A Comparative Grammar of the Modern Aryan Languages of India v3.c17.49

v3.c17.49

The reason why the forms of the Bhû conjugation exercise so great an influence, and, like the -as-stem in nouns, so largely displace all the other types, is probably that the first conjugation is by far the largest, containing upwards of nine hundred out of the two thousand roots said to exist in Sanskrit. The second conjugation has only seventy-three, the third but twenty-five, the fourth and sixth about one hundred and forty each. The tenth, it is true, contains four hundred, but it is identical in form with the causal. The fifth has only thirty-three, the ninth sixty-one, while under the seventh class are twenty-five, and under the eighth only nine. These figures, it must be added, are taken from the Dhâtupâtha, a grammarian’s list of roots,¹ which contains many roots seldom, if ever, found in use, so that for all practical purposes the first conjugation covers more than half the verbs in the language. When it is also remembered that the fourth, sixth, and tenth differ but slightly from the first, it is not surprising that the terminations common to these four conjugations should have fixed themselves in the popular mind, and been added by the vulgar to all roots indiscriminately. Nearly all those verbs which retain the type of any conjugation, except the first, are words of extremely common use, which would naturally keep their well-known forms in the mouths of the people in spite of all rules and tendencies to the contrary.