8 A. H. Edgrejt, 



instead of -aji {ina-td, ma-ti, ta-td, ta-tva, etc.), which are by 

 all grammarians and lexicographers referred directly to the 

 roots in -an, have, farther, been explained by a few investiga- 

 tors as made from «-roots instead. 



This apparent variation between -an, -a, and -«-roots has 

 been made use of to prove that the present tauSini, etc., 

 was made from an rt-root by adding the suffix -no {ta-no-mi), 

 not, as assumed by the grammarians, from tan by the suffix 

 6 {tan-6-nii), nor, as advocated by Brugman, from tan by the 

 suffix -no, through *tn-n6-mi, and that the suffixal n has pene- 

 trated outside the present system, or else that the so-called 

 * general tenses ' are formed from a root taji, existing at the 

 side of ta. 



To this view some grave objections may certainly be made. 

 Thus : 



a. The root-forms required by the advocates of formations 

 like ta-no-mi, etc., are not td, etc., but td, etc. There may, 

 indeed, seem to be some plausible reasons for accepting the 

 existence of the former (as do Delbriick and Brugman), in so 

 far as their occurrence in various forms is not yet satisfac- 

 torily explained on the basis of a phonetical change of tan, 

 etc., and as the language after all has quite a number of 

 (2-roots. But there is no very plausible, and yet less con- 

 vincing, reason for assuming any roots in -d, like ta, etc. 

 The quoted verb-forms ksapdyati, vasimahi, sasavdhs are 

 nowise convincing. Causatives with / are not satisfactorily 

 explained, and may come from roots in -p ; vaslnialii, occur- 

 ring only once (R. V. XL 72), is probably for vahslviaJii ; and 

 sa-sa-vdiis, which occurs a few times in different cases in the 

 Rig and the Atharva Veda, though hard to explain satisfac- 

 torily (Grassmann and Delbriick suggest that it stands for 

 sasanvdiis, and Saussure for sasavdhs), cannot very plausibly 

 be derived from sa, since no perfect-form, and in fact no 

 tense-form whatever, of such a root is found in the language. 

 Outside of the above forms, where analogy would require the 

 nasal, if they are to be derived from roots in -n, the -a radical 

 hardly occurs except where analogy would require a weaken- 



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