120 THE FORMATION OF NOUNS 4 prayer ’ : brahmd m. ' priest ydsas n. 4 glory 1 : yasds - m. 1 glorious The Sanskrit examples are not very numerous, and are only found in the case of a small number of suffixes ; they are in fact the last remnants of a system dying out. In earlier Indo-European on the other hand the system was of very great extension and importance, and it is fundamental to the under- standing not only of the formation of nouns but also of their declension. The ^hematic vowel s tands apart from the other suffixes in many way s . Its original fun ction seems to have be en to produce age nt no uns orjtdjec tives from the j^ arious prim iti ve neut er ^tK^^nouns, e.g. udr-d ‘ otter ' : Gk. vSajp * water It was in fact an u alternative method to the above in the formation of such nouns. This , is it s_ normal use in Hittite, which indeed ignores the method indicated above. "The numerous neuter t h ematic st ems which are only enlargements of simple consonantal steins (Skt. anjan-a- n. : Lat. iinguen , etc.) appear to be a later develop- m^l^ajQil^i^Li CT o re d by Hittite. In the descriptive grammar of Sanskrit nominal derivatives are divided into two major classes, primary and secondary, in the terminology of the Indian grammarians krt and taddhita. The' former comprises all those formations which are derived directly from a root by means of a suffix (e.g. vdcas ‘ speech * from vac-) and the second those which are derived from the basis of nouns already made (e.g. dsvavant- ‘ possessing horses ’ from dsva- ‘ horse '). Cohvenient as this twofold classification is from the point of view of Sanskrit itself, it has no fundamental or ancient significance from the point of view of Indo-European. For one thing the same suffix is found functioning in both ways, and when a suffix is found to function predominantly or even exclusively in secondary derivation, it is historically a case of secondary specialisation. The suffix -vant is normally a second- ary suffix in Sanskrit, but it is primary in such examples as drvant - 1 steed yahvdnt - ‘ young also in Av. bzzvant- 1 abun- dant zrzzvant- ' straight and in Hitt. dasSuwant - 1 strong It was as a primary suffix that this, like other suffixes which have become predominantly secondary in Sanskrit, first came into being. A historical account of nominal stem formation must therefore be arranged entirely according to the external form of the suffixes concerned. Secondly many formations which from the point of view of
