पृष्ठम्:The Sanskrit Language (T.Burrow).djvu/३७२

THE VERB 366 The Vedic language (with Old Iranian) represents most accur- ately the state of affairs in Indo-European. The infinitive as an independent category is not yet fully developed. The forms classed as infinitives are various cases of verbal action nouns, in which as a general rule the case has its normal force : Acc. vdsti drdbham ' he desires to begin, wants a beginning Dat. avis tanvam krnuse dr id kam 1 you reveal your body for seeing AbL sd vm mahim dhunim dtor aramndt ‘ he stopped the great river from flowing A curious feature of the Vedic language is that the noun which is logically the object of the infinitive is placed in the same case as the infinitive, so that for instance ' to see the sun ' is expressed drsdye surydya, lit. 1 for seeing, for the sun ' ; simi- larly, with ablative, trAdhvam kart&d uvapddak * save us from falling into a pit lit. ' save us from a pit, from falling down In the normal usage of the Vedic infinitive there is not a great deal to distinguish it from an ordinary verbal noun in- flected in an oblique case. One of the few things that places these formations in a special category is the fact that the majority of verbal noun stems which appear in this usage are not otherwise used, nor in other cases. Taking the neuter s- stems as an example, there are many regular nouns so formed ( ydsas ' fame etc.), but there are in addition a large number which appear only in the dative case, in this infinitival use. Many such dative infinitives are a] so distinguished formally, since they are given an accent (jivdse) which is different from that of the neuter nouns. The infinitives in the Veda which are most removed from ordinary nominal formation are those formed from stems which are no longer used in the formation of ordinary nouns. Such are the dative infinitives in -dhyai and the comparatively rare locative formations in -sani and -tari. Another feature differentiating infinitive from verbal noun, one only partially developed in the Vedic language, is that it governs the accusative like a verb instead of the genitive like a verbal noun, e.g. mahi ddvdne ' to give something big ' as opposed to gotrdsya ddvdne 1 for the giving of a herd In the classical language where the infinitive in -turn has re- placed all others, the infinitive has become quite independent of the nominal formation. It also takes over the sense of the dative infinitive ( avasthdium sthdndntaram cintaya 1 think