The Final Hymn of the Rigveda : Some Thoughts

The final hymn of the Rigveda, 10.191, the last three stanzas of which are dedicated to sam.jnanam 'unity', plays in a remarkable way with the preposition/prefix sam(-) 'with; together' and the phonetic sequence ma.n. Some of the words with ma.n go back to Proto-Indo-European *men 'think' (manas- 'mind, intellect, thought', mantra- 'utterance, spell', and mantraye 'I utter an utterance, recite a spell'); others are forms of the adjective samana- 'common, the same'.This brief communication shows that the display of phonetic fireworks has analogs in our earliest hymns in Avestan and Greek, in which both reflexes of *men and etymologically unconnected words that have the same pattern of sounds are frequently found in the most "privileged positions": the beginning and/or end of a section, poem, or entire poetic collection.