Page:Sanskrit Grammar by Whitney p1.djvu/202

 and  are attached by the grammarians to  young, or  small; and  and  to  old.

468. From Veda and Brāhmaṇa together, considerably more than a hundred instances of this primary formation in and  (in many cases only one of the pair actually occurring) are to be quoted.

a. About half of these (in RV., the decided majority) belong, in meaning as in form, to the bare root in its adjective value, as used especially at the end of compounds, but sometimes also independently: thus, from √ burn comes excessively burning; from √ offer come  and  better and best (or very well) sacrificing; from √ fight comes  fighting better; — in a few instances, the simple root is also found used as corresponding positive: thus,  hasty, rapid with  and.

b. In a little class of instances (eight), the root has a preposition prefixed, which then takes the accent: thus, especially coming hither;  best clearing away; — in a couple of cases, the negative particle is prefixed; — in a single word , an element of another kind.

c. The words of this formation sometimes take an accusative object (see 271 e).

d. But even in the oldest language appears not infrequently the same attachment in meaning to a derivative adjective which (as pointed out above) is usual in the later speech.

e. Besides the examples that occur also later, others are met with like choicest ( choice),  greatest ( great),  quickest ( quickly), and so on. Probably by analogy with these, like formations are in a few cases made from the apparently radical syllables of words which have no otherwise traceable root in the language: thus, and  (K.) from,  and  from ,  (RV.) from ,  (AV.) and  (TS.) from ; and so on. And yet again, in a few exceptional cases, the suffixes and  are applied to stems which are themselves palpably derivative: thus,  from  (RV.: only case),  (AV.) from,  and  (TS. etc.) from ,  (TA.) from ,  (TA.: instead of ) from ,  (TS.) from. These are beginnings, not followed up later, of the extension of the formation to unlimited use.

f. In or  and, from  new, and in  from  old (all RV.), we have also formations unconnected with verbal roots.

469. The stems in are inflected like ordinary adjectives in, and make their feminines in ; those in  have a peculiar declension, which has been described above (463 ff.).