Rhotic metathesis in Gandhari

Abstract Rhotic metathesis is a characteristic feature of the northwest Middle Indo-Aryan dialect called Gandhari. At the early stage, in the Aśokan rock edicts, rC is eliminated by metathesis with either the preceding vowel or the following consonant, resulting in Cr if not simplified by r-loss. At the later stage of the Khotan Dharmapada and other Gandhari texts, metathesis in the opposite direction, from Cr to rC, is also observed. This paper evaluates contact metathesis in Gandhari by examining parallels in relevant languages and other Indo-European languages, and by scrutinizing the motivations behind the attested metathesis. The developments of r-clusters and syllabic r̥ in the Aśokan rock edicts and the Khotan Dharmapada show that in Gandhari, Cr or, at a later stage, stop-r clusters tend to be more persistent than other types of r-clusters. Different contact metatheses of r in Gandhari are a shift towards more stable sequences-or at least away from unstable sequences- and are thus linguistically plausible, although it has been asserted that some cases of metatheses are merely orthographic.