Devi and Vrkis feminines


In Vedic Sanskrit, the and inflections are two types of inflection of feminine ī-stems exhibiting distinct apophony patterns.

Vṛkīs

The distinguishing feature of the ' inflection is that the ī always has the Vedic accent except in the vocative case, and the nominative singular has the -s like non-feminine words. Indeed, while '-words are overwhelmingly of the feminine gender, there are a few members of the class that belong to the masculine gender or are gender indeterminate: ' "wain-driver, charioteer".
The inflectional type is usually accepted to reach back into Proto-Indo-European times, with an exact correspondence of Sanskrit ' and Old Norse ', both meaning "she-wolf", first described by Karl Verner in 1877. The distinction between devī and vṛkīs dies out in during the Vedic period and Pāṇini is unaware of it, classifying ī-stems by accentuation.
One formation that has been diachronically connected with the vṛkīs inflection is Cvi', which in Classical Sanskrit refers to a formation where an ī is added to a nominal stem and compounded with a verbal root kṛ "to make", as "to be" or bhū "to become", resulting in a factitive verb where the ī-stem is indeclinable and used like a preverb. For example, grāmībhū "to get possession of a village", from grāma "village". The form is described in Pāṇini's ancient grammar of Sanskrit, the Aṣṭādhyāyī,'' 5.4.50.

Devī

The devī inflection exhibits an ablaut pattern different from the vṛkīs inflection. Pāṇini does not make the distinction, classifying the ī-stems by their accentuation.