  Still, while it is surely appropriate thus to credit Kumārila’s arguments for the eternality of language with capturing profound insights regarding our linguistic being, the case for his account of the eternality of language is greatly complicated by the fact that Kumārila actually holds, in a way, that it is in both of the foregoing senses of the word that śabda should be understood as eternal; on his view, that is, it is not only linguistic universals that are timeless, but also the phonemes that manifest these. This view reflects, no doubt, characteristically Mīmāṃsaka commitments, centering on the category of mantra, about the Vedas—commitments, in particular, about the inherent power not only of language as such, but of properly uttered Sanskrit sentences to bring into being the states of affairs they concern. Many Brahmanical texts preserve, in this regard, a famous story of the significance of precise transmission of the text:  wishing, by uttering the nominal compound Indra*ndash;śatru (which could mean “conqueror of Indra”), to make his son triumphant, the mythical figure of Tvaṣṭar instead ensured his son’s death by pronouncing the compound so that it had the sense of an adjectival, bahuvrīhi compound (“having Indra as conqueror”)—with the latter state of affairs then brought into being by his utterance.