On Instability in the Use of Moods in Earliest Sanskrit

Maurice Bloomfield was a professor at John's Hopkins University and a great authority on Sanskrit literature and comparative linguistics. In this paper, he shows that as far as earliest Hindu speech is concerned, ideas which are expressed in a given mood may be, and are, on a large and surprising scale, expressed equally well in another mood, the circumstances under which the two statements are made being precisely the same. The paper includes a catalog of all such instances in the Rig-Veda, and presents an interesting look at early Sanskrit's development technical enough to satisfy a linguist, yet readable to a more casual observer.