the subjunctive. In the perfect, the middle third person has, like the active, the same ending with the first, namely e simply; and in the older language, the third person present also often loses the distinctive part of its termination, and comes to coincide in form with the first (and MS. has aduha for adugdha). To this e perhaps corresponds, as secondary, the i of the aorist 3d pers. passive (842 ff.). The imperative has tām (or, in the Veda, rarely ām) for its ending.
546. Dual: First person. Both in active and in middle, the dual first person is in all its varieties precisely like the corresponding plural, only with substitution of v for the m of the latter: thus, vas (no vasi has been found to occur), va, vahe, vahi, vahāi. The person is, of course, of comparatively rare use, and from the Veda no form in vas, even, is quotable.
547. Second and Third persons. a. In the active, the primary ending of the second person is thas, and that of the third is tas; and this relation of th to t appears also in the perfect, and runs through the whole series of middle endings. The perfect endings are primary, but have u instead of a as vowel; and an a has become so persistently prefixed that their forms have to be reckoned as athus and atus. The secondary endings exhibit no definable relation to the primary in these two persons; they are tam and tām; and they are used in the imperative as well.
b. In the middle, a long ā — which, however, with the final a of a-stems becomes e — has become prefixed to all dual endings of the second and third persons, so as to form an inseparable part of them (dīdhīthām AV., and jihīthām ÇB., are isolated anomalies). The primary endings, present and perfect, are āthe and āte; the secondary (and imperative) are āthām and ātām (or, with stem-final a, ethe etc.).
c. The Rig-Veda has a very few forms in āithe and āite, apparently from ethe and ete with subjunctive strengthening (they are all detailed below: see 615, 701, 737, 752, 836, 1008, 1043).
548. Plural: First person. a. The earliest form of the active ending is masi, which in the oldest language is more frequent than the briefer mas (in RV., as five to one; in AV., however, only as three to four). In the classical Sanskrit, mas is the exclusive primary ending; but the secondary abbreviated ma belongs also to the perfect and the subjunctive (imperative). In the Veda, ma often becomes mā (248 c), especially in the perfect.
b. The primary middle ending is mahe. This is lightened in the secondary form to mahi; and, on the other hand, it is regularly (in the Veda, not invariably) strengthened to mahāi in the subjunctive (imperative).
549. Second person. a. The active primary ending is tha. The secondary, also imperative, ending is ta (in the Veda, tā only
