Vedic Metre in its Historical Development c12.28

c12.28

But if the grammatical function of a word draws it to the beginning or end of a clause, the results will be different. Many relatives and conjunctions are disyllables which regularly stand at the beginning of the verse, since in the Rigveda each verse is a fairly complete grammatical whole. Since then the final vowel necessarily stands in the second place, it is so far restricted to the positions 2T 2D 2T 2D and GR, none of which is in itself decisive. But we may infer from the table that if the vowel is short the positions 2T, 2D will be commoner than 2T 2D, and also that consonant groups will very frequently follow: whereas if the vowel is long the quantity of the third syllable will be just as often short as long, and consonant-groups will follow comparatively seldom.