The highly inflected nature of Sanskrit

Before we look at verbs in Sansktrit we need to know this really important linguistic feature of Sanskrit. Look at this simple sentence: rāmaḥ kṛṣṇaṃ paśyati (राम: कृष्णं पश्यति). This translated to English is "Rāma sees Krishṇa". But let's actually look at each word in that sentence and their order.

1. rāmaḥ: Rāma (subject)
2. kṛṣṇaṃ: Krishṇa (object)
3. paśyati: sees

So if translated literally it would be "Rāma Krishṇā sees". HHmmm... Doesn't sound right in English but actually makes perfect sense in Sanskrit. Why? Let's find out.

English follows this word order: Subject-Verb-Object. Rāma sees Krishṇa (S-V-O).

Sanskrit follows this word order: Subject-Object-Verb. Rāma Krishṇā sees (S-O-V).

Ok, makes sense. Because of the word order speakers of Sanskrit can properly understand who (subject) is seeing whom (object). However, what if I were to say if I changed the word order in Sanskrit then too a native speaker can identify the subject and object without making any mistake? So if I were to say

• kṛṣṇaṃ rāmaḥ paśyati (O-S-V)
• paśyati rāmaḥ kṛṣṇaṃ (V-S-O)
• paśyati kṛṣṇaṃ rāmaḥ (V-O-S)

A native speaker can read all these variation and easily understand who is seeing who without any difficulty. And this is because of how Sanskrit highlights nouns in a sentence. Not just nouns but adjectives, verbs, and pronouns are treated very differently compared to English. You can take a semantically valid sentence in Sanskrit, completely jumble its words, and the resulting sentence would still mean the same as the original one. All of this is possible because of inflections.

In Linguistics, inflection is a process of word formation. Through the process the word is modified to express different grammatical categories like:

• tense (past, present, etc.)
• case (purpose of the noun; subject, object, etc.)
• voice (passive, active, etc.)
• person (first person, second person, etc.)
• number (singular, plural)
• gender (man, woman, neuter)
• mood (indicative, potential, etc.)

When you inflect a noun, adjective, adverb, etc. it is called a declension and when a verb is inflected it is called a conjugation. Sanskrit is a highly inflected language, while English is a weakly inflected language.

A word in English will not have many different forms. On an average, the words in English have few inflections. For example to specify the plural the noun dog English adds a suffix 's' to the noun which then becomes dogs. English rarely uses different forms of the same word to convey various grammatical properties and instead it makes up completely new words to convey those categories. But this is fairly new development in the English language. Old English spoken around c. 450-1100 AD was an inflected language. Old English was the language of the Germanic inhabitants of England from the time of their settlement in the 5^th century to the end of the 11^th century.

Old English was a synthetic language meaning it had inflectional endings showing the grammatical structure and word order was rather free as in the case of Latin. Compared to modern English which is an analytic language meaning the word order is much more constrained with the Subject-Verb-Object clause order. There are various theories on how Old English lost its and the most cited one is linguistic simplification due to language contact. When a language comes into contact with many other languages it often happens that the grammar the language simplifies. The theory is after Viking settlement, speakers of Old English and Old Norse needed to communicate. The two languages were related enough to be partially mutually intelligible but their inflections were different so those endings became communicative noise and were eventually dropped in both the languages and reliance was more on the word order. The Norman Conquest in 1066 accelerated this process. While Latin is an inflected language, French had lost most of its inflections. Phonological reduction also played an independent role in the loss of inflections. Unstressed syllables in Germanic languages have a tendency to weaken over time. The distinct vowels in endings like -an, -um, -as, etc. began merging towards a schwa sound. Once endings sound the same, the grammar has to shift to word order and prepositions to carry the meaning the endings used to. All of these factors led to the loss of inflections in Old English while it evolved into modern English.

Some IE inflected languages are: Latin, Ancient Greek, Russian, Polish, German, Armenian, etc.

Some non-IE inflected languages are: Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, Georgian, etc.

Coming back to Sanskrit, Vedic and Classical Sanskrit poetry required precise syllable counts and quantitative patterns of long short syllables. Meter, here is essentially a repeating rhythmic pattern built from units of syllable weight. Sanskrit meter is quantitative rather than accentual like English. In English poetry, meter is based on stress, syllables are stressed vs unstressed. The actual duration of the syllable doesn't matter much. In Sanskrit (And Ancient Greek and Latin) meter is based on mora which is the measurable duration of a syllable. A shirt syllable counts as one mora and a long syllable counts as two. Inflection and meter are deeply intertwined in Sanskrit. A poet could choose between any word order suited for the meter and still convey the essence of the poetry without thinking much about the word order. They could place an adjective at the start of the meter and place the noun which the adjective refers to while still keeping the message clear and concise. A line of Sanskrit shloka (verse) is rhythmically right and mathematically precise.

So now that we understand linguistic inflections, let's finally learn how Sanskrit handles its verbs.