Page:Sanskrit Grammar by Whitney p1.djvu/228



527. subject of conjugation or verbal inflection involves, as in the other languages of the family, the distinctions of voice, tense, mode, number, and person.

a. Further, besides the simpler or ordinary conjugation of a verbal root, there are certain more or less fully developed secondary or derivative conjugations.

528. Voice. There are (as in Greek) two voices, active and middle, distinguished by a difference in the personal endings. This distinction is a pervading one: there is no active personal form which does not have its corresponding middle, and vice versa; and it is extended also in part to the participles (but not to the infinitive).

529. An active form is called by the Hindu grammarians a word for another, and a middle form is called  a word for one's self: the terms might be best paraphrased by transitive and reflexive. And the distinction thus expressed is doubtless the original foundation of the difference of active and middle forms; in the recorded condition of the language, however, the antithesis of transitive and reflexive meaning is in no small measure blurred, or even altogether effaced.

a. In the epics there is much effacement of the distinction between active and middle, the choice of voice being very often determined by metrical considerations alone.

530. Some verbs are conjugated in both voices, others in one only; sometimes a part of the tenses are inflected only in one voice, others only in the other or in both; of a verb usually inflected in one voice sporadic forms of the other occur; and sometimes the voice differs according as the verb is compounded with certain prepositions.