The Cambridge Introduction to Sanskrit

DEFINITION

The category of ‘nominal’ forms includes several kinds of word:

• – nouns, also called substantives (such as forest, girl, soul, idea)

• – pronouns (such as it, I, you, which, whoever)

• – adjectives (such as beautiful, rare, old)

• – participles (adjectives formed from verbs, such as running, as in running water or I see the boy running down the street)

These four kinds of word are grouped together because, as we will see, they have similar grammatical features. As with verbs, there are two things to look at: what kind of grammatical information nominal forms express, and how they express it. And again as with verbs, nouns in English and Sanskrit express the same kind of information, but do so in different ways.

The three grammatical categories that nominal forms express (or, to use the technical term, that they are marked for) are case, number and gender.

1) CASE

Nominal forms can play various roles in a sentence; case is the name for the way in which a language marks these roles. Look at the following English examples.

The knife lies on the table. – He cuts the cake with a knife.

The city lies on a hill. – She is coming from the city. – She is going to the city.

English frequently marks what role a noun is playing by using a preposition – such as with (used above for an instrument with which something is done), from (used above for a source or starting- point) or to (e.g. for a goal or aim). For some roles, such as the subject of a sentence (that which the sentence ‘is about’, so to speak) English does not add any preposition, but marks the case role by means of word order: in sentences such as ‘The man bites the dog’ and ‘The dog bites the man’ only the order of the words tells us who is biting (the subject) and whom he bites (the object); the forms of ‘the man’ and ‘the dog’ remain exactly the same.

In Sanskrit, on the other hand, these various roles are marked through the addition of case endings.