Pali phonetics

The Pali grammarians starting with Kaccayana devote a few suttas (Kacc 35)
to a series of consonantal aagamas that occur in sandhi. Take, for instance,
the following passage from M I 303: yadariyaa  etarahi  aayatana.m
upasampajja  viharantii ti. The interpretation en vogue since Geiger is that
the relative pronoun yad is a "historical" form corresponding to Sanskrit
yad. In the present case the pronoun is to be construed with aayatana.m.
However, there are quite a few cases where one cannot interpret yad as
"historical." Take, for instance, M III 216:  tayo satipa.t.thaanaa yadariyo
sevati, where yad evidently refers to tayo satipa.t.thaanaa. No one, I
believe, is willing to interpret yad as a "historical" form in this case:
the form is evidently = acc. plural to be construed with sevati, the object
being the three satipa.t.thaana. The commentator therefore comments ye
satipa.t.haane  ariyo  ...  sevati (Ps V 27). There are many similar
examples. In the first case, we would expect ya.mariyo for yadariyo and in
the second case ye ariyo.
My question is therefore: How are we to interpret such and similar features
of the language?
I propose that they are to be interpreted as glides. In the first case the
expected /.m/ was elided and a on-glide /d/ was articulated before ariyo.
The second case is particularly interesting because the expected /e/ of ye
apparently was treated like /e/ before vowel in Sanskrit (except before /a/
like here): ye ariyo > *yay ariyo > ya ariyo > ya d-ariyo. /d/ as glide
occurs often in environments like ya.m ya d-eva (f. sg. acc.), bahu d-eva,
puna d-eva. The usual practice is to call consonants like /d/ (Kacc 34
treats it as an aagama) sandhi consonants. That is not very helpful in my
opinion. Interestingly, the remaining aagamas and except /t/ and /d/ are
continuants.

Ole Holten Pind


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