The Cambridge Introduction to Sanskrit

These two paradigms use the same endings everywhere except for the 1st SG and the 3rd PL. They are thus introduced together here, even though they are unrelated in their meaning/function.

MEANING

The imperfect tense refers to the past: while the 3rd SG PRES IND भरति means ‘he carries’, its imperfect equivalent means ‘he carried’. The potential mood (also called ‘subjunctive’ or ‘optative’ in some grammars) refers to what is possible. Thus the 3rd SG PRES POT भरेत् can be used to express simple possibility (‘he may, might carry’), what is wished for (‘he should, ought to carry’), also what will be (‘he will carry’), and conditional clauses (‘if he carried, were to carry’). In the 1st DU and PL, it may also express the idea of ‘let's carry’. The potential mood is regularly used only of the present tense.

FORMS

As we saw in Chapter 4, a number of the present-tense verb forms are marked by the final vowel -i: भरामि, भरसि, भरति, 3rd PL भरन्ति. Imperfect and potential also have this kind of ‘signature’ vowel that helps us recognise them: the imperfect paradigm is marked with an augment, the vowel a- at the beginning of each form. This is a marker of ‘pastness’ that is also found in another kind of past tense, the aorist (which will be discussed in Chapter 38). The potential, on the other hand, is marked by the vowel -e- that appears directly before the ending. Look at the imperfect indicative and present potential of √भृ ‘to carry’:

The endings, parallel in all forms but the 1st SG and 3rd PL, make memorising the two sets of forms easier. In some forms, comparison with the present tense helps even further: in the singular, the pattern of m, s, t repeats throughout (āmi, asi, ati – am, as, at – eyam, es, et; this pattern is made less obvious by the fact that word-final -s changed into -ḥ through sandhi; –› Chapters 4 and 13 for details), and the first persons dual and plural all include -va- and -ma-, respectively.