Page:Vedic Grammar.djvu/325

 VII. VERB. FINITE VERB. AUGMENT. FORMATION of the MoodS. 3¹5 svas- 'breathe', sidh- 'repel', stan- ‘thunder', stambh-1 'prop'. There are also a few 3. plurals in -i-re, viz. rnvire, pinvire, śrnviré, sunviré and hinviré, in which the connecting vowel i appears 2. The Augment. 413. The augment ³ (originally doubtless an independent temporal particle) consists of the syllable a-, which is prefixed to the imperfect, pluperfect, aorist, and conditional, giving to those forms the signification of past time. It in- variably bears the acute when the verb is accented, like the preposition immediately preceding a verb in a principal sentence (111). The augment sometimes appears lengthened before n, y, r or v, the only examples being á-nat, from nas- 'attain'; á-yunak (beside a-yunak), á-yukta (beside á-yukta), and á-yukṣātām, from yuj- 'join'; árinak and á-raik, from ric- '"leave'; á-var, from ur- 'cover'; a-vrni, from vṛ- 'choose'; á-vṛṇak, from vṛj- 'turn'; ã-vidhyat (beside á-vidhyat), from vyadh- 'wound'. The only one of these forms written with ā in the Pada text is á-var (but once also a-var). There is also one passage (II. 17.9) in which the metre seems to require that yás t 'vidhat should be read yás ta ávidhatª. a. With the initial vowels i, u, r the augment irregularly contracts to the Vṛddhi vowels ai, au, ar; e. g. áicchas, 2. sing. imperf. of is- 'wish'; áunat, 3. sing. imperf. of ud- 'wet'; árta, 3. sing. aor. of r- ‘go'. This appears to be a survival of a prehistoric contraction of a with i, u, r to ãi, au, ār, which is otherwise almost invariably represented by e, o, ars. b. The augment is very often dropped. This optional loss is to be explained as a survival from the Indo-European period when, being an in- dependent particle, the augment could be dispensed with if the past sense was clear from the context. In the RV. the number of examples in which the augment is wanting (about 2000) is considerably more than half that of forms in which it is prefixed (about 3300), more than one half of these un- augmented forms being aorists. In the AV. the number of forms which lose the augment is less than half that of those which retain it, more than four fifths of these unaugmented forms being aorists. In sense, the forms which drop the augment are either indicative or injunctive. The indicatives have for the most part a past, but often also (generally when compounded with prefixes) a present meaning. In the RV., the indicative and injunctive un- augmented forms are about equal in number6; the injunctives being used in nearly one-third of their occurrences with the prohibitive particle má. In the AV. about nine-tenths of the unaugmented forms are injunctive, some four- fifths of these being construed with má. Formation of the Moods. 414. 1. Subjunctive 7. The subjunctive is a very common mood in the RV. and the AV., occurring three or four times as often as the optative. It is formed from the present, the perfect, and the aorist. The stem is formed by adding a to the indicative stem. When a strong and weak stem are distinguished, the a is attached to the former; while it coalesces to a with the final of the stem in the a- conjugation. Thus the subjunctive stem of I AVERY 226. 2 AVERY 227 (top). 3 Cp. AVERY 225; BRUGMANN KG. 626. 4 WHITNEY 585, a. 5 Cp. above 19 a, 4. 5. 6 WHITNEY 587, a. According to AVERY 225, the unaugmented forms of the RV. have a historical sense in 488 instances only. 7 See especially W. NEISSER, Zur vedischen Verballehre (Inaugural-Dissertat.), Göttingen 1882 BB. 7 (1883), 211—241. 8 Only a single form of the future sub- junctive occurs. =