Page:Comparative Grammar of the Sanskrit, Zend, Greek, Latin, Lithuanian, Gothic, German and Slavonic languages (Bopp 1885).pdf/119

OF THE ROOTS. 97 monosyllabic; and the polysyllabic forms represented by the grammarians as roots contain either a reduplicate-syllable, as DEV jâgṛi, “to wake,” or a preposition which has grown up with the root, as DEV ava-dhîr, “to despise”; or they have sprung from a noun, like DEV kumâr, “to play,” which I derive from a kumâra, “a boy.” Except the law of their being monosyllabic, the Sanskrit roots are subjected to no further limitation, and their one-syllableness may present itself under all possible forms, in the shortest and most extended, as well as those of a middle degree. This free state of irrestriction was necessary, as the language was to contain within the limits of one-syllableness the whole body of fundamental ideas. The simple vowels and consonants were not sufficient: it was requisite to frame roots also where several consonants, combined in inseparable unity, became, as it were, simple sounds; e.g. DEV sthâ, “to stand,” a root in which the age of the co-existence of the s and th is supported by the unanimous testimony of all the members of our race of languages. So also, in DEV skand, “to go,” (Lat. scand-o) the age of the combination of consonants, both in the beginning and ending of the root, is certified by the agreement of the Latin with the Sanskṛit. The proposition, that in the earliest period of language a simple vowel is sufficient to express a verbal idea, is supported by the remarkable concurrence of nearly all the individuals of the Sanskṛit family of languages in expressing the idea “to go” by the root i.

The nature and peculiarity of the Sanskrit verbal roots explains itself still more by comparison with those of the Semitic languages. These require, as far as we trace back their antiquity, three consonants, which, as I have already elsewhere shewn, express the fundamental