पृष्ठम्:The Sanskrit Language (T.Burrow).djvu/३२३

THE VERB 317 of development it became established as a necessary element in Italo-Celtic and Tocharian, and on the other hand went out of use in that dialectal area of Indo-European from which Indo- Iranian and Greek derive. The primary middle endings of Sanskrit arise in the first place, as in the active, from the addition of -i to the secondary endings : bharaia 4- i> bhdrate . Corresponding to the -e t Greek has -at. This vocalism is most simply explained as due to the ending of the 1st person (-H a + i>ai) from which it spread by analogy to the other persons. In Sanskrit this final - e appears in all the primary forms, but its presence in the dual and in the first and second persons of the plural is due entirely to analogy, and these are to be regarded as the latest parts of the system. The active endings of the perfect are in the singular identical with the oldest forms of the middle endings : (1) -H a>a, vida, cf. bhaveya ; (2) -tha, cf. -thas, Hitt. - ta ; (3) - a (IE - e ), veda , cf. aduha, Hitt. esa. That this is no accident is clear from the frequent cases in which active perfects with intransitive sense appear by the side of middle forms in the other tenses, e.g. Skt. variate : vavdrta, Gk. ylyvo^iat : ydyova, etc. Originally, it seems, the perfect had no distinction of the two voices, and both in form and sense it was closer to the middle than to the active. The development of separate middle forms may be regarded as a late Indo-European feature. In Sanskrit these perfect termina- tions are identical with those of the present, and these, as already observed, are later formations than the corresponding secondary endings. As to the nature of the personal endings it is quite clear that they have nothing to do with the corresponding personal pro- nouns. The theory that these endings are of the nature of suffixed pronouns has often enough been put forward in the course of IE studies, but concrete evidence in the form of de- tailed comparisons is lacking. It is possible to find an -w- in the ending of the 1 sg., and a t in the 3 sg., which are letters that occur in the corresponding pronouns (acc. sg. md : ta-}, but beyond this there is practically nothing. Since no theory can be based on the comparison of one or two single letters, the attempt at explaining the personal endings as suffixed pronouns has to be abandoned. When this is done, and the terminations are analysed in such detail as the comparative evidence will permit, it becomes clear that the elements of which the system