All the Skr. pronouns appear in Pr., but often in extremely abraded shapes. There is also a most luxuriant growth of by forms, the genitive plural of the pronoun of the second person being, e.g., represented by no less than 25 different words in M. alone. We also find forms which have no original in classical Skr.
Conjugation.—The Pr. verb shows even more decay than does the noun. With a few isolated exceptions, all trace of the second, or consonantal, conjugation of Skr. has disappeared, and all verbs are now conjugated after the analogy of the a-conjugation, which falls into two classes, the first being the a-conjugation proper, and the second the &conjugation, in which the e represents the aya of the Skr. loth class and of causal and denominative verbs. The present participle is the only form which has everywhere survived. All the past tenses (imperfect, perfect and aorists) have fallen into disuse, leaving only a few sporadic remains, their place being supplied, as in the case of the tertiary vernaculars, by the participles, with or without auxiliary verbs. The present tense of the verb substantive has survived from Skr., but it is usual to employ atthi (=Skr. asti) for both numbers and all per sons of the present, and asi (=dsit) for both numbers and all persons of the past. The latter has survived in the modern Pun jabi si, was. Another verb substantive (Skr. V bhfl) has also sur vived, generally in the form h5i or huvai for bhavati. Its usual past participle is /ilia-, or Mg. hida-, S. blaida. The forms given here are important when the history of the Tertiary Prakrits comes under consideration. These two verbs substantive make periphrastic tenses with other participles, and, in the case of the past participles and gerundives of transitive verbs (both of which are passive in signification), the agent or subject is put into the instrumental case, the participle being used either personally or impersonally, as in the tertiary languages. The gerundive, or future passive participle, is also used impersonally in the case of intransitive verbs.
Besides the participles, the infinitive and the indeclinable parti ciple (gerund) have also survived. So also the passive voice, con jugated in the same tenses as the active. The causal has been already mentioned. There are also numerous denominative verbs (many of them onomatopoeic), and a good supply of examples of frequentative and desiderative bases, mostly formed, with the necessary phonetic modifications, as in Skr. Many direct repre sentatives of Skr. participles in -ta- (without the i) and -na- also appear. As usual there is a tendency to simplification, and the termination is is commonly added to the Pr. present base, instead of following Skr. analogy. All the three forms of the future pas sive participle or gerundive in -tavya-, -aniya- and -ya- have sur vived. The infinitive has survived, not only with the form corresponding to the classical Sanskrit termination -tum, but also with several old Vedic forms. The same is the case with the
gerund, in which both the classical forms in -tva and -(t)ya have survived, but with the loss of the distinctive use which obtained in Sanskrit. Besides these there are also survivals of Vedic forms, and even of Primary Prakrit forms not found in the Veda. The passive is generally formed by adding -jja or, in S. and Mg., -ia to the root or, more often, to the present stem.
The only tenses which are fully conjugated in Pr. are the present, the imperative, the future and the optative. Except in Ap., the personal terminations in general correspond to the Skr.
ones, but in Ap. there are some forms which probably go back to unrecorded Primary Prakrits. The imperative similarly follows the Skr. imperative. The base of the optative is generally formed by adding -ejja- in the Outer languages and -ea- in S. The Skr. future termination -isya- is represented by -issa- or -ihi-.