Sandhis of word-final N

[Hans Henrich Hock]

Thanks to Madhav Deshpande for further and helpful discussion.  For _m_, it
is interesting to note that it exhibits a much higher degree of
assimilations to following oral stops (not just to "acute" i.e. dental,
retroflex, palatal ones) and that it goes to anusvara and the like before
fricatives in external sandhi; compared to the other old nasal, _n_, thus
is much "weaker".  The fact that final _m_ also is extremely weak in Latin
may suggest that it came out of PIE as a weak consonant.  This weakness may
be responsible for the fact that final doubling has not been extended to
it.  As for the palatal nasal _ñ_, we are of course dealing with an element
that does not occur in final position in "well-formed" Sanskrit (but maybe
it does in grammatical terms?), not even in onomatopoeia and other
affective vocabulary, it seems.  So perhaps there was nothing there to
begin with to which final doubling could have applied.

Best wishes,

Hans Henrich Hock


>Thanks to Georg von Simson and Hans Hock for referring to the
>onomatopoetic usages like bhaN iti found in late Vedic material.  For
>Panini, such words are called imitations of inarticulate sounds
>(avyaktaanukara.na), and are considered to be grammatical Padas which can
>be subjected to regular sandhi rules.  In known usages, their sandhi
>treatment is seen to be irregular, so jha.titi, and not jha.diti, but
>consider usages like: pha.t pha.t phaa.d iti where the expression pha.t is
>subjected to voicing before a vowel.  On the expression dvir va.sa.t
>karoti in (Aitareya Br), Saaya.na says:  vau.sa.d vau.sa.d iti.  Here the
>voicing of the final .t to .d occurs, indicating that these onomatopoetic
>expressions are subject to the same sandhi rules as regular Padas.  I
>suspect something like this was assumed by Panini for expressions like
>bha.n iti.  Many more such onomatopoetic expressions ending in .n are
>found in modern Marathi:  .ta.n .ta.n, .tu.n .tu.n, bhu.n bhu.n, ku.n
>ku.n, ru.n jhu.n, gha.n gha.n, ta.n ta.n, da.n da.n, .tha.n .tha.n, pha.n
>pha.n, va.n va.n, etc.  I suspect something like these did occur in
>Panini's Sanskrit.
>        What seems interesting is that the rule of doubling of final .n
>after a short vowel and before another vowel does not extend to palatal ~n
>and m.  Why does it apply only to the other three nasal consonants?  Any
>suggestions?
>                                        Madhav Deshpande