Grihya Sutras

SR No.: 007685
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Hermann Oldenberg
Publisher: Oxford
Publication Year: 1886
Total Pages: 2642
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 49 MB

Page 510

xii
GRIHYA-SOTRAS.
taken place at one jump. And accordingly a consideration of the Vedic texts reveals a transition period or rather a series of several transition periods between the old and the new standpoints. The first change is that every other ending of the first pada is allowed by the side of the iambic ending. The two forms of the ending, the one prevailing in the earliest, and the one prevailing in the later period of the prosody, the iambic (u-u%) and the antispastic (u--Y), are those that occur most frequently in the intermediate period, but besides them all other possible forms are allowed.
This is precisely the stage of metrical development which the great Grihya songs of the tenth Mandala of the Rigveda have reached. Let us consider, for instance, the marriage songs and the marriage sayings, X, 85, and see what kind of ending there is at the end of the first pâda. Of the first seventeen verses of this Sakta sixteen are in Anushtubh metre (verse 14 is Trishtubh); we have therefore thirty-two cases in which the metrical form of these syllables must be investigated. The quantity of the syllable immediately preceding the caesura being a matter of indifference, we have not sixteen but only eight a priori possible combinations for the form of the last four syllables of the påda ; I give each of these forms below, adding each time in how many of the thirty-two cases it is used :
IKK KKK KKK
w w w Aer er oo
32 Compare the statistics as to the frequency of the different metrical forms at the ending of the first påda, p. 63 of my above-quoted paper, and Hymnen des Rig-veda, vol. I, p. 28. I have endeavoured in the same paper, p. 65 seq., to make it seem probable that this was the stage of prosody prevailing during the government of the two Kurd kings Parikshit and Ganamegaya.
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