Upasarga is a term used in
Sanskrit grammar for a special class of twenty prepositional particles prefixed to verbs or to action nouns. In
Vedic, these prepositions are separable from verbs; in classical Sanskrit the prefixing is obligatory.
The twenty prefixes are recognized in
's
at 1.4.58-59, and are enumerated in the
(#154):
[Katre, p.1301]
* ''pra''- "forth"
* ''parā''- "away"
* ''apa''- "away"
* ''sam''-/''saṃ-'' "with"
* ''anu''- "after"
* ''ava''- "off, down"
* '-/''nis-'' "away"
* '-/''dus-'' "bad, difficult, hard"
* ''vi''- "apart, asunder"
* ''ā''- "near"
* ''ni''- "down"
* ''adhi''- "over"
* ''api''- "proximate"
* ''ati''- "beyond"
* ''su''- "good, excellent"
* ''ut''-/''ud-'' "up(wards)"
* ''
abhi
Abhi (Devanagari अभि) is a preposition in Sanskrit, also found in Pali, Bengali, Assamese and Hindi. Today, it remains a productive element in forming names.
Origin
The first reference to the word "Abhi" is found in the ancient Hindu sacre ...
''- "to, towards"
* ''prati''- "against"
* ''pari''- "round, around"
* ''upa''- "towards, near"
By the usual rules of
euphonic combination the two prepositions ending in
visarga
Visarga ( sa, विसर्गः, translit=visargaḥ) means "sending forth, discharge". In Sanskrit phonology ('' ''), ' (also called, equivalently, ' by earlier grammarians) is the name of a phone voiceless glottal fricative, , written as: ...
, ' and ', have the alternative forms ''nis''-/''nir''- and ''dus''-/''dur''- respectively. The listing has these variants, not the forms in
pausa
In linguistics, pausa (Latin for 'break', from Greek παῦσις, ''pausis'' 'stopping, ceasing') is the hiatus between prosodic declination units. The concept is somewhat broad, as it is primarily used to refer to allophones that occur in cer ...
, and thus has twenty-two items in all.
A versified form of this list may be found in modern primers or textbooks:
Notes
References
* Monier-Williams, M., ''A Sanskrit English Dictionary'', (reprint) New Delhi, Motilal Banarsidass 2005
* Katre, Sumitra M., ''{{IAST, Aṣṭādhyāyī of Pānini'', New Delhi, Motilal Banarsidass 1989
Vyakarana
Prefixes