Here a short syllable being prefixed to each foot that had a short initial, makes that foot equal to the one above it.
At first sight, this ancient mode of arrangement may appear fanciful: but is convenient as fixing the feet in the recollection.
The six feet thus formed are denominated ssio^eJX'rss&citaj Indra feet; Indra being a name of Jupiter: which we may conveniently call the greater feet. The Greek would call them Dactylic.
If we take the first couple of these, E v | w and NG | ] | w, and drop the last syllable, we have two "lesser" feet which are called Ar»e§x'c8«Sx>eu or Apollonian.
Accordingly the Surya feet (or Trochaicks) are GL or H u | or the Trochee — U/ N III the Tribrach w ^ <j
The Indra and Surya feet, (or, greater and lesser feet) are used in all the Telugu Changing Metres. The Chandra feet are found only in a few metres which will be afterwards noticed.
The Uniform metres, as already shewn, require particular feet in particular places; but the changing metres admit any Indra foot in the Indra seats and any Surya foot in the Surya places.
[Every line in the Changing metres ends with a Surya foot: and as the Surya feet end in shorts, every changing metre has the final syllable short: whereas the fixed metres have it long.f
- Foot note.—And if we add a syllable to any Indra foot, this is called, a Ho[aXn^a or Adonian. That is Choriambic. The syllable thus added is, as far as I have observed, always short: but this is not stated in the treatises on prosody.
f But in all manuscripts of poems, the final short syllables are wrongly written long: because in reading, it is usual to draw out the final vowel in a sort of whire or drawling tone.
