If Sanskrit was not discovered… (original) (raw)
National Seminar on INDIA AS A LINGUISTIC AREA – A REVISIT 5th - 7th February Organized By International School of Dravidian Linguistics, Trivandrum, India, PIN- 695586, 2025
Palaeolinguistics or Linguistic Palaeontology (LP) is the exploration of extra-linguistic aspects such as social, cultural, spiritual, scholastic, eco-environmental, etc., of linguistic communities of distant past by means of linguistics. LP is usually done by the comparative method (CM) of Historical Linguistics involving phonological correspondences and morphological similarities to reconstruct a proto-language and create its vocabulary; information for LP is gleaned from these words. Established ‘sound laws’ confer validity and acceptability to the reconstruction; but lack of ‘semantic laws’ casts doubts on the exact meanings of referents denoted by the derived words and, therefore, the extra-linguistic conclusions based on them. This problem can be overcome by ascertaining the concept behind, the range of possible intensions and exact referents of cognate words in the presumed daughter languages of the proto-language using semantic analysis. If such a study shows that the presumed cognate originated in that daughter language itself, then its ‘daughter language’ status gets invalidated. Bronkhorst coined the term ‘Semantic Etymology’ (SE) analysis for the process of elucidating the true meaning of a word, in contrast to the CM dubbed as ‘Historical Etymology’ that essentially traces a word’s early history. He puts the Nirukta of Yāskācārya, concerned only with meanings, as the foremost in semantic etymology. In addition to finding the true origin of a word, SE analysis can also help to identify linguistic contact and there by identify linguistic areas. LP remains a gray area in Indian linguistic research. Sanskrit is one of the oldest and most refined linguistic systems in history and is suitable for LP study by SE analysis. SE analysis of twenty Sanskrit words was done with an emphasis on biological approach. Some of the results are as follows: 1. áśvá, ratha, pitṛ, mātṛ and gōdhūma are purely of Sanskrit origin and do not have any PIE or other roots; 2. ayas means iron and not any other metal; 3. bhūta in the plants bhūtanāśiṉi and bhūtanāśiṉ represents the past time related to the effect of the medicines from them, and not magic or sorcery; 4. vimāna, pramāṇa and dákṣiṇá are Sanskrit-Malayalam hybrid compound words representing intense Sanskrit-Dravidian contact since the ancient past; 5. kuṣṭhá (leprosy) represents absence of heat sensation characteristic of the disease; 6. the grapheme of the phoneme ṭhá in all Indian scripts is the same (Brahmi and Malayalam) or almost same as the mathematical symbol for śūnya (0) which is its semantic content, thereby characterizing it as a logograph emphasizing the presence of intense and prolonged Sanskrit-Dravidian contact in the past, and since ṭhá, the hardest consonant carries meaning of diamond, the hardest substance, it is a phoneaestheme as well as a featural grapheme; 7. these evidences of in situ origin of Sanskrit words and Dravidian contact show that India is indeed a Linguistic area, as suggested long back by Emenaeu, and is not in any way indebted to any outside regions for formation and development of these languages; 8. The ancients followed a dual Universe of Discourse system wherein meanings and words were equally applicable, based on functional and appearance similarities, to objects or phenomena in both the ‘Outerworld’ and ‘Bodyworld’; they had very good knowledge of linguistics, human body structure and function, and other sciences like agriculture and botany. The study also shows that SE analysis is suitable as a tool for assessing the caliber of ‘Faculty of Language’ (FoL) of a linguistic community from the Biolinguistic perspective and that the ancients who knowledgeably formed Sanskrit had a very high caliber FoL. The findings of the study suggest that Saṃskṛtam (the Sanskrit language), as its name implies, is a perfectly constructed language and the highly developed inherent sarasvati, an innate structure similar to the FoL but encompassing cognitive skills too, in the ancients helped them to achieve this. Moreover, the Goddess Sarasvati is a metaphor for this innate sarasvati.
FOURTEEN INDO-EUROPEAN ETYMOLOGIES IN HONOUR OF KLAUS KARTTUNEN
Pūrvāparaprajñābhinandanam. East and West, Past and Present. Indological and Other Essays in Honour of Klaus Karttunen, 2010
My academic career in comparative Indo-European linguistics began with Classical Philology (Greek and Latin) and Indo-Iranian languages (Sanskrit and Avestan). In this regard I have much common in with Klaus Karttunen, my former teacher and a supervisor of my dissertation, now celebrating his 60th birthday. It is my utmost pleasure to contribute to this volume a paper on Indo-European etymologies, related in various ways to Italo-Greek and Indo-Iranian, and dedicate it to Klaus Karttunen. 1
The Opaque History of Indo-European Languages
This paper is about the early history of the Indo-European language family: about its probable 'Homeland', break-up, and branching. There are many different models and theories that claim to trace this process and many more variations of these models. But none of these have managed to build a respectable consensus in favor of it. The history of a language or the pattern of movements of its past speakers can be 'proved' only if we have direct evidence or clear attestation of it from the relevant period. The earliest available texts in IE languages are all from periods millennia after the breakup of its proto form. These archaic forms are mostly incomprehensible and are more mythological than historical. If there are any relevant historical content in these, we have not found the means to identify them. Thus, any theory on these processes can only be based on indirect evidence and subjective inferences.
This succinct article envisages depicting the study of the origin of languages since antiquity till the 18th and mid 19th centuries. Numerous papers have been written on the subject of the history of linguistics or topics related to linguistics, especially so after oriental scholars deciphered the starting point of European languages by the middle of the 19th century, with the discovery of Sanskrit and Old Persian languages, thus coinciding with the unearthing of the family tree of Indo-European languages. From an historical perspective, beginning with the ancient Greek philosophers who first questioned the nature of languages; to the Romans who divulged Latin throughout the Empire; to the study of Hebrew during the early Middle Ages; to the preliminary comparison of Sanskrit during the Renaissance; and finally ending with various European scholars who intellectually linked East and West throughout the Oriental Renaissance in the late18th century, this article will highlight the most significant traits of this discovery. To sum up, who and what led to this breakthrough. Lastly, wherever relevant it may be, this expose will also bring to light, European travelers to the Indian continent who may have willingly or unwillingly contributed to the decipherment of the Indo-European languages. Keywords: Indo-European, oriental scholars, discovery, languages.
Linguistics in Premodern India
Published in "Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics". Ed. Mark Aronoff, New York, Oxford University Press, 2018
Indian linguistic thought begins around the 8 th-6 th centuries BC with the composition of Padapāṭhas (word-for-word recitation of Vedic texts where phonological rules are not applied). It took various forms over these twenty-six centuries and involved different languages (Ancient, Middle and Modern Indo-Aryan as well as Dravidian languages). The greater part of documented thought is related to Sanskrit (Ancient Indo-Aryan). Very early, the oral transmission of sacred texts-the Vedas, composed in Vedic Sanskrit-made it necessary to develop techniques based on a subtle analysis of language. The Vedas also-but presumably later-gave birth to bodies of knowledge dealing with language, which are traditionally called Vedāṅgas: phonetics (śikṣā), metrics (chandas), grammar (vyākaraṇa) and semantic explanation (nirvacana, nirukta). Later on, Vedic exegesis (mīmāṃsā), new dialectics (navya-nyāya), lexicography (nighaṇṭu and later, kośa) as well as poetics (alaṃkāra) also contributed to linguistic thought. Though languages other than Sanskrit were described in premodern India, the grammatical description of Sanskrit-given in Sanskrit-dominated and influenced them more or less strongly. Sanskrit grammar (vyākaraṇa) has a long history marked by several major steps (Padapāṭha versions of Vedic texts, Aṣṭādhyāyī of Pāṇini, Mahābhāṣya of Patañjali, Bhartṛhari's works, Siddhāntakaumudī of Bhaṭṭoji Dīkṣita, Nāgeśa's works) and the main topics it addresses (minimal meaning-bearer units, classes of words, relation between word and meaning/referent, the primary meaning/referent of nouns) are still central issues for contemporary Linguistics.
Filip Vesdin and the comparison of Sanskrit with Iranian and Germanic languages
Language & History 62 (3): 195-226, 2019
Filip Vesdin, known by his monastic name Paulinus a Sancto Bartholomaeo (1748–1806), was a Carmelite missionary stationed from 1776 to 1789 in Southwestern India. Vesdin authored an impressive opus of 32 books and smaller treatises on Brahmanic religion and customs, oriental manuscripts and antiques collections, language comparison and missionary history. This article focuses on the field of language comparison, principally on Vesdin’s book De antiquitate et affinitate linguae Zendicae, Samscrdamicae, et Germanicae dissertatio (= Dissertation on the Antiquity and the Affinity of the Zend, Sanskrit, and Germanic Languages), published in Rome in 1798. In this rather short treatise (56 pages), the most important part consists of three word-lists where a large number of words from Avestan, Sanskrit and Germanic languages are compared in order to prove that these languages are related. The paper presents Vesdin’s three word-lists together with a description and evaluation of his views on the relationships between these languages in order to highlight his significance in the history of comparative and historical linguistics. The paper also provides new insights into the relationship of De antiquitate to Vesdin’s later proto-linguistic treatise, De Latini sermonis origine (1802).
Among the overwhelming majority of linguists, the accepted model for the genetic affiliation of the Indic languages (Sanskrit, Pali, Hindi, Punjabi, Kashmiri, Gujarati, Bengali, etc.) is what can be called the Indo-European model. According to the Indo-European model, Indic languages are all descended from a single language that no longer exists (sometimes referred to as Proto-Indo-European), which is also the ancestor of the languages of Iran and most of the languages of Europe. In this paper I will offer a brief presentation of the assumptions underlying the Indo-European model and I examine two separate critical appraisals of it by the linguists Angela Marcantonio and Nikolay Trubetzkoy. I show that neither of their criticisms succeed in casting sufficient doubt on the Indo-European hypothesis, and neither offers an adequate explanation of the existing linguistic data. In the second half of the paper I shall draw a distinction between the hypothesis of a reconstructed Indo-European parent language, and the reconstruction of the culture and homeland of its original speakers. Acceptance of the hypothesis of the Indo-European model of language relationship need not entail acceptance of any single hypothesis about the prehistoric migrations of speakers of Indo-European languages or about their original culture.
Selected writings on Indian linguistics and philology
1997
Introduction (by M. Witzel). A. PAN-INDIAN. DRAVIDIAN AND MUNDA STUDIES. B. VEDIC AND IRANIAN STUDIES. C. NOTES ON VEDIC NOUN-INFLEXION. Mededelingen der Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, Afd. Letterkunde, 5/4, pp. 161-256. Word index (by A. Lubotsky and M.S. Oort). Errata.
Vedic Sanskrit and World Languages
The Paper claims that all the languages of the world had originated from Sanskrit spoken for centuries. Some examples are given to prove the claim.
From the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries, Indian intellectuals produced numerous Sanskrit-Persian bilingual lexicons and Sanskrit grammatical accounts of Persian. However, these language analyses have been largely unexplored in modern scholarship. Select works have occasionally been noticed, but the majority of such texts languish unpublished. Furthermore, these works remain untheorized as a sustained, in-depth response on the part of India's traditional elite to tremendous political and cultural changes. These bilingual grammars and lexicons are one of the few direct, written ways that Sanskrit intellectuals attempted to make sense of Indo-Persian culture in premodern and early modern India. Here I provide the most comprehensive account to date of the texts that constitute this analytical tradition according to three major categories: general lexicons, full grammars, and specialized glossaries. I further draw out the insights offered by these materials into how early modern thinkers used language analysis to try to understand the growth of Persian on the subcontinent.
Some thoughts on Dravidian-Turkic-Sanskrit lexical comparisons
The main goal of this paper is to analyze a specific group of Turkic lexical items whose historical destiny has been recently tied to the Dravidian languages. Overall, it is unclear how these lexical items should be dealt with, since authors supporting this borrowing route offer no clear picture of the exact nature of the historical setting. In this paper I hope to demonstrate that there is no such thing as Dravidian-Turkic direct contacts. Instead, more conventional borrowing routes, well-known in the specialized literature, might account for the majority of examples brought into discussion. Several other instances, however, must be regarded as cases that arise due to chance similarity. The bulk of evidence relies on both (pre)history and (historical) linguistics.
The Celts, 1992
The adjective 'Celtic' has its most respectable and formal use within linguistics. The idea of the Indo-European languages is a result of the increasingly scholarly and scientific study of language in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Similarities between otherwise very different languages in Europe had long been noticed, with erudite Romans speculating on the relationship of their own language to Greek. 1 Gerald of Wales made some thoughtful suggestions about the relationships between disparate languages in the late twelfth century, which have been seen as an early attempt at comparative Indo-European linguistics. 2 Only in the late eighteenth century, however, did thoughts on this subject begin to assume their modern form. Before then, attempts to understand the relationships between different languages had usually aimed at derivation from Greek or Latin (as privileged languages of ancient scholarship), or from Old Testament Hebrew. In 1786, however, William Jones, in a now famous address to the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, noted that Sanskrit, the language of Indian religious learning, had remarkable affinities with Latin and Greek. He further suggested that these three languages, and indeed other European languages, and Persian, had a common origin. As Lockwood says, 'the modern science of comparative philology had begun' (Lockwood, 1969:22). The progressive scholarly elaboration of these ideas represents, perhaps, the greatest modern intellectual achievement in the humanities.3 The group of related languages to which Jones had drawn attention came to be called 'Indo-European' (although, in studies written in German, as many were, 'Indo-Germanic' was also commonly used). The theory of the Indo-European languages supposed that there was, behind all the modern Indo-European languages, a single common ancestor language (a 'Common Indo-European'), from which all the different modern languages had, over the years, diverged. This 'Common Indo-European' was not attested, in that no record of it survived, but increasingly sophisticated study of the earliest recorded forms, and of the laws of sound change, enabled the construction of hypothetical common forms. From this recon
Themes and Tasks in Old and Middle Indo-Aryan Linguistics 2006
The Volume under review comprises twelve papers authored by as many scholars that were initially presented at the 12th World Sanskrit Conference (Linguistics section) held at Helsinki Finland in July, 2003. The papers included in the Volume relate to several themes from historical phonology, morpho-syntax, etymology of OIA, to Iranian loan words and computer processing of Sanskrit. The Volume opens with "The development of PIE *sć into Sanskrit/(c)ch/" authored by Masato Kobayashi wherein the earlier positions on the issue are revisited and with ample data from PIE, PIIr, OIA and MIA, the author concludes that the PIIr *ć is considered to have been a palatal affricate, hence the *sć cluster involved three obstruent phases in two consonant slots (*st∫). Consequently, by the general rule of simplification, the clusterinitial consonant *s was lost leaving behind t∫, spread to two consonant slots. In pre-Vedic phonology "the feature [aspirated] was redundantly specified for all sibilants, as the sandhi -tś->cch reflects. Finally, [t∫] was phonemicized as an aspirate/(c) ch/and filled in the empty place of an aspirated voiceless palatal plosive in the consonant inventory of OIA." Hans Henrich Hock in "Reflexivization in the Rig-Veda (and beyond)" presents more evidence from Rig-Veda to demonstrate that "the reflexive possessive is complementary to middle voice verb inflection, marking the one constituent that cannot be expressed on the verb, namely the nominal genitive relation; and that the full reflexive (RV tanū′) is indeed a very recent innovation, whose development can still be traced in the Rig-Veda". The complementarity of the reflexive possessive and middle voice is based upon the arguments that "nominal genitive relation is fundamentally different from that of the case relations of verbal complements" and the adnominal genitive relation is not subcategorized on the verb". Rejecting Lehmann"s (1974) observation that PIE had no reflexive pronouns at all, (it marked reflexivization on the verb, as middle voice), simply meaning "own", Hock demonstrates that sva-does behave as a reflexive in several instances in Rig-Veda and that in the RV, (Book 10) there are some instances of the use of tanū′ as a clear reflexive, with verb in the active voice, which is an innovation and the first attestation of the later Vedic and Classical pattern in which a reflexive pronoun, nominal in origin (RV tanū′, later ātmán) has been reinterpreted as the major marker of reflexivization.