A History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature, so far as it illustrates the Primitive Religion of the Brahmans c11.3

c11.3

We cannot say this of all the hymns: nay, the greater portion of what we now possess of Vedic poetry must, no doubt, be ascribed to a secondary period, the so-called Mantra period. But after we have discarded what bears the stamp of a later age, there remains enough to give us an idea of an earlier race of Vedic poets. It is true, no doubt, in one sense, that even those earliest specimens of Vedic poetry belong, as has been said by Bunsen, to the modern history of the human race. Ages must have passed before the grammatical texture of the Vedic Sanskrit could have assumed the consistency and regularity which it shows throughout. Every tense, every mood, every number and person of the verb is fixed, and all the terminations of the cases are firmly established. Every one of these terminations was originally an independent word with an independent meaning. Their first selection was more or less the result of individual choice, their technical character the result of long usage. There was more than one word for *I*, and more than one expression for the verb *to be*. The selection of *mi*, as the termination of the first person singular, the selection of as in the sense of to be, and the joining of the two so as to produce the auxiliary verb asmi, I am, all this was a conventional act, the act of one or two individuals, fixed by circumstances which were more or less accidental. If, then, we find the same combination in the ancient Greek εἰμί, and the modern Lithuanian esmi, it is clear that the origin of that form goes back to times long anterior to the separate existence of Sanskrit, Greek, and Lithuanian. As soy, suis, and sono are modern modifications that point back to an earlier type, the Latin sum, the Sanskrit asmi, Greek εἰμί, Lithuanian esmi, are likewise but the modern representatives of some earlier typical form, which existed in the undivided language of the Aryan race.