Page:Sanskrit Grammar by Whitney p1.djvu/68

 another; but the nasals and have also in certain cases their special assimilative influence. Thus;

a. In the two classes of non-nasal mutes and spirants, surd and sonant are wholly incompatible; no surd of either class can either precede or follow a sonant of either.

b. A mute, surd or sonant, is assimilated by being changed to its correspondent of the other kind; of the spirants, the surd is the only one having a sonant correspondent, namely, to which it is convertible in external combination (164 ff.).

c. The nasals are more freely combinable: a nasal may either precede or follow a mute of either kind, or the sonant spirant ; it may also follow a surd aspirant (sibilant); no nasal, however, ever precedes a sibilant in the interior of a word (it is changed instead to ); and in external combination their concurrence is usually avoided by insertion of a surd mute.

d. A semivowel has still less sonantizing influence; and a vowel least of all: both are freely preceded and followed by sounds of every other class, in the interior of a word.

e. Before a sibilant, however, is found, of the semivowels, only and very rarely. Moreover, in external combination, is often changed to its surd correspondent.

But

f. In composition and sentence-collocation, initial vowels and semivowels and nasals also require the preceding final to be sonant. And

g. Before a nasal and, the assimilative process is sometimes carried further, by the conversion of a final mute to a nasal or respectively.

118. Of conversions involving a change of articulate position, the most important are those of dental sounds to lingual, and, less often, to palatal. Thus:

a. The dental and  are very frequently converted to  and  by the assimilating influence of contiguous or neighboring lingual sounds: the, even by sounds — namely, - and -vowels and  — which have themselves no lingual character.

b. A non-nasal dental mute is (with a few exceptions in external combination) made lingual when it comes into collision with a lingual sound.

c. The dental mutes and sibilant are made palatal by a contiguous palatal.

But also:

d. A (not radical) is assimilated to a following consonant, of whatever kind.

e. For certain anomalous cases, see 151.

119. The euphonic combinations of the palatal mutes, the palatal sibilant, and the aspiration, as being sounds derived by phonetic alteration from more original gutturals (42 ff.), are made peculiar