A History of Sanskrit Literature c7.s3.17

c7.s3.17

We are reduced to conjecture as to the cause of this tendency. The desire for brevity is already seen in the style of the Vedic Sūtras, and the grammarians carried it to excess; their works furnish abundant instances of insistence on using cases in a pregnant sense and in affecting compounds; gerunds are frequent in the ritual texts. It has been suggested that the love for participial forms is partly explained by Dravidian influence;¹ the periphrastic future in both Sanskrit and Dravidian uses the auxiliary verb only in the first and second persons; the type *kṛtavān* has a parallel in *çeydavan*; the rule of the order of words in which the governed word precedes and the verb is placed at the end of the sentence is Dravidian. Unhappily, the arguments are inconclusive;² the omission of the auxiliary in the third person is natural, for in that person in any sentence whatever it is commonly omitted as easily understood; the order of words in Sanskrit has parallels in many other languages than Dravidian and rests on general rules of thought.