It is clear from what Yaska says that some important discrepancies in opinion prevailed among the older expositors and the different schools of interpretation which flourished before his time. He gives the names of no fewer than seventeen predecessors, whose explanations of the Veda are often conflicting. Thus one of them interprets the word Nasatyau, an epithet of the Vedic Dioskouroi, as "true, not false;" another takes it to mean "leaders of truth," while Yaska himself thinks it might mean "nose-born"! The gap between the poets and the early interpreters was indeed so great that one of Yaska's predecessors, named Kautsa, actually had the audacity to assert that the science of Vedic exposition was useless, as the Vedic hymns and formulas were obscure, unmeaning, or mutually contradictory. Such criticisms Yaska meets by replying that it was not the fault of the rafter if the blind man did not see it. Yaska himself interprets only a very small portion of the hymns of the Rigveda. In what he does attempt to explain, he largely depends on etymological considerations for the sense he assigns. He often gives two or more alternative or optional senses to the same word. The fact that he offers a choice of meanings shows that he had no earlier authority for his guide, and that his renderings are simply conjectural; for no one can suppose that the authors of the hymns had more than one meaning in their minds. It is, however, highly probable that Yaska, with all the appliances at his command, was able to ascertain the sense of many words which scholars who, like Sayana, lived nearly two thousand years later, had no means of discovering. Nevertheless Sayana is sometimes found to depart from Yaska. Thus we arrive at the dilemma that either the old interpreter is wrong or the later one does not follow the tradition. There are also many instances in which Sayana, independently of Yaska, gives a variety of inconsistent explanations of a word, both in interpreting a single passage or in commenting on different passages. Thus çarada, "autumnal," he explains in one place as "fortified for a year," in another as "new or fortified for a year," and in a third as "belonging to a demon called Çarad." One of the defects of Sayana is, in fact, that he limits his view in most cases to the single verse he has before him. A detailed examination of his explanations, as well as those of Yaska, has shown that there is in the Rigveda a large number of the most difficult words, about the proper sense of which neither scholar had any certain information from either tradition or etymology. We are therefore justified in saying about them that there is in the hymns no unusual or difficult word or obscure text in regard to which the authority of the commentators should be received as final, unless it is supported by probability, by the context, or by parallel passages. Thus no translation of the Rigveda based exclusively on Sayana's commentary can possibly be satisfactory.