The benedictive mood

Grammatical mood

In linguistics, grammatical mood is a grammatical feature of verbs, used to signal modality. That is, it is the use of verbal inflections that allow speakers to express their attitude toward what they are saying...

 is found in Sanskrit

Sanskrit

Sanskrit , is a historical Indo-Aryan language and the primary liturgical language of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism.Buddhism: besides Pali, see Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Today, it is listed as one of the 22 scheduled languages of India and is an official language of the state of Uttarakhand...

, although extremely rarely. For verbs in the active voice (parasmaipada), it is formed by adding endings very similar to the athematic optative endings directly to the verb root itself. Essentially, the sibilant -s is inserted between the optative marker -yā and the personal endings. By the action of the rules of sandhi

Sandhi

Sandhi is a cover term for a wide variety of phonological processes that occur at morpheme or word boundaries . Examples include the fusion of sounds across word boundaries and the alteration of sounds due to neighboring sounds or due to the grammatical function of adjacent words...

, the second- and third-person benedictive endings are identical to the corresponding optative endings (-yāst turns into -yāt for the third person, and -yāss into yās for the second person).

Middle voice (ātmanepada) benedictives are not found in Classical Sanskrit.

For example, the verb root bhū forms the benedictive thus:

Benedictive

Active
Singular	Dual	Plural
First Person	bhūyāsam	bhūyāsva	bhūyāsma
Second Person	bhūyās	bhūyāstam	bhūyāsta
Third Person	bhūyāt	bhūyāstām	bhūyāsus