Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume XIV.djvu/637

 SANSKRIT 613 served, in form and signification, by the San- skrit than by any other member of the family. It is this remarkable conservation of materials and processes which gives prominent impor- tance to the Sanskrit in Indo-European philol- ogy, making its introduction the inauguration of a new era in etymologizing, and so in the science of language, which is based on etymol- ogy, or the history of individual words. The whole system of inflection in Sanskrit is most nearly accordant with that of Greek ; it is de- cidedly richer in declension, but vastly poorer in conjugation. In declension, it distinguishes three genders, the masculine and neuter agree- ing in theme, and usually in inflection, the fem- inine having long terminal vowels and fuller endings. The cases are eight : the nominative, with which in most instances the next case, the vocative, agrees in form ; two other cases of relation, the dative expressing for, the gen- itive of; and four cases of position or direc- tion : the accusative, expressing to, direct ap- proach, immediate action ; the ablative, ex- pressing from; the locative, in; the instru- mental, by the side of, along with, with, by. Each occurs in three numbers, singular, dual, and plural, and the usual terminations are as follows : sing. nom. s (neut. m or wanting), ace. TO, inst. d, dat. e, abl. as (or t), gen. as (asya), loc. i; dual, nom., ace., and voc. du (neut. i), inst., dat., and abl. bhydm, gen. and loc. os; pi. nom. as (neut. dni, i), ace. as (masc. n), inst. bhis, dat. and abl. bhyas, loc. su. Adjectives are declined like substantives ; as comparative and superlative suffixes they add tara and or fyans and ishtha. The numerals close- ly accord with those in the related languages. (See GERMANIC RACES AND LANGUAGES, vol. vii., p. 740.) The pronouns, excepting the first and second personal, distinguish three genders. They derive themselves from roots of their own, which play also an important part in the development of forms and form-words. Their many irregularities of declension agree nearly with those of the pronouns in the other Indo- European dialects, nor are their roots peculiar. The verb has two voices, an active and a mid- dle or reflexive, which latter, in a part of its forms, serves also as a passive, as in Greek. It distinguishes throughout, like the noun, three numbers, with the usual three persons in each, and the personal terminations are evi- dently reducible to forms of pronouns, indi- cating in each case the subject ; they are of two classes, corresponding to those of the prin- cipal and historical tenses in Greek. In their normal form they are as follows : active : princ. sing, mi, si, ti ; dual, DOS, thas, tas ; pi. mas, tha, anti; hist. sing, m,, t; du. va, tarn, tdm; pi. ma, ta, an; middle: princ. sing, e, se, te ; du. vahe, dtM, dte ; pi. make, dhve, ante; hist. sing, i, thds, ta; du. vahi, dthdm, dtdm ; pi. mahi, dhvam, anta. The present and imperfect tenses exhibit various modifi- cations of the verbal root into a special stem, on which is founded a division of the verbs into ten conjugational classes; all are analo- gous with changes which the Greek verbs more irregularly undergo in the same tenses, and with scattered phenomena in the other related languages. The present has an im- perative, distinguished by special terminations, and a potential, corresponding to the Greek optative, having for its characteristic the vow- el i, or the syllable ya, inserted between the root and the personal ending. Of a subjunc- tive, made, as in Greek, by an a between root and ending, only fragments remain, in the an- tiquated dialect of the Vedas. The character- istic of the imperfect is an augment, a prefixed a. Of other tenses, we have an augmented aorist, of double formation, as in Greek ; a " second aorist," which is the imperfect of the unmodified root, and a " first aorist," in several varieties, having s as its sign ; a per- fect, reduplicated, and with peculiar termina- tions ; a periphrastic future, of late growth ; a future of compounded origin, the same with the Greek in au ; an imperfect of this future, or a conditional, of very rare occurrence ; and finally a precative, or optative of compound formation, belonging to the aorists, also not common. Fragments of imperative, optative, and subjunctive forms, belonging to the aorist, perfect, and future tenses, are found in the oldest literature, but they are obsolete in the classical Sanskrit. The present, perfect, and future tenses, active, passive, and middle, have participles. Of verbal nouns there is an ac- cusative case (the Latin supine in um), used as an infinitive ; also an instrumental case, forming a gerund, or a kind of indeclinable past participle (as bhutvd, having been), which is of excessively frequent employment. The derivative forms of the verb, formed at plea- sure from any root, are the passive, having a special form only in the present and imperfect, the causative, the desiderative, and the inten- sive or frequentative. The affluence of verbal forms is thus seen to be great, yet the language is far from making full use of them, and the Sanskrit verb is not to be compared for power of expression with the Greek, or even with the Latin; there is a strong tendency, espe- cially in the later styles of writing, to slight the finite forms, and to construct loose and awk- ward sentences with the participle and gerund. Prepositions, in our sense, are almost absent, the prepositions of the other Indo-European tongues having here still their original value as adverbs, directing the action of the verb, but not directly governing nouns; as prefixes to verbs they are of constant application, and play a great part in the formation of derivatives. Conjunctions and adverbs are in part derived from pronominal roots, in part from nouns. Syntax is a branch of the grammar of very inferior interest, and is even left out in most of our Sanskrit grammars. Whatever expres- siveness and rhetorical charm the language has lie chiefly in its boundless wealth of epithets, and not at all in the construction of its sen-