THE FORMATION OF NOUNS §i. General Remarks The Sanskrit nominal stem may coincide with the root, as happens in a minority of cases, but usually it is derived from it by the addition of a suffix. These suffixes are very numerous and are inherited from Indo-European. They are not, as occurs in some languages (e.g. Engl, man-ly, man-hood) derived from what were originally independent words, but are in every case analysable into their component parts, that is to say the indi- vidual consonants or semivowels of which they are composed. These primary elements include nearly all the available phonemes, but the ones most commonly used are r, n, s, t, yji , vju, m, h and h. They may appear either with guna, i.e. preceded by the thematic vowel (-ar, -an, -as, IE er-, en-, es- f etc.) or in their weak form (- r , -n, -s). The thematic vowel itself may appear as a suffix but naturally, since elsewhere it is always a question of the guna grade of a consonantal suffix, only in final position ( bhav-an-a -, udr-d, etc.). The IE primary suffixes could be added either to roots or to words already end- ing in another suffix : e.g. the suffix -as is added to the root in vdcas - ‘ speech to a base having the suffix )i in rcknas- 1 inherit- ance, property the suffix t in srotas- ‘ stream * and the suffix v in fiivas- ' fat Since the root itself could originally function freely as a noun, that is to say was a word in the full sense, there is no difference in principle between primary and secondary derivation of this kind. A suffix could be added to any word, whether it already had a suffix or not, and the nature of the process was precisely the same. The result was that owing to the very large number of possible combinations of the primary elements, the number of these compound suffixes in all IE lan- guages is very large, and the complexity of nominal stem formation in Sanskrit and the allied languages is entirely a matter of the multifarious combination of a comparatively small number of primitive elements.
