Page:Comparative Grammar of the Sanskrit, Zend, Greek, Latin, Lithuanian, Gothic, German and Slavonic languages (Bopp 1885).pdf/32

10 CHARACTERS AND SOUNDS. terminating sounds are almost always governed by the following words. It is true the half sound owes its being to the mutability of a concluding m, but is not mutable itself, since it never has an independent existence of its own at the end of any word: in the middle, however, of a radical syllable, as DEV daṅś, DEV hiṅs, it is susceptible of expulsion, but not of alteration. That the Indian Grammarians, however, consider the m and not the ṅ as the original but mutable letter in grammatical terminations, like DEV am, DEV bhyâm, &c., appears from the fact that they always write these terminations, where they give them separate, with the labial nasal, and not with Anuswâra. If it be objected that this is of no importance, as dependent on the caprice of the editor or copyist, we can adduce as a decisive proof of the just views of the Indian Grammarians in this respect, that when they range the declensions of words in the order of their terminating letters, the Pronouns DEV idam, and DEV kim, in which they consider the m as primitive, are treated when the turn comes of the labial nasal m, and together with DEV praśâm, “quiet,” from the root DEV śam. (Laghu-Kaumudî, p. 46.)

The deadened nasal, which is expressed in the Lithuanian by particular signs over the vowel which it follows, appears to be identical with the Sanskrit Anuswâra; and we write it in the same manner with ṅ. At the end of words it stands for the remainder of an ancient m, in the accusative singular for example; and the deadening of n before s into ṅ presents