are first adapted and then assimilated to each other they give rise to a new consonant group they separated by the insertion of a vowel infix they are sometimes interchanged by metathesis Aspirate consonants when one of the two consonants is the sibilant s, then the new group of consonants has the aspiration in the last consonant: as-ti (root: √as) > atthi 'is' the sibilant s, followed by a nasal, is changed to h and then it is transposed after the nasal (metathesis): akas-ma > akah-ma > akamha 'we did' Alternation between y and v Pali v appears for Skr. y. For instance, āvudha -> āyudha 'weapon'; kasāva -> kasāya 'dirt, sin'. After the svarabhakti-vowel I there appear v instead of y as in praṭyamsa -> pativimsa. Alternation between r and l Representation of r by l is very common in Pali, and in Pkr. it is the rule for Magadhi, although this substitution occurs sporadically also in other dialect. This, initially, in lūjjati -> rūjyate 'falls apart; sometimes double forms with l and r occur in Skr.: lūkha -> lūksa, rūksa 'gross, bad Morphology Pali is a highly inflected language, in which almost every word contains, besides the root conveying the basic meaning, one or more affixes (usually suffixes) which modify the meaning in some way. Nouns are inflected for gender, number, and case; verbal inflections convey information about person, number, tense and mood. Nominal inflection Pali nouns inflect for three grammatical genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter) and two numbers (singular and plural). The nouns also, in principle, display eight cases: nominative or paccatta case, vocative, accusative or upayoga case, instrumental or case, dative or sampadāna case, ablative, genitive or sāmin case, and locative or bhumma case; however, in many instances, two or more of these cases are identical in form; this is especially true of the genitive and dative cases. a-stems a-stems, whose uninflected stem ends in short a (), are either masculine or neuter. The masculine and neuter forms differ only in the nominative, vocative, and accusative cases. ā-stems Nouns ending in ā () are almost always feminine. i-stems and u-stems i-stems and u-stems are either masculine or neuter. The masculine and neuter forms differ only in the nominative and accusative cases. The vocative has the same form as the nominative. Linguistic analysis of a Pali text From the opening of the Dhammapada: The three compounds in