पृष्ठम्:The Sanskrit Language (T.Burrow).djvu/१२१

विकिस्रोतः तः
एतत् पृष्ठम् अपरिष्कृतम् अस्ति

PHONOLOGY 114 which no proper grammatical analysis can be made. For this reason the accent will be continually under discussion during the succeeding chapters. Here a few general remarks will suffice. The full technical details of the Vedic and early classical accent of Sanskrit, and of the various methods used to denote them, are somewhat complicated but the main principles are as follows. Each word had normally one accent whose position varies from word to word. Any syllable from the first to the last may bear the accent (e.g. dpaciti ' retribution dhdrdyati 1 holds/, namasydti 1 respects ' and aparahnd- ‘ afternoon ’ are accented on the first, second, third and last syllable respec- tively). No simple set of rules can be given to determine on which syllable of a word the accent will fall. Certain words were enclitic by nature and never bore the accent. These are such particles and pronominal forms as ca ' and md 1 me me * of me etc. Elsewhere the accent might be dropped in certain circumstances. (1) In the vocative a noun lost its accent except at the beginning of a sentence, when it was accented on the first syllable regardless of its natural accent. (2) The finite verb in the main clause of a sentence is unaccented unless it appears at the beginning of a sentence, in which case it retains its natural accent. In dependent clauses it retained its accent whatever its position. In this case a verbal preposition is most commonly compounded with the verb and loses its accent, e.g. prd gacchati ‘ he goes forward yadi pragdcchati ‘ if he goes forward The accent so indicated is termed by Panini udatta- 1 raised ' and the rise was one of pitch or musical tone. The main accent affected also the pronunciation of the following syllable, since the return of the voice to the normal level was effected during the enunciation of this syllable. The accent of the syllable immediately following the udatta is termed svarita- and it is described by Panini as a combination (samdhdra-) of udatta and anudatta. That is to say it begins at the high pitch of udatta and descends in the process of utterance. There exists also an independent svarita which arises secondarily out of the contraction of iya to yd, etc., in which case the main accent of the word is the svarita. This is a post- Vedic development since the metre of the earlier texts shows that the contraction had not yet taken place.