226 THE DECLENSION OF NOUNS nom. sg. pasus . The same seems to have occurred with pitus 1 food gen. sg. pitvds , since this by its meaning is an action noun, and among i-stems with rayts : rdyds ‘ wealth ’ (for
- rdms : ranyds). Possibly also some masc. w-stems which are
not of the adjective/agent-noun type arose in this way, e.g. murdha t gen. sg. murdhnds ‘ head §2. Heteroclitic Declension The mutual relation of the r- and n-stems has been dealt with at some length in the section dealing with the formation of nouns, and may be briefly summarised here. The neuter r- stems that remain in Sanskrit are normally not declined out- side the nom. acc. sg., w-stems being used in the remaining cases : dharjdhnas f day yakrtjyaknds ‘ liver etc. This type of inflection is found elsewhere in Indo-European, but always, outside Hittite, as an archaic survival, and not as a productive formation. In Hittite, on the other hand, this type of alterna- tion is exceedingly common, and appears regularly in the in- flection of neuters in rjn t and in the compound suffixes -mar, war , sar , tar/n. It was therefore at an earlier period of Indo- European much commoner than later, and its decline is due partly to the decline of the old neuter types in general, and partly to the extension of the w-stem to the nom. acc. sg. This system arose too early for it to be possible now to say how pre- cisely it came into being. It does not however appear that the neuter, r-stems were from the beginning incapable of inflection, since such examples occur in all languages (Skt. svar j stir as ; vasar 0 jusrds ; Gk. eapjeapos Hitt, kururjkururas , etc.), and there is no reason to believe that this type is not ancient. Nor can it be said that the w-suffix is in origin either a case termina- tion or a formative making an oblique case. It is a suffix in its own right, on a par with the others, and it appears like them in the nom. acc. sg. in many ancient examples (e.g. Skt. n&ma ‘ name ', Lat. notnen, Hitt. Idman, etc.). It is therefore dif- ficult to say how exactly these two stems so often combined to form a single paradigm, but this took place in the early period of Indo-European, and though the system was beginning to become obsolete in the final stages of the parent language, it persists as an archaic survival in several of the existing lan- guages.
