Re: Iti & ti

Dear Rett,

Thanks for the nice and detailed answer regarding iti. A similar
explanation is given by Geiger, but I was wondering if there were other
ones. I can not think of a similar example in Dutch. (In Dutch the 2nd
person plural pronoun is julie (pronounced julii) and villen i = willen
julie. Vill du  = Wil jij.)

I still hope to get an answer with regards similar developments in Prakrits.

Regards,
                     Bh. Nyanatusita

> I would guess that the reason is that iti's apostrophe form /ti/ came to be felt as a word in its own right. As you know, often when a word ends in a short vowel + iti, the sandhi is final-vowel>long + ti. After hearing this often enough users of the language could begin to experience /ti/ as an independent form that causes lengthening of preceding vowels, instead of just the result of a sandhi. This was certainly my experience when first learning to chant the iti pi so. When it ends with 'buddho bhagavaa ti' I registered /ti/ as a word, and it stuck despite later learning about the sandhi.
> So the reason why anusvara > n, is simply because it is preceding the dental consonant /t/. It's not anusvara + iti, it's simply anusvara + ti, in those cases. Stranger things have happened in languages. In colloquial English you can hear expressions like 'I have to wait a whole nother year?' (sic). Here the word 'another'  (which obviously originated in an + other) is 'felt' as being analyzed a + nother, in order to make space to insert an adverbial)
>
> Swedish developed a new 2nd person plural pronoun /ni/ fairly recently. Up until about a hundred years ago the pronoun was /i/, and verb forms using it ended in -en.
> Så compare: vill du... (would you like to...)
> villen i... (would you guys like to...)
>
> The final n of /villen/ came to be felt as being part of a new word /ni/ so the modern form is:vill ni...
>
> I'm not 100% sure that this is the correct explanation, but it wouldn't surprise me.
>
> best regards,
>
> /Rett
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