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146 § 204. Com of two or more self-existent words however impor- pounds & topic of tant for the etymologist has little or nothing to Syntax. do with their employment in speaking or writing. In Sanskrit it must be otherwise. Keeping apart such compounds as have got any special meaning, which stamps them to unities ¹), there exists in that language an almost illimited freedom of expressing any kind of relations, grammatical or logical, by the way of com- pounding. Every moment the speaker and especially the writer of Sanskrit may have the opportunity of substituting compounds to the analytical mode of ex- pression. For this reason, Sanskrit Syntax has to deal with compounds, as far as regards giving an account. of the part they are acting in the phraseology and of the modes and ways how to employ them, employ them, whereas it is a topic of Sanskrit Etymology to expound their structure and their outer shape. The three great classes of compounds, set up by ver- nacular grammar, are dvandva, tatpurusha, ba huvrihi. They include nearly all varieties as well of the simple compounds, which are made up of but two non- compound words, as of those, which are most intricate and of an immoderate length. Outside of them, there re- mains only the class of such compounds as are produced by putting together the preposition + the noun-case depend- ing on it, as etc. (152) 2); in most cases - 1) Such as when the name of the mountain, HER »brahman," g: the well-known constellation, and the like. noble," woman,' 2 39 2) WHITNEY Sanskrit Grammar § 1310 calls them prepositional com- pounds."