Where the R Is an L

In the eastern Prakrit of several Ashokan edicts an inherited r appears instead as l, so a word that Sanskrit writes with this letter is cut with the lateral instead. The substitution is regular rather than occasional, it is confined to particular parts of the empire, and it is one of the standard criteria by which the dialects of the edicts are grouped. An edict cut at one site and the same edict cut at another can therefore differ in a way that has nothing to do with the scribe and everything to do with the language spoken locally.

That variation is the earliest direct evidence for dialect geography anywhere in South Asia, and it was generated by accident. A chancery sent one text out across an empire running from the northwest to the far south, and local scribes rendered it in the language of the place. Nothing comparable exists again for many centuries, which is why the Ashokan corpus is studied as intensively for its language as for its content.

For a reader the practical effect is that this letter is less frequent in the eastern material than a reader coming from Sanskrit would expect, and the lateral correspondingly more so. A transliteration that silently corrected the spellings would erase the boundary, which is why editions print what the stone shows.