TRACING VEDIC DIALECTS - People.fas.harvard.edu

events which the speaker or listener recalls as a personal experience. The
aorist is used for events that took place "just now," in the near past, including
those that took place in the n e a r past and have an effect in the present.
Once the new opposition-- (distant) past : near past-- had been established, a
situation could occur when a narrator goes on to tell in the aor.: "(and then)
this happened, and then that happened just now / a day before > at any time
before now." Constant use of this tense (aor.) must have lead to the use of the
aor. as a general past tense (preterite) and to the disappearance of the perfect
in Pāli and other early Middle Indian dialects. 293
§9.6 The Subjunctive
The gradual disappearance of the subjunctive in Vedic and its survival in the
1st forms of the imperative paradigm have been studied by L.Renou, in his
Monographies sanskrites, Vol. I, Paris 1937. He concludes (p.43) that in
Vedic prose, the subj. was an archaic remnant, a fossil (une formation figée)
which was necessarily on its way out. He continues that its reappearance,
more apparent than real, in the late Br., has no "chronologic" value, 294 in this
case, a correct evaluation. His materials indicate the beginning of the gradual
decline of the subj. in the Mantras of the YV (TS, see p.15 sq.).
Saṃhitā prose contains a fair number of cases. TS has 118 cases (of which
1st pers. = 56x, and thus should be disregarded; see p.36). The decline is
more pronounced in the Brāhmaṇas; from 8-9% forms in the old Saṃh.s, the
usage of the subj. falls to 1.5% in AB (78 cases), viz. 2.5% in KB (67x,
mantras, saṃpraiṣa, gātha always excluded). This agrees with an
accelerating simplification of its syntactical usage (p.16 sq.). Notably, the 2nd
(AB 2x, KB 0) and also the 3rd persons (AB 11, KB 7) become rare (p.20).
The 2nd person was probably already regarded as archaic by the authors of
AB (p.21); in ŚB, it is found only in narrative portions. Another Western Br.,
PB, has 27 cases, of which 16 are in the 3rd pers. and 2 in the 2nd (p.37). The
late AA has 20 cases, including 2 in the Sūtra-like book 5 (p.39).
293 See Geiger, Pāli, § 120, 158- 171; in § 162, he is misinformed about the Vedic impf.; cf. C.
Caillat, Pour une nouvelle grammaire du Pāli, Ist. di Indol. d. Univ. di Torino, Conference
IV, Torino 1970; O.v. Hinüber, MSS 36, pp. 39. (cf. also MSS 32, p.65 sqq., KZ 96, p.30
sqq.).
294 One of his favourite, although generally too global, opinions regarding linguistic
variation in the Saṃh. and Br. texts; cf. above ann. 12, which is shared by Caland and
Minard. They all regard such variations as a simple matter of style, not taking into account
the geographical spread and little of the relative chronology of the texts.
107