The Vedic imperatives yodhi 'fight' and bodhi 'heed'.

• Author: Jasanoff, Jay H.

IT WAS FROM READING one of Stanley Insler's stimulating articles nearly thirty years ago that I first came to appreciate the oddity of the Vedic 2nd sg. imperatives yodhi (: yudh- 'fight') and bodhi (: budh- 'awake, heed'). (1) In dedicating this little study to him now, I hope that our honorand will be pleased to see how much my analysis owes to him.

yodhi is a hapax, occurring at RV V 3.9:

ava sprdhi pitaram yodhi vidvan, putro yas te sahasah suna uhe

Insler (p. 556) translates this passage as follows: "Protect (or free) the father. Knowing how, fight (for him) who is considered thy son..." In adopting this interpretation, he specifically upholds the traditional analysis of yodhi as a form of yudh-, correctly rejecting the attempts of Oldenberg, Geldner, and other scholars to refer it to yu- 'keep away'. (2) Insler's stated reason for preferring yudh- to yu- is functional: transitive yu-, he notes, never appears in the Rigveda without an overt direct object. But his discussion as a whole reveals another, more intuitive line of thought: since yodhi is inseparable from bodhi, and since bodhi is a form of budh-, yodhi must be a form of the morphologically parallel root yudh-.

bodhi itself--not to be confused with the homophonous but unrelated 2nd sg. impv. bodhi (bodhi) 'be(come)' (: bhu-) (3)--is attested ten times in the Rigveda. The typical use is seen in passages like IV 3.4:

rtasya bodhi rtacit svadhih

Being of good attention, be aware of the truth, thou perceiver of truth.

and VIII 43.27:

agne sa bodhi me vacah

Agni, be now aware of my words. (4)

Since both yudh- and budh- have characterized presents in -ya- (yudhya-, budhya-), the imperatives yodhi and bodhi must be classified as root aorists. As active athematic imperatives in -dhi, however, they are anomalous in at least two respects: 1) they show single -dh- rather than expected *-ddh- for presumed underlying /-dh-dhi/; and 2) they have full grade, rather than zero grade, of the root. The expected root-based imperatives of yudh- and budh- --the present vs. aorist distinction makes no difference here--would have been *yuddhi and *buddhi. The problem is to explain why these forms seem to have been replaced by yodhi and bodhi.

Insler (p. 556f., n. 9) attributes the simplification of *-ddhi to -dhi in yodhi and bodhi to the preceding heavy syllable, comparing the loss of the root-final consonant in trndhi (: trd- 'bore'), prndhi (: prc- 'mix'), bhandhi (: bhanj- 'break'), rundhi (AV) (: rudh- 'obstruct'), and vrndhi (:vrj- 'twist'). These examples, however, are not satisfying comparanda, since all involve the loss of the medial consonant in sequences of the type -N[C.sub.1][C.sub.2]-. The *-ddh- in *yoddhi and *boddhi, by contrast, was for all practical purposes intervocalic, even if--as is not unlikely--the root vowel at the time of the putative phonological reduction was the diphthong *-au- rather than -o-. Clusters, and in particular geminates, were not simplified in this position; direct counterexamples can be seen in agent nouns of the type yoddhi (:yudh-), cettr- (: cit- 'notice'), bhettr- (:bhid- 'split'), etc. (5) An extreme variant of the "reduction" approach underlies Mayrhofer's attempt (1986: 111-12) to place the degemin ation of *-ddhi to *-dhi within Proto-Indo-European. According to Mayrhofer, "im Falle von RV 5, 3, 9 yodhi, wehre ab!' (und in ved. Bodhi, merke, sei wachsam!') scheinen Wurzeln auf *[LANGUAGE NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]eudh vor dem Morphem -dhi die Silbengrenze nach *[LANGUAGE NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]eu- zu legen, wodurch [LANGUAGE NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII][d.sup.h][d.sup.h]i in der Position. TTV zu. TV vereinfacht wurde." This, however, is merely notational sleight-of-hand; it is almost inconceivable that a preform of the type *ieudh-dhi could even have been syllabified *ieu.dhdhi in a phonetically meaningful way.

Even more surprising than the apparent reduction of *-ddhi to -dhi is the unexpected gunation of the roots yudh-, budh- to yo(dh)-, bo(dh)-. The normal Vedic rule for the formation of aorist and present imperatives in -dhi (-hi) calls for zero grade of the root; cf. srudhi (:sru- 'hear'; root aor.), krdhi (: kr- 'do'; root aor.), gahi (:gam- 'go'; root aor.), bruhi (: bru- 'say'; root pres.), ihi (:i- 'go'; root pres.), dhehi < * dha(d)zdhi (: dha- 'put'; reduplicated pres.), srnuhi (:sru-; nasal pres.), as well as trndhi, prndhi, etc., cited above. Exceptions occur; these, however, are mainly of the type sagdhi (: sak- 'be able'; root aor.), edhi < *azdhi (:as- 'be'; root pres.), sahi (: sa- 'bind'; root aor.), and pahi (: pa- 'protect'; root pres.), which illustrate "the overwhelming tendency of roots of the shape (C)CaC and (C)Ca to generalize their full-grade morphemes in root formations" (Insler: 552). yodhi and bodhi clearly have nothing to do with this phenomenon; roots in medial -i-, -u-, and -r- noto riously retain their inherited zero grades, and even extend zero grade at the expense of full grade in certain grammatical categories. As far as the origin of yodhi and bodhi is concerned, therefore, one of the following three general scenarios must be correct. Either 1) both forms go back to very ancient--in effect, late PIE--preforms with an atypical but historically justified full grade; or 2) one of yodhi and bodhi has a historically justified full grade and the other is analogical; or 3) neither yodhi and bodhi is old, but both are closely modeled on a third form or group of forms with a well-motivated full grade. The first possibility is purely theoretical; no one has ever adduced independent morphological evidence to support the proposition that late or dialectical PIE had both a full-grade...