Page:Atharva-Veda samhita.djvu/76

lxviii stuvánnemi (that is stuván emi: cf. Festgruss, p. 90-91) an untranslatable stuvan nemī: here, it is true, one of the wildest blunders of the pada-kāra was before him; but even a modicum of insight should have kept him out of that pitfall. Again, he seems never to have observed that past passive participles with a preposition accent the preposition (cf. Grammar, §1085 a), and accordingly takes saṁvṛ́tas at xviii. 3. 30 as if it were sámvṛtas. Despite accent and pada-kāra, he takes rajasā́, p. -sā́ḥ, at xi. 2. 25, as instr. of rájas! And so on.

The text used by the commentator is nevertheless notably different from that given by the mss. used for the Berlin edition, and from that given by S. P. Pandit's authorities. In books i.-iv. Whitney counts over three hundred peculiarities of the commentator's text, and in the Festgruss he gives several lists of them. He has intended in the present work to report all variants of the commentator's text throughout, and I trust that those which may have escaped his notice (or his and mine) will prove to be few indeed.

Was the commentator of the Atharva-Veda identical with the Sāyaṇa of the Rig-Veda?—I suggest that it might prove to be an interesting and by no means fruitless task to institute a systematic and critical comparison of the Mādhavīya-vedārtha-prakāça (or RV. -bhāṣya) with the bhāṣya on the AV., with special reference to the treatment of the accent in the two works, and to the bearings of these comparisons upon the question of the identity of the Sāyaṇa of the RV. with the "Sāyaṇa" of the AV. The latter does indeed sometimes heed his accents; but the occasions on which he takes notice of them expressly are of utmost rarity (see W's note to xix. 13. 9 and mine to verse 4).

If, by way of comparing the two comments, we take the accusative plural yamárājñas, we find that at RV. x. 16. 9 Sāyaṇa explains it quite rightly as a possessive compound, yamo rājā yeṣāṁ, tān; while at AV. xviii. 2. 46, on the other hand, in the half-verse addressed to the dead man, 'by a safe (?) road, go thou to the Fathers who have Yama as their king,' áparipareṇa pathā́ yamárājñaḥ pitṝ́n gacha, "Sāyaṇa" makes of the very same form a gen. sing, and renders 'by a safe road belonging to king Yama (tasya svabhūtena mārgeṇa) go thou to the Fathers'! Evidently, so simple a matter as the famous distinction between índra-çatru and the blasphemous indra-çatrú (cf. Whitney on TPr. xxiv. 5; Weber, Ind. Stud. iv. 368) was quite beyond his ken. Such bungling can hardly be the work of a man who knew his Rig-Veda as the real Sāyaṇa did.