Short Pronouns, etad, and ena

This lesson doesn't cover much new material. After you finish the lesson, take the time to review the pronouns that we've already studied. You can find these pronouns and their many forms in the References part of the site.

Short pronouns

In some cases and numbers, mad and tvad have optional "short forms," each of which is only one syllable long. These short forms can never start a sentence. They are often used in Sanskrit poetry.

etad

Sanskrit has a fairly rich system of pronouns, and although the distinctions between them aren't always sharp, they usually differ by the degree or extent of the distance between the object and the speaker. tad usually refers to things that are quite far from the speaker. With this in mind, let me introduce the pronoun etad, which describes things that are very close to the speaker. This closeness can be either literal or abstract.

How do we inflect etad? We can do so very easily: to get the etad forms, take the tad forms and add an e- to the front of them. The rules of saḥ sandhi still apply.

• तस्मै → एतस्मै

  tasmai → etasmai

  for it (masculine or neuter)

• तासाम् → एतासाम्

  tāsām → etāsām

  of them (feminine)

• स गच्छति → एष गच्छति

  sa gacchati → eṣa gacchati

  He goes.

That's all there is to do. Note that the case 1 singular forms eṣaḥ and eṣā have changed due to internal sandhi.

ena

ena is almost like the "short form" of tad. It can never start a sentence, and it only occurs in a few cases and numbers. Moreover, it can only refer to something that has already been mentioned. It's easy to use ena: just replace the t part of the tad forms with en. An example of ena in the masculine gender is shown below. Note that ena only has 6 forms — and one of them is a duplicate!

Don't bother memorizing the cases and numbers that ena uses. It's not worth your time.