A Comparative Grammar of the Modern Aryan Languages of India v3.c17.14

v3.c17.14

Each of these six phases may be conjugated throughout thirteen tenses, in each of which are nine forms representing the three persons of the singular, dual, and plural. It rarely happens in practice that any one verbal root exhibits the whole of these forms, but if we regard the general type, we may fairly say that a Sanskrit verb, as an individual entity, is an aggregate of seven hundred and two words, all agreeing in expressing modifications of the idea contained in the root-syllable, which is the common inheritance of them all.¹ Of the thirteen tenses, nine are conjugated according to certain rules which, with some exceptions, hold good for all verbs in the language, but the remaining four tenses are subject to rules by which they are divided into ten classes or conjugations. These four are the present, imperfect, imperative, and optative; and before we can determine what form a verbal root can take in any of these tenses, we must know what conjugation it belongs to.