8. Further cases of pragŗhyam, blocking sandhi changes to long vowels

We are grappling with the series of sutras starting with 1.1.11,

1.1.11      īdūdeddvivacanapragŗhyam

which is parsed as

īT ūT eT dvivacana pragŗhyam

which has the sense of “entities ending in the long vowels ī, ū or e in the dual number are pragŗhyam“. The last word is a technical term, indicating that the normal rules of sound-join, sandhi, are suspended when the first word ends in one of these long vowels. The examples given are dual forms like

agnī atra “two fires here”
pacete iti “they (two) cook”

In these cases, the usual sandhi join of the final sound of the first word and the initial sound of the latter word, is not done: it is held back, pragŗhyam.

The next sutra in this stretch is

1.1.12    adaso māt

The first word is actually adasah, if we take off the sandhi, and it is in the sixth, or genitive (of), case (vibhakti), singular number (indicated by 6/1). The second word is in the fifth (ablative, from) case, singular, indicated as 5/1: the ending t of māt is part of the case ending and not one of the nonsense terminators or iT. The phrase would mean something like “of the word adas, from the sound m”. We have to provide the previous sutra’s context to make it meaningful: that is, the forms of adas which end in m followed by one of the long vowels ī, ū or e, are pragŗhyam, i.e. they do not get modified according to the normal sandhi rules but are kept “reserved” or pragŗhyam. (We do not apparently have to add the dvivacana specification, because the forms coming under this sutra include plural as well as dual, as we see below).

What are these forms of adas ending in m- followed by long vowels īT ūT eT? The word adas is the lexeme for “that”, as we may remember from that famous saying in the Brihadāraņyaka Upanishad talking about the Infinite (Brahman):

Om
purnam adah, purnam idam, purnat purnam udacyate

Or, with diacritical marks,

pūrņam adah, pūrņam idam, pūrņāt pūrņam udacyate

“that is fullness, this is fullness, from fullness fullness comes forth” 

The dual forms occur as follows because the declension of adas is very irregular:

Adas “that”, masculine:
nominative asau amū amī
accusative   amum amū amūn

“that”, neuter:
nominative adah amū amūni
accusative   adah amū amūni

“that”, feminine:
nominative asau amū amūh
accusative   amum amū amūh

So forms like amū and amī fall into the category of ending in long vowels, and hence pragŗhyam. They do not get modified when followed by another vowel as per normal sandhi rules (which would apply to words ending in short i or u, but that is obviously covered in some other sutra in the 4000 odd of Panini’s Ashtadhyayi or eight-cantos). The examples provided are such as the following phrases: 

amī atra, “those people (plural) are here” 

amū atra “those two people are here”. 

We don’t see forms like am(i)yatra or am(u)vatra which we would expect with sandhi involving short vowel-endings. The question arises in our mind (as a first time reader!) why this case should not be covered by sutra 1.1.11 itself. The answer is somewhat complex, and involves operation of different rules from other areas of the Ashtadhyayi that generate these m- forms of adas, but which would have nullified application of 1.1.11 were it not rescued by this specific pointing to adas forms in 1.1.12. These are somewhat convoluted reasonings which we will not go into at this first reading.

The next sutra adds another case or context for pragŗhyam:

1.1.13 śe

This is a short one indeed! The entity is in nominative vibhakti, singular (1/1). (The ś is the palatal flat-tongued spirant sound, not the retroflex curled-tongue variant represented by şşş). Again, we have to supply the relevant words from the opening sutra of this run or span, pragŗhyam, which means, on the whole, that “the form (word) ending in a Śe is a case of pragŗhyam, i.e. the ending will not be modified by the normal sandhi rules given elsewhere in the Ashtadhyayi”.

This sutra is difficult to grasp at this first reading, because the Śe referred to is a technical ending derived by the operation of other rules in specified circumstances, and not just any sound śe. Indeed the first letter Ś is actually a marker, an iT, which is why it has to be capitalised. The distant sutras hinted at here specify that the Śe occurs in the Vedas. The sutra 1.1.13 is therefore referring not to all words ending in the sound śe, but to specific words derived by the rules governing Śe that give us certain forms ending in long –e in Vedic, such as asme (dative and locative of first person plural, “to us, in us”); yuşme (dative and locative of second person plural, “to you, in you”); me (locative of first person singular, “in me”); tve (locative of second person singular, “in thou”) in Vedic . The examples given are

asme indrābŗhaspatī (from Ŗg Veda)
yuşme iti
me iti
tve iti

We will have to defer a deeper and real understanding of this sutra till we have looked at those distant parts of the treatise that generate these forms like Śe and adaso māt to grasp why Pannini has had to provide specially for them rather than subsuming all into one main sutra. This gives us, however, a feel of the way the sutras are inter-twined, and that too across vast gulfs from different corners of the galaxy of the Ashtadhyayi. Obviously, the entire work has been fashioned by a recursive process and what we see is a certain state of perfection (but this being a man-made thing, a Smŗti rather than a divine revelation, a Śruti, there are still deficiencies which subsequent analysts have not failed to point out over the centuries!).

We will look briefly at further contexts which are classed by Panini as pragŗhyam (without necessarily getting a full, deep comprehension), and then use this span of sutras to talk about the traditional ways of explaining the sutras that parallel what we have been doing in our own unsophisticated way. One thing is sure: no one can really understand Panini without a gloss and a guide, and many such have been produced over the ages, which we will look at shortly.