“The language of the tenth Maṇḍala represents a distinctly later stage of the Rigvedic language. Hiatus, which is frequent in the earlier Rigveda, is… - Batakrishna Ghosh

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“The language of the tenth Maṇḍala represents a distinctly later stage of the Rigvedic language. Hiatus, which is frequent in the earlier Rigveda, is already in process of elimination here. Stressed i u cannot in sandhi be changed into y v in the earlier parts, but in the tenth Maṇḍala they can. The ending –āsas in nominative plural is half as frequent as –ās in the Rigveda taken as a whole, but its number of occurrences is disproportionately small in the tenth Maṇḍala . Absolutives in –tvāya occur only here. The stem rai- is inflected in one way in the first nine Maṇḍalas, and in another in the tenth, and in the inflexion of dyau-, too, the distribution of strong and weak forms is much more regular in the earlier Maṇḍalas. The Prakritic verbal stem kuru- appears only in the tenth Maṇḍala for the earlier kṛiṇu-. Many words appear for the first time in the tenth Maṇḍala or are shared by it only with the interpolated part of other Maṇḍalas. The old locative form pritsu, adjectives like girvaṇas and vicharṣani, and the substantive vīti do not occur at all in the tenth Maṇḍala , though in the earlier Maṇḍalas they are quite common. The particle sim, which is unknown in the Atharvaveda, occurs fifty times in the first nine Maṇḍalas but only once in the tenth. Words like ājya, kāla, lohita, vijaya, etc., occur for the first time in the tenth Maṇḍala, as also the root labh-. Words shared with the tenth Maṇḍala only by the interpolated parts of other Maṇḍalas, the Valakhilyas, and unmistakably late hymns, are loka (for earlier uloka which is a haplology for uruloka), mogha, visarga, gup- (a back-formation from gopa), etc. And words which occur mostly, though not exclusively, in the tenth Maṇḍala and these parts, are sarva, bhagavant, prāṇa, hridaya, etc. The archaic particle ī of pronominal origin, for which the Padapāṭha throughout wrongly reads īm, does not occur at all in the tenth Maṇḍala, and the particle īm, which is only less archaic than ī, occurs in it only about half a dozen times. Of forms like dakshi, adukshat , etc., which are. the results of the action of a pre-Vedic phonetic law, only one, namely dudukshan, occurs in the tenth Maṇḍala. It is unnecessary to dilate any further on the language of the Rigveda.” (pp.343-344).