  We present the first linguistically annotated treebank of Ashokan Prakrit, an
early Middle Indo-Aryan dialect continuum attested through Emperor Ashoka
Maurya's 3rd century BCE rock and pillar edicts. For annotation, we used the
multilingual Universal Dependencies (UD) formalism, following recent UD work on
Sanskrit and other Indo-Aryan languages. We touch on some interesting
linguistic features that posed issues in annotation: regnal names and other
nominal compounds, "proto-ergative" participial constructions, and possible
grammaticalizations evidenced by sandhi (phonological assimilation across
morpheme boundaries). Eventually, we plan for a complete annotation of all
attested Ashokan texts, towards the larger goals of improving UD coverage of
different diachronic stages of Indo-Aryan and studying language change in
Indo-Aryan using computational methods.
