Dear Jon and Jim,

May I say a few words about this. Take a word like nara. Its genetive sing.
is nara-ssa, loc.sg is nara-smi.m, abl. sg is nara-smaa. Through all this
nara- remains unchanged. It is also the stem. So we can say here the stem is
unchangeable. (In cases like dative naraaya also it remains unchanged
nara+aaya, which becomes naraaya by sandhi. Nominative naro may look
different, but it is not so. (We will have to go to its prior history to
show how; I won't attempt it here). All words ending in -a have such
unchangeable stems.

Now take raajaa . This is the nom. sg. form. Acc. sg. is raajaana.m The
correct way to analyse this is rajaan+a.m. The stem is raajaan and -a.m is
the acc. sg. ending. Instr. sg. is ra~n~aa. Analysis: raajn-aa: which
changes to rajnaa and then to ra~n~aa in Pali. So we have here the stem in
two forms raajaan- and *raajn--. We say this stem is changeable. (Listing
the word in a lexicon as raajaa- is not quite correct. This nom. sg stands
for *raajaan-s, the reconstructed prior form, which we indicate by *. There
is a rule which says that a finished word cannot end in certain given
letters. By this we elide -n- and -s-. So we are left with raajaa. The
strictly correct way to list the word is raajan. The integrality of -n- in
the word is proved by the forms like raajaano and ra~n~naa = raajnaa.

Why do some words have changeaable stems and some unchangeable. This can be
understood only from facts of the "pre-history" of Indo-Aryan. In earlier
times words used to be accented. The Vedic texts mark the accent and in
ritual usage they are recited with the accent, even now. Later on
accentuation disappeared, in all IA languages including Pali and Skt. One of
results of accentuation is the change of form of the stem of words when
combined with case endings. In certain cases the stem is accented and
therefore pronounced full, i.e. in its longest form, to put it loosely. So,
e.g. Nom. sg and pl and acc sg have the strong stem. Ex. raajaano. When on
the other hand the accent is on the ending, the stem is pronounced more
weakly and here it changes appropriately. Thus we have the weak stem in the
instr sg as in ra~n~naa = raajnaa. Rajaan- is strong, raajn is weak.

In Pali these changes occur mostly in words where the final syllable of the
stem has -an, or -ar as in raajan, gu.navant-, pitar- etc.

This of course is an absurdly simplified explanation of a complex but
generally explicable phenomenon.

As for mano, it stands for manas- and remains so throughout the declension.
It appears as mano in certain combinations of stem and ending and as manas
in others. But this merely a matter of Sandhi. (Even in Skt -as before soft
consonants changes to -o.)
With apologies about trying to go into language history,

Mahinda

On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 5:12 AM, Jim Anderson <jimanderson.on@...>wrote:


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