Prakrit

About

A Prakrit is any of several Middle Indo-Aryan languages. The Ardhamagadhi (“half-Magadhi”) Prakrit, which was used extensively to write the scriptures of Jainism, is often considered to be the definitive form of Prakrit, while others are considered variants thereof. Pali, the Prakrit used in Theravada Buddhism, tends to be treated as a special exception from the variants of the Ardhamagadhi language, as Classical Sanskrit grammars do not consider it as a Prakrit per se, presumably for sectarian rather than linguistic reasons. Other Prakrits are reported in old historical sources but are not attested, such as Paiśācī. (Source: Wikipedia)

Corpora

Use CorpusImporter() or browse the CLTK GitHub organization (anything beginning with prakrit_) to discover available Prakrit corpora.

In [1]: from cltk.corpus.utils.importer import CorpusImporter

In [2]: c = CorpusImporter('prakrit')

In [3]: c.list_corpora
Out[3]: ['prakrit_texts_gretil']