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I have read that Vedic Sanskrit had five grammatical moods a verb could take; indicative, optative, imperative, subjunctive, and injunctive; four of them I understand the function of through other languages; but what did the injunctive mood do?

The indicative mood declared something to be the case. The optative indicated a hopedor wished for event. The imperative ordered someone to do something. The subjunctive talked about things that are not necessarily real. But what did the injunctive do? What was its function?

Peter Mortensen
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noah johnson
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1 Answers1

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The injunctive can be defined formally as an imperfect or aorist verb without the augment (a-). Its main function is with the negative particle mā to express prohibition. In non-negative sentences it is used to indicate that a statement is already known to the listener.

Related: Unaugmented contract imperfect in Ancient Greek?

EDIT: Some examples:

bharati “he carries” (present indicative)

abharat “he was carrying” (imperfect indicative)

bharat “(as you know) he carried/carries” (present injunctive)

mā bharat “do not carry!” (present injunctive negated)

fdb
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  • huh? what does that mean exactly? – noah johnson Dec 14 '22 at 18:59
  • @noahjohnson Tell me which part is unclear and will try to explain it. – fdb Dec 14 '22 at 19:37
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    couldn't prohibition be expressed by negating an imperative verb? and also why is a seperate mood needed for saying something the speaker already knows? also how is the same thing expressed with negative verbs? – noah johnson Dec 14 '22 at 21:41
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    We don't know why. That's just the way they used it. "Why" questions about historical linguistics rarely have answers because there is rarely any data that bear on them. – jlawler Dec 14 '22 at 22:11
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    also why is it called "injunctive" given that? – noah johnson Dec 14 '22 at 23:06
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    @noah It’s fairly common in Indo-European languages that prohibition is not expressed by just negating an imperative. In Greek and Latin, just like in Sanskrit, a common way to negate an imperative is to use a special negator (μή in Greek, ne in Latin) with a form of the verb that is neither indicative nor imperative (mostly optative in Greek, subjunctive in Latin). This continues in Romance languages to this day: in Spanish, the negative of ¡toma! ‘take!’ (imp.) is ¡no tomes! (negated subjunctive). – Janus Bahs Jacquet Dec 14 '22 at 23:24
  • gottcha on that; but why is it called the "injunctive mood" instead of something like "the prohibitive mood?" – noah johnson Dec 15 '22 at 00:00
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    @noahjohnson because an injunction is a prohibition – No Name Dec 15 '22 at 01:24
  • This answer is all sanskrit to me. Could you provide an example of the two use cases you mention to clarify? – Toivo Säwén Dec 15 '22 at 11:10
  • @ToivoSäwén Compare to English "Run!" and "Don't run!". We might think of these as both being imperative mood, though note that a negative command always involves the helper verb "do" that the positive command treats as optional. (That is, you could, but rarely do, say "Do run!") In Sanskrit, you'd use the imperative mood for "Run!", but the injunctive mod (and mā) to express "Don't run!". As for the non-negative sentence, I think you could translate a verb in the injunctive mood the same way you would the indicative mood, but adding "but you already knew that" to the sentence. – chepner Dec 15 '22 at 18:35
  • @chepner thanks. It would be helpful to see examples in Sanskrit as well. – Toivo Säwén Dec 15 '22 at 18:59
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    @ToivoSäwén. I have added some examples. – fdb Dec 16 '22 at 11:55