THE DECLENSION OF NOUNS 239 cation, being used both in the singular and the plural, and covering the meanings of instrumental, locative and ablative. In Indo- Iranian, as opposed to Greek and Armenian ( gailov , pi. gailovh 1 : gail ‘ wolf ') this formative appears only in the plural, the instrumental singular being formed in quite a different manner. The final -s may be interpreted as the -5 of the plural added to this element, or possibly in view of such adverbial forms like Gk. A iKpufals 'crosswise* and Av. mazibis 1 greatly * may be merely some adverbial suffix (cf. afxfts, etc.), which in view of the regular occurrence of -s in the plural led to its being understood as such. As elsewhere Balto- Slavonic and Germanic have -m- in this case (Lith. summits, etc.) which it is not possible phonetically to relate to the -bh- of the other languages. Dative- Ablative Plural. Anomalously the ablative which in the singular has mainly the same form as the genitive, has in the plural a form identical with that of the dative. The ending is -bhyas, Av. byd. The western IE languages have a form similar to this going back to original -bhos (Lat. -bus, Osc.fs, ss, Venet. -bos, Gallic -/3o). It is possible but not certain that this - bhos has developed out ‘of -bhyos through the sporadic loss of post-consonantal -y- t easily understood in a weakly stressed termination. The analysis of the form is indicated by the com- parison of the datives of the personal pronouns. Beside the usual forms tubhyam , asmdbhyam the Vedic language preserves also a form without -m, whose antiquity is attested by Iranian (Av. maibyd). The -bhyas of the dat.-abl. plural can be inter- preted as this - bhya followed by the -s which characterises the plural. In this way the case would originally be a dative, and its use also as ablative can naturally be explained by the fact that the -as which comes at the end of the termination is similar in form to the -as of the gen.-abl. sg. Genitive Plural . The termination of the genitive plural is distinguished from the majority of the plural cases by the absence of $ (w r ith the exception of the pronominal forms tesdni , tdsam). The termination is -dm which is frequently scanned as disyllabic in the Veda, and this in conjunction with the circumflex accent in Gk. -Gjv, points to an original contrac- tion of - o-om . This can only have come about in thematic stems, and it must be assumed that the original termination -am has elsewhere been replaced by the long contracted -dm
