Page:Atharva-Veda samhita.djvu/78

lxx Various combinations.—The combination of e or o (final or initial) with other vowels gives rise to errors. Thus at viii. 2. 21 cd = i. 35. 4 cd, ténu (= te ánu) is resolved by the pada-kāra as té ánu, and the comm. follows him in both instances. In matters concerning the combination of accents he is especially weak, as when he resolves saptā́syāni into saptá ā́syāni at iv. 39. 10 (see note). The errors in question are of considerable range, from the venial one of not recognizing, at xiv. i. 56, that ánvartiṣye means ánu: vartiṣye, to the quite inexcusable ones of telling us that yá stands for yáḥ in the verse x. 10. 52, yá eváṁ vidúṣe dadús, té etc., or that māyá stands for māyā́ḥ as subject of jajñe in viii. 9. 5. Perhaps his tát: yā́m: eti (iv. 19. 6) and stuván: nemi (iv. 28. 3), already noticed (p. lxvii) in another connection, may be deemed to bear the palm. Beside the former we may put his resolution of sómātvám (= sómāt tvám), at iv. 10. 6, into sómā: tvám.

Character of Whitney's editions of the Prātiçākhyas.—In the preface to his edition of the Tāittirīya Saṁhitā, Weber speaks with satisfaction of the service rendered him in the task of editing that Saṁhitā by Whitney's critical edition of the appurtenant Prātiçākhya. Whitney's edition of that treatise is indeed a model; but even his earlier edition of the Atharvan Prātiçākhya was buttressed by such elaborate studies of those actual facts which form the topics of the Prātiçākhya, and by such complete collections of the different classes of those facts, that he could speak with the utmost authority in criticism of the way in which the maker of the Prātiçākhya, or of the comment thereon, has done his work, and could pronounce weighty judgment concerning the bearing of the treatise in general upon the constitution of the Atharvan text.

Bearing of the Atharvan Prātiçākhya upon the orthography and criticism of the text.—First, as for the orthography, a discussion of the importance of the Prātiçākhya for that purpose is superfluous for any student acquainted with the nature of the treatise; but the orthographic method pursued by the editors of the Berlin text and the relation of that method to the actual prescriptions of the Prātiçākhya are made the subject of a special chapter, below, p. cxxiii.—Secondly, the treatise does bear upon the general criticism of the text. That it ignores the nineteenth book is a weighty fact among the items of cumulative evidence respecting the original make-up of the text and the supplementary character of that