A Comparative Grammar of the Modern Aryan Languages of India v1.c5.69

v1.c5.69

Bopp, in the passage quoted above, seeks to ascertain whether the intervening consonant has any effect in hindering this reflexive influence, or epenthesis of i and u. He finds that this influence is arrested by a nexus, except nt, which sometimes does, and sometimes does not, hinder it. He also observes that many consonants, the gutturals including *h*, the palatals, the sibilants, and *m* and *v*, arrest this influence; *n* arrests it if the vowel be *â*, but not if it be *a*; *b* generally arrests it. The examples hitherto procured of this process in the Indian languages do not afford sufficient data for determining this point, but a law may be detected which decides in what cases the epenthetic vowel shall combine with the preceding vowel, and in what cases it shall entirely supplant it. It may be thus stated:—when a nexus intervenes, the epenthetic vowel supplants, when only a single consonant intervenes, it amalgamates with, the preceding vowel. The reason of this is that the modern languages do not treat *e* and *o* as short vowels, as the Prakrit does, and they cannot endure to have a long vowel followed by a double consonant or a nexus. When, therefore, either of these two occur, the vowel must be short, and the *i* consequently supersedes and destroys the vowel whose place it has taken. Thus in *amlikâ*, *anguli*, the nexus *ml*, *ng*, demand to be preceded by a short vowel, consequently in *imlî*, *unglî*, the *â* is entirely rejected; but in *patrî*, which had first become *patî*, and in *paśu*, there is only a single consonant, and the *i* and *u* therefore amalgamate with the preceding vowel into *e*, and *o*, *pe*, *pohe*. In *chanchu* and *sandhi* the nasal is treated as an anuswâra, because in the first case we have merely a reduplicated form from a root *cham*; in the latter the word is compounded with the preposition *sam*, and in both cases the *m* is regularly replaced by the anuswâra, which is not strong enough to form a nexus, and the च and घ are each, therefore, regarded as a single consonant, and the long or guṇa vowel can stand before them.