पृष्ठम्:The Sanskrit Language (T.Burrow).djvu/३१०

विकिस्रोतः तः
एतत् पृष्ठम् अपरिष्कृतम् अस्ति

THE VERB 304 important feature in connection with the dialectal divisions of Indo-European, since it is clearly of late origin, and has estab- lished itself over only part of the IE linguistic area, among dialects which for other reasons also may be held to have been contiguous. Even where it established itself it existed origin- ally only as an optional formation, augmented and unaugmented forms being optionally used. The unaugmented forms were of course alone used in an injunctive sense, but they could be also used as preterites just like the augmented forms. The co- existence of augmented and unaugmented preterites is a char- acteristic both of the earliest Greek and the earliest Sanskrit. It is only in the later stage of both languages that the augment ceases to be optional and becomes obligatory. In Iranian the augment is regularly used in Old Persian, but only rarely in Avestan, where the unaugmented type of preterite has mainly prevailed. In the early stage of Middle Indo-Aryan, which still preserves an old preterite made up of imperfect and aorist forms, the old Vedic freedom of usage is maintained, but the unaugmented instead of the augmented forms become the most common. The augment seems in origin to have been a separate word, namely a particle i meaning ' there, then J which came to be compounded with the verb. It invariably bears the acute accent whenever the verb is accented. When the verb is com- pounded with a preposition, it always appears between the preposition and the verb: samabharat, etc., and likewise in Greek. An irregular sandhi appears when it is combined with a root beginning with i, u or r [aicchat ‘ wished aurnot ' covered ' ardhnot r thrived ' from icchdti, urnoti, rdhndti, with vrddhi in- stead of the expected guna, and this indicates that up to a late period it was pronounced as a separate syllable with hiatus (. aicchat , etc.). On the other hand its coalescence with initial a (IE e , a, 0) appears to be ancient, judging by parallels between Greek and Sanskrit (Skt. as ' was Gk. Dor. 77s, Skt. ijat ' drove ", Gk. Dor. 3ye). Before roots beginning with v t y, n and r the augment may appear as long d in the Vedic language (dvrnak, ayunak , etc.). The reason for this is not very clear but a parallel phenomenon in the case of initial v- is found in Greek (Horn. Att, 7jSei). Reduplication consists normally of the repetition of the initial consonant of a root with a vowel which may or may not