Vedic Metre in its Historical Development c4.18

c4.18

I fear that my treatment of this subject on pages 108–140 will be thought complicated and difficult: but perhaps this will be more readily excused by those who are familiar with the voluminous writings and inconclusive results of my two predecessors. For many years I had avoided this subject as too difficult for treatment, and had intended to assume (with Zubatý) the correctness of the Saṃhitā text as a working hypothesis. But my study of the subject of ‘resolution’ shewed me that the Vedic poets were in the habit of following very definite standards of pronunciation, with only a small margin of choice in the case of words which were actually changing their pronunciation in common speech. I felt therefore that I could not accept Zubatý’s theory of optional quantity, and that a systematic study of Vedic usage must necessarily reveal in every case either a fixed or at any rate a preferential quantity. It required some time to examine and classify the many thousands of occurrences in the Rigveda, and it is not easy to put forward the detailed results in a form in which they can readily be followed. But the general conclusion is only strange in the sense that it is new. All the difficulties disappear when Benfey’s suggestion is carried out, not in a hesitating or tentative fashion, but to its logical conclusion. A great number of final vowels are always long in Vedic usage, though in the Saṃhitā text they are often, and in the Pada-pāṭha text always, short: that is to say, the Saṃhitā text has partly, the Pada-pāṭha text entirely, failed to preserve the original quantity. The metrical position is not the cause which has produced long quantity in certain cases, but the hindrance which has prevented the corruption of the Saṃhitā text by the prevailing usage. In other endings the shortening can be traced in the later parts of the Rigveda itself. The instances in which any real doubt remains become in this way reduced to a very small number.