A Comparative Grammar of the Modern Aryan Languages of India v1.c6.86

v1.c6.86

The cases of retention from their form are nearly all seen to be Tatsamas, or such very late Tadbhavas that they have not yet had time to make any great divergence from the Tatsama form. The principal difficulty lies between weakening and elision. The Prakrits may be cleared away at once by saying that they always elide, and we may further get rid of the cerebrals, which are never elided. The inherent weakness of य, which leads it almost always to be softened into the semi-vowel, places this letter also on a different footing from the rest. When it has become व, and by a step further औ, ओ, and उ, its total elision becomes rather a question of vowels than of consonants. Thus, प्रापनं having become पाउना, the further change to पाना is a matter of vowels, and more especially in those languages where the verbal base ends in a vowel, while the termination begins with one, as in the case of Bengali ite, ilâm, or Sindhi iṇu, iṇdo; where, to avoid too great a clash of vowels, the u naturally disappears. The same remarks apply in a still greater degree to व, as has been pointed out in the preceding section. The semivowels, nasals, sibilants, and ह, do not come within the scope of this inquiry, as they are seldom if ever elided, except य and व, for which we should probably understand ज and ब, and they cannot be weakened, as they have no corresponding weak letters, being in fact mediæ themselves; consequently their changes are not positional but organic.