CHARACTERS AND SOUNDS. 9
the variable nasal, which, under certain conditions, passes into the proper Anuswâra; but before vowels is necessarily retained, both in writing and pronunciation. [G. Ed. p. 10.] That Von Schlegel also still continues the original DEV m at the end of words as an euphonic alteration of the dead sound of Anuswâra appears from his mode of printing Sanskrit text, in which he makes no division between a concluding DEV m and the commencing vowel of the following word; while he does make a division after DEV n, and thereby shews that he admits a division after terminating letters which remain unaffected by the influence of the letters which follow. If, however, we write DEV tân abravît, “he said to them,” we must also write DEV tâm abravît, “he said to her;" not DEV tâmabravît, for the DEV of DEV tâm is original, and not, as Von Schlegel thinks, begotten out of Anuswâra. The conjecture of C. Lassen (Ind. Bibl. Book III. p. 39), that the Anuswâra is to be understood, not as an after sound (Nachlaut), not as an echo (Nachhall), but as a sound which regulates itself by that which follows—as it were the term Nachlaut, with the accent on laut[1]—appears to me highly improbable. Schlegel's nasalis mutabilis would indeed be justified by this view, and the imputation of error removed from the Indian Grammarians, to whom we willingly concede a knowledge of the value of the Sanskṛit signs of sound, and whom we are unwilling to censure for designating a half sound as mutable, in a language whose
- ↑ This seems intended for an explanation, for Lassen has nothing like it. I have not found an etymological explanation of the term in any grammatical commentary; but it may be doubted if the explanation of the text, or that given by Lassen, be correct. Anuswâra may indeed be termed sequens sonus; but by that is to be understood the final or closing sound of a syllable. Any other nasal may be used as the initial letter of a syllable; but the nasal Anuswâra is exclusively an “after” sound, or final. It is not even capable of blending, as it were, with a following vowel, like a final n or m, as in tân- or tâmabravît. It is the legitimate representative of either of the other nasals when those are absolutely terminal,
