§ 1. The sentence “The year consists of twenty-four halfmonths” may be rendered in Vedic prose in three different ways : —

A. The nominatival type : ardhamāsāḥ saṁvatsaraḥ or, with resumptive pronoun (cf. my Syntax of Cases in the Narrative and Descriptive Prose of the Brāhmaṇas, i, § 3, p. 2, and §§ 8 f., pp. 10 ff.), ardhamāsāḥ sa saṁvatsaraḥ.

B. The genitival type: saṁvatsarasyārdhamāsāḥ.

PROFESSOR J. BLOCH in L'Indo-aryen du Veda aux temps modernes, p. 271 f., has discussed the passage of the passive construction of the past tense of transitive verbs (based on the past participle of Sanskrit) into an active construction in which the verb agrees in number and gender with the logical subject. It is obvious that during the course of this evolution there were periods of fluctuation. An astonishing fluctuation is found in the Rājasthānī MS. Nala kī bāta (R.A.S. Todd Coll. No. 81), written at some date prior to A.D. 1806.

M. Bloomfield, cerca, nella Miscellanea in onore di Ernst Kuhn (Aufsätze zur Kultur- und Sprachgeschichte … Monaco, 1916, p. 211 sgg.), di sostenere la sua proposta (JAOS., xxvii, p. 72 sgg.), secondo cui RV., viii, 18, 13 dovrebbe leggersi:

yó naḥ káç cid rírikṣati rakṣa1E63;tvéna mártya1E25;

suáiḥ ṣá évai jánaḥ

in luogo del tramandato ririṣīṣṭa yur; rappresenterebbe una contrazione di e il Bloomfield traduce in conseguenza :

“ The mortal who with demonic practices desires to harm us : may that person by his own doings injure his life! ”

WILHELM GEIGER stellt in Litteratur und Sprache der Singhalesen (1900) § 23, 3 fest: ” In einer Anzahl von Fällen ist der Palatal c nicht zu s, sondern (durch j) zu d geworden.“ In der von Geiger und Sir D. B. Jayatilaka unterzeichneten Einleitung zu A Dictionary of the Sinhalese language (1935) wird das noch genauer bestimmt: dies d entsteht nur aus intervokalischem *c, nie im Anlaut. Zur Erklärung heisst es ebenda : ” …we may assume that a later wave of immigration brought to Ceylon a dialect in which c between vowels was softened to j … The exact date of that immigration is unknown.… idquo; Aber es ist doch sehr bedenklich, einen einzelnen Lautwandel durch Sprachmischung zu erklären. Es lässt sich vielmehr eine einfachere Deutung finden, die den allermeisten Fällen gerecht wird.

A Propos du mot indien sarṣapa, le Prof. J. Charpentier a émis l'opinion suivante “ … Wohl am ehesten nichtarisches Wort ”. Auparavant, le Prof. S. K. Chatterji avait déjà écrit: “ Skt. sarṣsapa ‗ Pkt. sāsava, which remains unexplained. But cf. Malay sĕsawi.(The Malay word may be a Prakrit borrowing ; but it is Skt., and not Pkt., which furnishes Aryan loans in Indonesian.) ”

The forms of the nominative singular of the demonstrative pronoun or definite article and of the relative pronoun in Sanskrit and Greek correspond exactly in accordance with the regular soundchanges of each language:—

The word bhūnaha occurs thrice in Canonical Pāli literature: (a) in the Sutta-nipāta as sg. voc. bhūnahu; (b) in the Majjhima Nikāya as sg. gen. bhūnahuno; and (c) in the Jātaka as pi. nom. bhūnahuno.