sandhi of Skt. -as [was Re: "syllabicity"]

[Vidhyanath Rao]

Patrick C. Ryan <proto-language at email.msn.com> wrote:

> in 176a, he [Whitney] mentions several pronouns in -a{'}s that simply
> lose their -s's before any consonant: sa dadarCa, 'he saw'.

The usual explanation is that the original nominative, *so, had no s.
Note that sas loses its s even before unvoiced stops and often the a of
sa is combined with the following vowel.

--

There is a short note in a recent issue of JAOS about the sandhi of -as
that is relevant.

This whole business is strange: a:s regularly loses its s before voiced
sounds, as does -as before vowels except a. In RV, as+a often scans as
two short vowels, not as one long (as as+a => o suggests) or one long
plus one short as the usually written o+a suggests. The samaveda practice
is still different. pre-IA sandhi of -as may have been very different from
what we see latter and must have been subject to considerable leveling.