A History of Sanskrit Literature c7.s1.11

c7.s1.11

In some of these losses Sanskrit keeps pace with popular speech, but the evidence is conclusive against ascribing too much weight to this fact. While such categories as the dual of noun and verb alike, the middle, and the past tenses, practically vanished from popular speech, Sanskrit rigidly retains them. On the other hand it rejects irregularities which popular speech permitted to survive, such as the *ā* of the instrumental singular and nominative plural neuter of *a* stems, the *āsas* of the masculine plural, the form *gonām*, the pronominal plurals *asme* and *yuṣme*, the short forms *yāt* and *tāt*, and verbal forms in *r*. Traces of the subjunctive, the infinitive in *tave*, the aorist *akar*, the instrumental in *ebhis* exist in Prākrit, but are banned in Sanskrit. On the other hand, although Pāṇini recognizes fully the Vedic accent, it can hardly be doubted that already by his time in actual speech in many regions it had yielded in part to an expiratory accent. The tendency to such a result is already visible in the *Ṛgveda*, where *duhitā* by the testimony of the metre must at times be read *dhitā*, comparable with Pāli *dhītā*;¹ the weakening of *bh* and *dh* to *h* occurs there normally after unaccented syllables,² and the curious mode of notation of the accent in the *Çatapatha Brāhmaṇa* has with some ground been ascribed to a stage of transition from the musical to the expiratory accent.³