Sandhi and Syllables in Classical Sanskrit

BRETT KESSLER
Stanford University & Hewlett Packard Laboratories
This material has been published in Erin Duncan, Donka Farkas, & Philip Spaelti
(Eds.), The proceedings of the Twelfth West Coast Conference on Formal

Linguistics, [Stanford, CA]: Center for the Study of Language and Information,
1994, pp. 3550. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by CSLI.

Possibly the single most famous phonological fact about Classical

Sanskrit1 is that it has marvellously prolific sandhi. Virtually any
sound segment at the end of a word is subject to assimilation to the
first segment in the next word, regardless of syntactic phrasing. Some
examples are shown in 13; but as seen in 46, the same changes
appear not to apply word-internally, whether at morpheme junctures
or not.2
(1) tat indriyam > tad indriyam that sense
(2) tat manas > tan mana that mind
(3) tat cetas > tac ceta that intellect

(4) mahat- great + - instr. sg. > mahat not *mahad

(5) tm self not *nm

(6) ad- eat + -mi pres. 1 sg. act. > admi not *anmi

In the sandhi charts at the end of this article is presented a synopsis

of all these changes. Of course these phenomena are so striking and

well known that the Sanskrit word sandhi has become the standard
linguistic term for word-juncture phonology. In this paper, however, I
come to the terminologically unfortunate conclusion that Sanskrit
does not have sandhi.3 The phonological phenomena that people
have associated with word junctures are in fact conditioned by syllable
structure. I will show that this is not merely an alternative way of
describing the same phenomena but in fact accounts for a wider range
of facts more parsimoniously. These results should give support to
those who would limit prosodic juncture rules, and refute those who

claim that the Sanskrit phenomena are artifacts introduced into the
language by the native linguistsleaving no clear winners, since these
are largely the same set of people.
The fact that these changes occur between all words in a sentence
but not within a word has made an impression on linguists over the
years. Selkirk (1980) used Sanskrit to showcase her theory of prosodic
phonology, but others were more doubtful about these facts. Whitney
(1964:35), the preeminent American Sanskritist, decided that no
language could have so many changes between words, and concluded
that the native grammarians had artificially influenced the language.
More recently, linguists have been looking at the other end of the
same problem: given that these changes do occur between words
without regard to phrasing or any lexical property of the words, why
dont they occur within words as well? As Allen (1972:25 26) noted,
one would expect that assimilation should be more likely to take place
between segments that are closer together, not the other way
around. Kaisse (1985) considered the Sanskrit data to be a real
problem for her theory, which held that word-juncture effects ought
to key off of some special property of the word or syntax. Since the
Sanskrit sandhi applies between all words, regardless of syntax, she
adopted Whitneys solution of declaring the phonology to be partly
artificial.
But in a paper exploring the domains of phonological rules, Rice
(1990:307311) made the important observation that Sanskrit voicing
assimilation can be described as a syllable-coda effect rather than as
a word-juncture effect. The core insight is that words emerge from
the lexicon with their final consonants in a syllable coda. Since codas
are well known to be particularly subject to neutralization and
assimilation, one might surmise that it is the syllable structure rather
than the word juncture that is the operant condition. An obstruent
never voices before a vowel word-internally because it will always be
in an onset: word-internal consonants would normally be expected to

syllabify with the following vowel, by a syllabification principle that is

well-known to apply in most if not all languages.

(7a) ma-hat + - > max. onset syll. ma-ha-t, to which no sandhi

rules apply
( b) ma-hat > word ma-hat with /t/ in coda at word level; so ma-hat-khy-nam great narrative > sandhi ma-had--khy-nam
I would like to show that Rices claim about voicing assimilation is
correct, and should be applied to all external sandhi in Sanskrit. This
would answer the concerns raised by Whitney and the others without
impugning the accuracy of the ancient Indian linguists. I claim that the
highlighted entries in the sandhi chartssequences that behave
differently when a word boundary falls in the middle of themare all
situations where the adjacent segments would be syllabified
tautosyllabically as onsets word-internally.
(8a) ya-as- glory + -as (gen.) > ya-a-sas > sandhi ya-a-sa
( b) ya-as a-sti glory is = ya-as-as-ti > sandhi ya-o-sti
To make this claim convincing, I must show that if there are any
word-internal heterosyllabic clusters, they are subject to external
sandhi changes, since at least one of their elements is in a syllable
coda. For this purpose I shall attempt a precise definition of the
Sanskrit syllable structure. With this information, it will be seen that
there are no word-internal clusters that fail to undergo external
sandhi. This will constitute a sort of negative evidence in favor of the
syllable-based theory of sandhi, in that it will serve to explain why
certain sequences are not found inside a word. I shall then adduce
positive evidence that external sandhi rules are needed to account for
changes of stems inside inflected and derived words.

Onsets Para esto usar \b

The most conservative way to begin to account for onsets is to
enumerate the clusters found at the beginning of words. The following
clusters appear at the beginning of words listed inMonier-Williams
(1899). Forms in parentheses are doubtful; it is not clear that words
beginning with such clusters appear in any Classical Sanskrit texts.

(9) (kn), (km), (ky), kr, kry, kl, kv, k , (k ), k m, k v, khy, (gn), gr, gl,
ghn, ghr, cy, (chy), j, (jm), jy, (jr), jv, (jhy), ( v), (tm), ty, tr, try, tv,
ts, dy, dr, dv, dvy, dhm, dhy, dhr, dhv, (dhvr), ny, nr, (nv), (pn), py,
pr, pl, ps, br, (bl), (bhy), bhr, (bhl), mn, (my), mr, ml, (yv), (lp), (ly),
(lv), vy, vr, vl, c, cy, n, m, y, r, l, v, ( ), h, ( v), sk, skh, st,
sty, str, stry, sth, sn, sp, spr, sph, sphy, sm, sy, sr, sv, hn, (hm), hy,
hr, hl, hv
Using the sonority hierarchy proposed by Clements (1990)
obstruent < nasal < liquid < glideit is clear that Sanskrit onsets
allow

segments

to

be

followed

by

any

segment

of

greater

sonority.4 However this rule does not in itself account for a large class
of onsets. Several clusters begin with two obstruents, and some
onsets have the glide /v/ appearing before liquids, which should be
less sonorous than /v/:5
(10) c, h, sk, skh, st, sth, sp, sph
(11) k, ts, ps
(12) vr, vl, mn

para esto usar

http://www.w3schools.com/jsref/jsref_reg
exp_dot.asp

Following the terminology of Cairns and Feinstein (1982), these

initial segments belong to a

PREMARGIN,

which in the case of Sanskrit is

at most one segment which precedes the head of the onset.6 This
construct serves as a locus of sonority sequencing violations, and also
explains why three-letter sequences of segments that are legal
pairwise might be illegal as a triplet, e.g., that there are no */sts-/,
*/tsp-/, etc.
(13a) a [+cont] obstruent before a voiceless [-cont] obstruent: c,
sk(h), st(h), sp(h)
(

b) a [-cont] obstruent before a voiceless [+cont] obstruent: k , ts,

ps

( c) a [+lab] sonorant before a [-lab] sonorant: vr, vl, mn

There is some morphological evidence that this one-segment

restriction is an active rule of Sanskrit phonology and not just a

historical survival from the parent language. The s-aorists normally

insert an /s/ between the stem and the personal ending ( acchait-s-

ma we cut, anai-s-ta ye led), but this /s/ is not found if it would

appear between two oral stops (acchait-ta ye cut).7 It would appear
that syllabification attempts to build up the onset /tst/ on the basis of
pairwise licensing (/t/ is permitted before /s/, /s/ is permitted
before /t/), then notes the single-premargin violation and deletes
the /s/, possibly because it is the locus of the sonority sequencing
violation. A more oblique piece of evidence for the premargin and
the /s/-deletion rule can be seen in verb reduplication, where /s/
stop clusters behave anomalously: unlike all other circumstances,
including /s/sonorant clusters, where the initial segment is
copied, /s/stop clusters apparently copy the stop: ta-sthau stood
vs. sa-smra remembered.
This
was
adduced
by Kiparsky
(1979:434435) as evidence for structure within the onset, with
reduplication copying the metrically weaker (less sonorous) part of the
onset. It is also possible that the entire margin is copied at a deep
level (*sta-sthau), which would agree with the Gothic evidence he
presents (stai-staut pushed, even though the usual reduplication in
that language is also uniconsonantal, cf. gai-grot wept). But since
the margin is almost always uniconsonantal, Sanskrit imposed a
shape-invariant Ca- pattern on reduplication. Again, the first repair
strategy when a cluster competes for that single slot is to delete
the /s/, leaving the attested ta-sthau. This is congruent with the
historical account suggested by Osthoff (1882).
So the correct formulation of the onset would appear to be that
consonants may sequence in ascending sonority (or glide may follow
glide), which sequence is optionally preceded by a premargin. The
exact internal organization of the onset really isnt important to my
thesis, as long as one accepts that the description results in the
correct syllable divisions in the context of maximum-onset

syllabification. But precisely because it is important that we agree on

the syllabification, it is worthwhile to consider Steriades proposal
(1982), by which the grammar prefers to keep /s/ out of onsets. Her
analysis was driven by the theoretical concern that these /s-/ clusters
violate sonority sequencing, and was supported by the facts about
reduplication

and s-aorists.

In

reduplication,

/s/

would

be

extrasyllabic and therefore invisible to the copying. In the s-aorist, the

/s/ would not be able to syllabify in an onset before stops, nor in a
coda after stops (see next section), so it would disappear.
Part of the problem with that argumentation is that it is motivated
by a universal claim about sonority sequencing in syllables, but the
Sanskrit facts are Indo-Aryan innovations that do not generalize to
other languages. In several Indo-European languages, including the
closely related Avestan, one always reduplicates the initial /s/, and in
Gothic of course the entire margin is copied (Osthoff 1882). This also
brings to mind Old English alliteration, which normally matches words
that have the same single initial consonant, but which in the case of
/s/-stop clusters requires both segments to match (Bright 1957:230);
this would be very odd if the /s/ is not even part of the syllable.

Furthermore, the same facts that rule out *acchaitsta should, if

universal, rule out Eng. capstan. Since languages have so much
variation in how /s/ is treated, much if not all of the simplicity

Steriade gains by not having to give structure-sensitive rules (e.g.,

that reduplication copies the margin, not the edge, of the onset; or
that /s/ itself is specifically liable to deletion) is lost by having to give
language-specific conditions about how extrasyllabic /s/ is treated (it
would end up getting licensed postlexically at the left margin of a
word, but deleted elsewhere), and about the relative ordering of /s/
deletion

and

Bartholomaes

(araudhsta >araudhta > arauddha, Whitney 1964:315).8

Law

Furthermore, it will be seen in the section on Morphological

Evidence that the behaviour of stem-final sibilants in the morphology

directly patterns with the predictions of my syllabification theory. If

the ending is such that the sibilant can form an onset with it, the
sibilant remains a sibilant, perhaps with some place assimilation; if
the ending cannot form an onset, the sibilant is neutralized in ways
paralleling the treatment at the end of utterances. For example, the

stem s- sit retains the /s/ in forms like ste sits and smahe we
sit, but makes it discontinuant in ddhve ye sit. This agrees with the
fact that there are words that begin with /st/ and /sm/ but not /sdh/,
and can most directly be explained by differences in syllabification.
Finally but perhaps most crucially, it will be seen that the sandhi
theory itself constitutes evidence for the syllabification of /s/. If I am
correct in stating that sandhi effects are triggered by syllable
structure, then sandhi such as /-s p-/ > /- p-/, contrasted with the
persistence of word-internal /sp/ sequences, is to be explained by the
fact that word-final /s/ are in syllable codas, but word-internally form
onset clusters with /p/. If however /s/ before /p/ were always in a
syllable coda, then the two cases could not be distinguished, and one
would have to resort to invoking word boundaries in sandhi. I would
argue that the evidence that all other sandhi is syllable-conditioned,
as well as the indecisiveness of the evidence against /s/-stop onsets,
should lead to the conclusion that the overall picture is simpler if one
accepts these onsets.

Codas
An inventory of word-final codas would be a good deal harder to
compile by thumbing through a dictionary, but fortunately the
doctrine of permitted finals is a well-established part of Sanskrit
grammar. Whitney

(1964:4953) teaches

that

for

all

practical

purposes, a word on the surface can end in one of the sequences /

(r)k/, //, /(r)/, /(r)t/, /n/, /(r)p/, /m/, /l/, or / /. An examination of
the sandhi tables suggests that a few small changes need to be made
to this inventory to account for deeper levels. Although it is traditional
to describe sandhi in terms of the surface forms the input words have
in isolation, most generative linguists agree that in some cases one
needs to assume somewhat different forms feeding sandhi; these are

added in parentheses in the charts. So it would appear from the

evidence of word-final consonants that prior to the postlexical
phonology, Sanskrit syllable codas can end in virtually any consonant
other than a palatal, or / /, or a voiced or aspirated obstruent.
Examination of the inventory of onsets suggests that the restrictions
on palatals and laryngeal features apply to any stop not followed by a
tautosyllabic sonorant. Some bisegmental clusters of descending
sonority are allowed (glide before any non-glide, non-obstruent
before obstruent).
That the lexical phonology handles most or all of the neutralizations
needed to satisfy these coda restrictions is apparent from morphemeor class-dependent variations. The fact that much reduction must be
lexical even though the assimilation must be postlexical reinforces the
view most recently championed by Cho (1990) that neutralization and
assimilation are two separate processes.
(14a) Monomorphemic -rT: suhrd good-hearted > suhrt
( b) Bimorphemic: a-bibhar-t he carried > abibhar > abibha
(15a) Palatal > velar: va i j merchant > va ik
( b) Palatal > retroflex: parivrj mendicant > parivr
(16a) // > //: dvi-hve ye hate (mid.) > dvi-hve > dvihve
( b) // > /k/ before verbal /s/: dvi-se thou hatest (mid.) > dvike

Word-internal clusters
It turns out to be the case that these simple observations about
word margins fully account for Sanskrits lexical syllable structure
word-internally as well. To verify this, I wrote a program to extract all
word-internal consonant clusters from a body of on-line Sanskrit
texts.9 Of these, the following are analyzable as onset clusters
according to the criteria just discussed. Note that they fill in many
apparent gaps where the onset criteria generated clusters that do not
show up word-initially.

para esto usar \B

(17) Word-internal onsets: k , kn, km, kmy, ky, k , k my, k y, k, g ,

gn, gny, gm, gmy, gy, gry, gv, ghny, ghy, chy, jm, jr, hy, y, r, v,
hy, hr, hv, y, v, tn, tny, tnv, tm, tmy, tvy, tsn, tsy, tsv, thn, thy,
thv, dry, dhn, dhny, dhry, nv, pn, pny, p, psy, by, bhn, bh , bhy,
bhv, m, my, mv, yy, ly, lv, v , vn, p, vy, k, kr, , y, v, r, y,
p, pr, ph, m, y, r, v, vy, stv [Plus those found word-initially]
The remaining consonant sequences are analyzable as codas
followed by onsets. The following inventory lists those which are
simply sequences of permitted codas and permitted onsets.

sandhis reales
(18)

Word-internal

deep

codas

plus

onsets,

sandhi

applying

vacuously: k-k; k-c; k-t(h); k-p; -k; k-t; -g; -c; -ch; -j; -k;
-; -(h); - ; - ; -m; t-k; t-t(h); t-p(h); t-sth; n-t(h); n-d; n-dh;
n-n; n-m; p-t; p-p; m-p(h); m-b(h); m-m; r-k(h); r-g(h); r-c(h); r-j;
r-; r-t(h); rt-t; r-d(h); r-n; r-p(h); r-b(h); r-m; r-; r- ; r-s; l-k; lg; l-p; l-ph; l-b; l-m; l-l; s-s [Omitting extensions of onsets, such
as /n-dr/ given /n-d/]
The theory that external sandhi applies at all syllable boundaries
implies that the sandhi rules should apply to these, though vacuously.
And such turns out to be the case. The only apparent problem is the
case of /s-s/, where one would normally expect / s/. This happens

when an ending is added to an s-stem verb: s- sit + -se (pres.

mid. 2nd sg.) > sse, not *se. The lexicon seems to turn the two
/s/ in these verb forms into a geminate, which would protect the
first /s/ from coda disarticulation because of geminate integrity. It is
not surprising that the treatment of the coda would be exceptional
here, since verbs usually have special coda neutralizations for
sibilants, especially before /s/, as illustrated in 16b.
Finally, here is the list of word-internal clusters for which sandhi
changes must be assumed.

sandhis reales no al principio ni fin

(19) gg < k-g; gd(h) < k-d(h); gbh < k-bh; cc(h) < t-c(h); jj < t-j; g
< -g; h < -dh; bh < -bh; dg(h) < t-g(h); dd(h) < t-d(h); db(h)
< t-b(h); bj < p-j; bd(h) < p-d(h); < m-; < m-; s < m-s;
< s-; s < s-s
So word-internal consonant clusters can safely be analyzed as being
susceptible to the same sandhi rules as are consonants that meet at
word junctures. In fact, one is better off using that analysis, since
otherwise one would need extra rules to account for the word-internal
assimilations seen above. This is a nice result, and the mechanisms
needed to account for this theory are ordinary, everyday linguistic
processes. Maximum-onset syllabification applies within words, but
not between words. Then consonants remaining in codas are
neutralized in ways that are partly sensitive to the morpheme or its
class. Immediately before emerging from the lexicon, words ending
in /r/ devoice it, and words ending in /n/ add an /s/.10 Postlexically,
certain assimilations affect elements in syllable codas, regardless of
their position within the word. Since these processes are so common;
since this analysis frees us from having to attribute the cause of
assimilation

to

phonological

or

syntactic

separation

(word

boundaries); and since this accounts for the distribution of wordinternal clusters as well, I would judge that all modern linguistic
descriptions that describe Sanskrit external sandhi as being a wordjuncture phenomenon are unnecessarily complex.

Lexical exceptions
There are a few morphs that take different forms depending on
what

sound

is

adjacent

in

the

sentence. sas that

and

its

extension eas this drop the /s/ before consonants in Classical

Sanskrit: sa putra that son, not *sa putra. On the other hand, the

dual endings -ai (surface -e), -, -, and perhaps a few interjections,

add a glide before vowels, resulting ultimately in hiatus (glide deletion
and

pause

being

the

sources

of

hiatus

in

Sanskrit): phalaiy

admi > phale admi I eat two pieces of fruit, not *phaledmi. The
word aum drops its /a/ after words ending in /-/: tava

um > tavom thine om, not *tavaum; this no doubt originated in an

effort to ensure that the mystic syllable always surfaces as /om/. The
words to and m not add a /t/ before /ch/ in those dialects that
have geminate /ch/ after all vowels word-internally, but word-initially
normally a single consonant after long vowels and a geminate after
short ones; this /t/ extension produces a geminate /ch/ as sandhi,
and must have originated at a point when and m were considered
to form a prosodic word with the following verb, therefore causing
gemination despite their long vowel: t chdaya cover! > cchdaya.
But these are fundamentally different from the sandhi I have been
discussing. The rule of sas/sa alternation is not a phonological
property of /s/ at word boundaries, but a lexical property of the
word sas itself, which happens to be sensitive to its phonological
environment. It is a matter of allomorphy, exactly comparable to the
alternation an/a in English, where no one would claim there is a
general synchronic rule deleting /n/ before consonants at word
boundaries. Thus these effectsthe only actual word-juncture effects
in Sanskritsatisfy Kaisses (1985) requirement that they should key
off of some lexical or syntactic property of the environment.

Morphological evidence con esto se podra hacer una

depuracion previa y luego pasar a las coincidencias
So far the evidence has mainly been negative: I have shown only that
the inventory of word-internal clusters does not contradict the
syllable-based theory of sandhi. In this section I address whether
there is direct evidence that external sandhi rules come into play in
the morphology.
One answer is that the traditional grammar has always recognized a
large overlap between the rules of external and internal sandhi. Many
of the unhighlighted entries in the sandhi charts also apply word
internally. Among these are the rules that Selkirk analyzed as domainspan

rules

(1980:125)

and

include

Glide

Formation,

Vowel

Contraction, Assimilation of /m/, Anusvara (disarticulation) of /m/,

and Obstruent Voicing (before other obstruents, which case she must

separate from their voicing word-finally). The outlook I am advocating

obviates the need to distinguish external rules from rules that are
both external and internal: the distinction is a matter of syllable
boundaries. It is particularly easy to see that sandhi rules affecting
word-final vowels before other vowels should also find the same
syllabic conditions when vowels come into contact word-internally,
and indeed there are many examples of Glide Formation and Vowel
Contraction in the morphology: kma-i love (loc.) > kme; kma-

as loves (nom.) > km; sya- two mouths > sye; gati- gait
(instr.) > gaty; nad- river (instr.) > nady; tan-ebody (dat.)
> tanve; jy-istham old-est > jyeham; juhu-thai you two sacrifice
(middle) > juhvthe; abhava-i I was (imperf. mid.) > abhave. Of
course, when a vowel precedes a consonant, there is also a syllable
boundary just as there is between words, but since the sandhi rules
call for no change in this case, the congruence of internal and external
sandhi is not particularly noticeable: kma-bhyas (dat./abl. pl.)
> kmabhya.
The situation is slightly obscured for stem-final consonants because
the most common case in the morphology is for that consonant to
form an onset with the ending. This of course bleeds the sandhi rules,
which are coda-sensitive, and has led to the false generalization that
most sandhi rules for consonants as the prior elements are
inoperative word-internally. Thus consonant-final noun stems are
unchanged before a vowel ending: manas- > manas, not *mana. It
turns out that the only noun endings beginning with a consonant
are -bhym (instr., dat., abl. dual),-bhis (instr. pl.), -bhyas (dat.,
abl. pl.), and -su (loc. pl.). /bh/ cannot be the second element of
any onset cluster, so a preceding consonant will always end up in a
coda, leaving the appropriate environment for sandhi changes: yaasbhis fame (instr. pl.) > yaobhi. /s/ is the second element of an
onset only after a tenuis (/k/, /p/, /t/, / /), so most of the time it too
will close a syllable yaas-su > yaasu; and the tenuis + /s/
sequence does not undergo any change at word boundaries, so this

case is indistinguishable from external sandhi. These facts led to the

false conclusion that these suffixes themselves are specially marked
as causing word-boundary sandhi changes, and so they are
called

PADA

suffixes (Sanskrit for word). It is of course troubling that

inflectional endings that have no morphological unity should be given

the status of separate words, especially since the suffixes otherwise

behave as part of the word: the suffix -su is subject to the rule of
Ruki, the /s/ becoming retroflex after sounds such as /k/ ( vc-

su voices > vk-su > vku), which change in the classical language
never occurs between words; and stem-final /r/ does not become / /
before -su (dhur-su yokes > dhru), though it would before
another word. In this new account, the suffixes do not need to be
given any special marking, nor do they need to insert a dubious word
boundary. The behaviour is completely predictable from the
phonology of the syllable structure.
Verbal inflections are more probative, since suffixes beginning with
consonants are not all such as occasion syllable boundaries. For
example, with the verb dvi- hate one finds the / / surviving intact in
inflections such as these present active forms: dviva (1st
dual), dvima (1st
pl.), dviha (2nd
dual), dvia (3rd
dual), dvianti (3rd pl.)that is, in forms where it can form an onset
cluster with the following segment. But voiced obstruents cannot be
part of onset clusters, so before suffixes beginning with /dh/, one
does not get the expected *dvihve(2nd pl. middle) but
rather dvihve.11 Similarly,
before
/s/
suffixes
one
gets
not *dvise (2nd sg. mid.) but dvike (with Ruki), because onsets
cannot be built from multiple fricatives either. Of course most of these
segments rejected from the onset cannot occur in codas either,12 and
so they are subject to certain neutralizations. As mentioned earlier,
these neutralizations are partly idiosyncratic, though generally drawn
from a very small set of possibilities. In the case of dvi-, the coda
neutralization to // (whence / / by normal voicing assimilation) is

regular, a simple dropping of +cont. The change to /k/ in dvike is a

subregularity, normal for continuants before verbal endings in /s-/.

The above example makes it clear that it is not simply the case that
consonantal endings occasion external sandhi. But one could conclude
that verbal suffixes in /dh-/ and /s-/ should simply be listed among
the pada suffixes. However, verb stems ending in /h/, a placeless
voiced

aspirate

(phonetically,

breathy h),

pattern

somewhat

differently. duh- milk, which is marked for conversion to velar in a

coda (go-dhuk13 cow-milker (nom. sg.)), forms most inflections

analogously to dvi-: duhva, duhma, duhanti, and before s- suffixes

one

sees

the

before t(h)- suffixes

expected
the

conversion

situation

is

to

not

/k/: dhuke.

analogous

But

to dvi-,

because /h/, being voiced, cannot form an onset cluster with

obstruents. The effect is obscured a bit by Bartholomaes Law, but the

conversion of /h/ to a velar shows that coda neutralizations are taking

place: dugdha for the 2nd and 3rd person dual. Before /t(h)/, an /h/
remains in a coda. In that position it must give up its laryngeal
features, which dock on the following dental, and the /h/ must
become articulated, which in this case means conversion to a velar.
The same principles are broadly true of derivation as well. For

example, prc- forward, which converts to a velar before the socalled pada suffixes, does so also before the comparative ending -

tara-,
since
/ct/
is
an
impossible
onset
sequence: prktaram. However, the so-called TADDHITA suffixesthose
which are appended to derived stems rather than to bare rootsare a
more complicated story. Those beginning with vowels behave as
expected, inducing no change in stem-final consonants, but those
beginning with consonants have a marked tendency to combine by the
rules of external sandhi. Thus manas-in having a mind > manasin,
not *manain, but manas-mayam mental > manomayam. By and large
it is clear that these are being combined by the rules of compounding
(a final /r/ changes to /s/ in words like prtastanam matutinal,
which is strictly a word-margin effect, cf. kartanam excision), but the

fact that only consonantal endings induce external sandhi raises the
suspicion that syllabification is involved. Conceivably this treatment
originated in a tendency to apply empty-onset filling rather than
maximum-onset syllabification as the syllabification principle at the
lexical stratum at which taddhita suffixes are adjoined. Since this
would almost always give the same results as compounding, this
could easily have led to a restructuring by which the common
consonantal suffixes were reanalyzed as bound words that require
compounding.

Conclusion
It is curious that this theory was not proposed and accepted long
ago. It is simpler and more explanatory than an account invoking
word boundaries, pada suffixes, and many exceptions in conjugation,
and certainly the ancients knew about syllables. But the doctrine of
word boundaries has been taught for millennia by the ancient Indian
linguists, by the neogrammarians, and by the structuralists, down
through the modern generativist prosodic phonologists, the only
exception I know of being Rices observation on voicing assimilation. I
suspect that the greatest problem has been a decided ambivalence
toward syllables as part of linguistic theory; they have largely been
ignored in favour of linear segmental models, at least up until the
introduction of autosegmental frameworks in the past couple of
decades. But even if one were inclined to pay attention to syllables,
Sanskrit does have a few features that can lead one astray. Most
notably, the Sanskrit poetic metre, like that of Latin and Greek, is
based on the pattern of heavy and light syllables, where a syllable is
heavy if its vowel is long or followed by two or more consonants. The
usual way of accounting for this is to provide that when two
consonants follow a vowel, at least a short one, the first consonant
syllabify with the preceding vowel, so that one can say that closed
syllables are heavy. This is of course at first blush completely contrary
to my claim that syllables are built word-internally only by maximizing
the onset in accordance with the general onset templates. Nowadays

one

can explain

these

conflicts

by

rule

orderingperhaps

postlexical rule readjusts syllables after the sandhi rules take effect
or by ambisyllabicity, but the neogrammarians and early structuralists
had no such devices.
I submit that current techniques of non-linear and metrical
phonology have made it possible to offer a significantly more concise
and explanatory account of Sanskrit external sandhi, one which does
not require reference to word boundaries. If these results are
accepted, Sanskrit will have to cease being adduced as the exemplar
of a language with a rich sandhi in the strict sense of the word, and
cease being faulted for being phonologically unnatural.
I hesitate, however, to extrapolate universal claims about prosodic
phonology just because it turns out not to be directly relevant to
Classical Sanskrit sandhi: as far as I know, this language is not the
linchpin in anybodys theory. I have offered these observations
because of the prominent role the Sanskrit phenomena have played in
the history of linguistics, from traditional discussions of sandhi on
down through Selkirks famous Sanskrit revisited paper and beyond.
It is noteworthy, however, that prosodic juncture rules seem to be
rather rare, and rejecting the Sanskrit data as evidence of word
juncture rules makes the data even thinner. I agree with Rice
(1990) that it might be worthwhile looking more deeply into other
cases of alleged prosodic juncture rules and examining how many of
them might, like those of Sanskrit, be analyzable as caused by other
conditions such as syllable structure.

Sandhi charts
The chief rule of external sandhi seen in the vowel chart is Glide
Deletion (disregarded by Selkirk, 1980:113, but cf. Allen, 1972:38).
With initial /a-/ is also seen the a-Deletion rule of Selkirk (1980:125),
which Allen

(1972:3943) treats

rather

as

wholesale

monophthongization of the sequences /aya/, /ava/. In the consonant

charts are seen Final Voicing of obstruents (Selkirk 1980:115) and
Stop To Nasal (p. 118). The change /as a/ > /o/ is analogous to a-

Deletion for final vowels. Concentrating on Vedic, Selkirk ignores the

dropping or nasalization of /s/ in final /ns/, and the disarticulation of
/s/ before non-coronal voiceless stops. She gives additional wordjuncture rules for /as/ > /o/ and /s/ deletion (for final /s/), but these
cases could be treated as prosodically unconditioned developments of
the /z/ (otherwise not found in Sanskrit) expected from Final Voicing;
it behaves analogously to the glides, which are licensed only after /a/.
She also treats r-Deletion as a word-juncture rule (for final /s/ or /r/
before /r/), but two /r/ never come together in Sanskrit, so this too
could be an utterance-span rule. In the approach advocated in this
paper, there are two word-level lexical rules-finals in /n/ add /s/, and
final /r/ devoices. The rest of sandhi is seamlessly integrated into
several dozen prosodically unconstrained postlexical rules.
-e
-ai -o
-au
Init
(-ay) (-y) (-av) (-v)

- -

ya

va ra e

va

a-

v r a

vi

ri

ai

ai

vi

i-

o yu

ru a u

au

vu u-

o y

r a

v -

ar yrr

vrr

rrr

a rr

rr

a rr

vrr

rr-

ai ye

ve re a e

ae

ve

e- (ay-)

-rr

ai yai vai rai a ai ai a ai vau ai- (y-)

au yo vo ro a o

ao

vo o- (av-)

au yau vau rau a au au a au vau au- (v-)

Chart 1: Sandhi of final vowels. Parentheses show underlying forms, boldface

shows outcomes different from those seen word-internally. /e/ and /o/ are
always long. /v/ is best considered a glide (a labiodental approximant). Short /a/
is -low on the surface, but throughout the phonology behaves as +low.

Final vowels plus initial consonants undergo no change, except that

many manuscripts alternate /ch/ after long vowels and /cch/ after
short ones; word-internally, many of the same MSS have /cch/ after
all vowels.
-k

-
-
(-)

-t

-n
-p
(-ns)

-m

-
-a
(-s/-rr) (-as)

-
(-s)

Init

ga

a
na
a da
ba
a1
nna1

gV

V
nV
V dV
bV mV rV
V1
nnV1

ma

ra

a-

aV

V-

kh akh kh
khxkh2 axkh2 xkh2

kkh kh

kh tkh nkh

pkh kh

ggh gh

gh dgh ngh

bgh gh rgh

ogh

gh

gh-

kch ch

ch cch ch pch ch ch

ach

ch

ch-

gjh jh

jh jjh

ojh

jh

jh-

kh h

h h h ph h h

ah

h-

gh h

h h h

oh

h-

kth th

th tth sth pth nth sth2

asth2

sth2

th-

gdh dh

dh ddh ndh

bdh ndh rdh

odh

dh

dh-

n
n
gn

n nn
nn
n dn

mn
nn
bn

rn

on

n-

kph ph

ph tph nph

pph mph

ph aph ph
phph2 aph2 ph2

gbh bh

bh dbh nbh

bbh mbh rbh

obh

bh

bh-

m
m
gm

m nm
nm
m dm

mm
mm r m
bm

om

m-

gy

y dy ny

by

oy

y-

gr

dr

nr

br

or

r-

gl

ll

ll
nl

bl

l
l ll

rl

ol

l-

gv

v dv nv

bv

v rv

ov

v-

cch
ch
ch

a3
a

n
nt

a3
a

ks

s
ks

s
ts
ts

ns
nts

ps

s3
ss

as3
ass

s3
ss

s-

oh

h-

ggh
h
gh

jh
njh

h ddh
nh
h dh

bjh jh rjh

bh h rh

y ry
r (VV)r

bbh
h4 rh
bh

Chart 2: Sandhi of final consonants. Multiple entries usually show options in free
variation. The rare final /l/ neither suffers nor causes changes. / / and / / are

disarticulated continuant and nasal, other inferior dots denote retroflexes. / / is a

velar nasal. /rr/ is a voiceless retroflex tap. /h/ is breathy-voiced as an

independent segment; after a stop it marks aspiration. // and // are palatal; /ll/

is nasal. 1The nasal doubles only after short vowels. 2The fricative is optionally

/-/ if the initial stop is followed by a sibilant. 3// is omissible if the sibilant is
followed by an oral stop. 4The /-m/ may assimilate to a (sonorant) consonant
following the /h-/.

References
Allen, W. Sidney. 1972. Sandhi: the theoretical, phonetic, and
historical bases of word-junction in Sanskrit. (Janua linguarum, ser.
min., 17). 2nd printing of 1962 ed. s-Gravenhage: Mouton.
Bright, James W. 1957. Brights Anglo-Saxon reader, rev. and enlarged
by James K. Hulbert. New York: Henry Holt.
Cairns, Charles E. & Mark H. Feinstein. 1982. Markedness and the
theory of syllable structure. LI 13.193225.
Cho, Young-Mee Yu. 1990. Parameters of consonantal assimilation.
Doctoral dissertation, Stanford.
Clements, G. N. 1990. The role of the sonority cycle in core
syllabification. Papers in laboratory phonology, John Kingston and
Mary E. Beckman, eds., 283333. Cambridge:Cambridge Univ. Press.
Kaisse, Ellen M. 1985. Connected speech: the interaction of syntax
and phonology. Orlando: Academic Press.
Kiparsky, Paul. 1979. Metrical structure assignment is cyclic. LI
10.421441.
Monier-Williams, Monier. 1899. A Sanskrit-English dictionary. Oxford:
Oxford Univ. Press.
Osthoff, H. 1882. Zur Reduplicationslehre. Beitrge zur Geschichte der
deutschen Sprache und Literatur. 8.540567.
Rice, Keren D. 1990. Predicting rule domains in the phrasal
phonology. The phonologysyntax connection, ed. by Sharon
Inkelas and Draga Zec, 289312. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
Rice, Keren D. 1992. On deriving sonority: a structural account of
sonority relationships. Phonology 9.6199.

Selkirk, Elisabeth O. 1980. Prosodic domains in phonology: Sanskrit

revisited. Juncture, M. Aronoff, 107129. Saratoga, Calif.: Anma
Libri.
Steriade,

Donca.

1982.

Greek

prosodies

and

the

nature

of

syllabification. Doctoral dissertation, MIT.

Whitney, William Dwight. 1964. Sanskrit grammar. Reprint of 2nd ed.,
1889. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press.

Footnotes
1By Classical Sanskrit is here meant the language that flourished in
the first millenium of the common era, as distinguished from the
language of the earlier Vedic literature. It is essentially the language
described by P ini, although I will here ignore variant forms unused
in the later literature, as well as the pitch accent, which was lost.
2For ease of comparison with almost all previous studies, I use the
standard Indological transliteration system for Sanskrit. The symbols
are explained in connection with the sandhi charts at the end of this
paper.

3In Sanskrit studies, one uses the word sandhi to refer to all

phonological

distinguishes

changes

INTERNAL

SANDHIbetween-word

at

morpheme

SANDHIwithin-word

boundaries,

changesfrom

then

EXTERNAL

changes. The latter is of course what we usually

mean nowadays by sandhi simpliciter. I accept the existence of certain

internal sandhi rules, but will argue that the so-called rules of

external sandhi really have nothing to do with word juncture.

Nevertheless, in order to avoid too great a break with established

terminology, I shall use the term external sandhi loosely, to refer to

those changes that are conventionally described as being conditioned
by word juncture.
4Cho (1990:202203) has argued that onset clusters must not be
homorganic (see also Rice, 1992, for a claim that this restriction is
nearly universal). In particular Cho would disagree with my position
that

/dhn/

or

/pm/

could

form

an

onset

in

words

like budhna bottom or ppm evil, and her case is bolstered by

the fact that such sequences do not occur at the beginning of words.

By making these into absolute and pervasive restrictions on onset

templates, however, Cho is forced to treat many neutralizations as
being disjunctively conditioned by word margins and by obstruent
clustering, since, for example, /dh/ loses its laryngeal features at the
end of a word and before obstruents, but not internally before nasals.
I would rather say that these heterorganicity requirements are simply
morpheme structure constraints, or word margin constraints, or at
most onset structure constraints that apply only in the base lexicon
and are relaxed at later levels.
5This could be taken for evidence that the /v/ is an obstruent at the
time of lexical syllabification (Cho 1990:201204), which could be
supported by the fact that this /v/ has a labiodental pronunciation.
But these onsets date back to Proto-Indo-European, where the labial
is clearly a glide (note the comparatively recent survival of /wr-/
onsets in English). It would appear rather that it is the labiality of
the /w/ that somehow makes a difference. It is noteworthy, for
example,

that

(mriyate dies),

Sanskrit
/ml/

morphemes

can

(mleccha foreigner),

root mn note), but not */nr/, */nl/, */nm/.

begin

with

/mr/

and

/mn/

(the

6 In their system, a branching onset like /try/ is divided into a

margin /t/ and an adjunct /ry/. In cases like those under

consideration here, the margin can itself branch into a premargin and
a margin core, so that the onset /stry/ would be bracketed [[[s][t]][ry]].
I prescind from whether quite that much structure is needed, while
agreeing that the premargin definitely has some special status.
7Whitney (1964:315). It must be noted however that this /s/
presumably also disappears after short vowels and before /dh-/
endings, which is not analogous to how /s/-final stems behave, so
the possibility of morphological idiosyncrasy must not be ruled out.
8Bartholomaes Law provides that when a [+voiced +spread]
Laryngeal node delinks from a coda, it will dock on an immediately

following dental stop (Whitney 1964:55). The scope of this law is

strictly lexical, so the deletion of the /s/ cannot simply be a
postlexical development.
9Since these are blind enumerations of clusters, it should be kept in
mind that they constitute a mixture of underlying clusters and clusters
derived from morphological processes. Some of these clusters will
also result from compounding and prefixing, which with respect to
syllabification and sandhi behave like separate words. The point of
this section is not to precisely enumerate word-internal clusters, but
to show that there are no heterosyllabic clusters that resist the rules
of external sandhi.
10This adding of an /s/ is obviously not a universal tendency, but is
peculiar to the history of Sanskrit. In pre-Classical (Vedic) times, the
ending /-n/ was rare but /-ns/ very common. The /s/ of the latter
disappeared in many sandhi environments, yielding results identical to
that for /-n/. This situation was simplified in Classical Sanskrit so that
there was no distinction between the terminations /-n/ and /-ns/.
The controversy as to whether the /s/ is underlying or added by
sandhi (see Cho 1990:71, who sides with Schein and Steriade in
considering it underlying against Odden, who says it is added in
sandhi)

may partly reflect some unclarity about whether the

discussants are referring to the Vedic or the Classical language.

11Retroflection spreads to a following dental stop.
12Although /s/ can apparently occur in codas at some level (its
sandhi treatment at the end of the word strongly suggests that it
emerges from the lexicon as /s/, and the treatment of /s/ at the end
of noun stems is totally analogous), verb stems consistently reject it
from codas. Perhaps verb inflection happens in an earlier, more
restrictive, stratum than that of nouns.
13The alternation of the initial /d/~/dh/ is interesting but distracts
from the matter at hand. The general rule appears to be that when
aspiration is delinked from a voiced consonant at the end of a root, it
can dock on a voiced consonant at the beginning of the root (Whitney

1964:53). Bartholomaes Law, however, which transfers the laryngeal

features to a following dental stop, takes precedence (p. 55).