Sanskrit Grammar

William Dwight Whitney

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780486317267
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Ancient Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

As Latin is key to the study of Western classics, so Sanskrit is the gateway to understanding ancient Indian literature. One of the few Sanskrit grammars currently available, this meticulously researched and thoughtfully assembled guide to the language’s basics will prove valuable to students of Indian culture and history.
Focusing on the fundamentals of Sanskrit as revealed in literary classics, the text follows the forms and constructions of the older language, as exhibited in the Veda and the Brahamana. It begins with an introduction to the Sanskrit alphabet, followed by a treatment of the accent — its changes in combination and inflection, and the tone of the individual worlds. Succeeding chapters discuss declension, conjugation, parts of speech, and formation of compound stems. A helpful appendix, Sanskrit index, and general index conclude the text.

CHAPTER III.

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RULES OF EUPHONIC COMBINATION.

Introductory.

98. The words in Sanskrit, as in the other languages related with it, are in great part analysable into roots, suffixes of derivation, and endings of inflection, these last being added mostly to stems containing suffixes, but also sometimes directly to roots.

a. There are, of course, a certain number of uninflected words — indeclinables, particles; and also not a few that are incapable of analysis.

99. The Sanskrit, indeed, possesses an exceptionally analysable character; its formative processes are more regular and transparent than those of any other Indo-European tongue. Hence the prevailing method of the Hindu native science of grammar, which sets up a certain body of roots, and prescribes the processes by which these may be made stems and words, giving the various added elements, and laying down the rules by which their combination is effected. And the same general method is, for like reason, followed also by European grammarians.

100. The euphonic laws, accordingly, which govern the combination of suffix or of ending with root or stem, possess a high practical importance, and require to be laid down in preparation for the topics of declension and conjugation.

101. Moreover, the formation of compounds, by joining two or more simple stems, is extremely frequent in Sanskrit; and this kind of combination has its own peculiar euphonic rules. And once more, in the form of the language as handed down to us by its literature, the words composing a sentence or paragraph are adapted to and combined with one another by nearly the same rules which govern the making of compounds; so that it is impossible to take apart and understand a Sanskrit sentence without knowing those rules. Hence an increased degree of practical importance belonging to the subject of euphonic combination.

a. This euphonic interdependence of the words of a sentence is unknown to any other language in anything like the same degree; and it cannot hut he suspected of being at least in part artificial, implying an erection into necessary and invariable rules of what in the living language were only optional practices. This is strongly indicated, indeed, by the evidence of the older dialect of the Vedas and of the derived Prakritic dialects, in both of which some of the rules (especially that as to the hiatus : see 113) are often violated.

102. The roots which are authenticated by their occurrence in the literary monuments of the language, earlier and later, number between eight and nine hundred. About half o...