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The negative particles in the anuştubh feet of the Buddhavamsa 307 12. As first syllables, the particles are immediately followed by nouns,
pronouns, verbs and indeclinables in 6, 5, 7 and 6 feet respectively, Where the particles appear elsewhere in the feet, they are immediately preceded by some noun, pronoun, adjective, verb and indeclinable respectively in 5, 3, 1, 1 and 6 feet. This shows that in the earlier type of feet, the parts of speech, except adjective, immediately follow the particles more or less in equal frequency. And in the other type of feet, the particles are immediately preceded by indeclinables and nouns almost equally. The pronoun comes next in order. The adjective and the verb are rather rare.
We now propose to give a precis of the frequency of the quantity of ibe syllables wben the particles appear as (i) first syllables and (ii) as syllables other than the first one. This we would like to do with reference to the parts of speech immediately following the particles as in case i, and those immediately preceding the particles as in case ii.
Case i parts of speech following
quantity
noun
times of frequency metrical patterns a b c d 6 0 0 3 0 6 6 3 4 0 4 1 1 5 1 4 u-u4 3 2 6 3 4 5 1
short long short long short long
pronoun
verb
indeclinable
short 5 long1 short 20 long 4
1 5 4 20
3 3 9 15
2
4 12 12
total frequency
u
-
--
Thus we see that when the particles are followed by noups, the first syllable is invariably short, the second and third ones are invariably long, and the fourth syllables are equally divided between short and long. When the particles are followed by pronouns, the second syllables are invariably long, the first and third ones are mostly short, while the fourth ones are mostly long. When the particles are followed by verbs, the fourth syllables are mostly short, the third ones are mostly long, while the first two are more or less uniformly distributed between short and long syllables. While
1979.97
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