Pages from Pandanus 2015 2 8 Novelli Pontillo (original) (raw)

Rosa Ronzitti, 2014, Due metafore del caso grammaticale: aind. víbhakti e gr. ptōsis. Preistoria e storia comparata (Innsbrucker Beiträge zur Sprachwisssenschaft, 148). Institut für Sprachen und Literaturen der Universität Innsbruck, Bereich Sprachwissenschaft, Innsbruck, 267 pp.; ISBN 978-3-85124-734-3 – Reviewed by Stefano Novelli (§ § c, d, e) and Tiziana Pontillo (§ § a, b, f), University of Cagliari (a.) This recently published volume attempts to inform the scientific community about the necessity of a fresh approach to comparativism between Vedic-Sanskrit and Classical languages and cultures. Since the work deals with a new method, principally based on technical, that is to say, grammatical and rhetorical, traditions, it is probable that the volume could play a role in the future development of Indo-European Studies. The book is mainly divided into three sections devoted to Vedic, Greek, and Latin grammatical prehistory and history respectively (and almost symmetrically). The beginning of the first section concentrates on the persistent involvement of cases of polyptoton in the earliest Indian religious works, i.e. the Vedic Saṃhitās, with special attention being paid to the ṚgVedic hymns. The crucial hypothesis is that the semantic-narrative layer of the composition might have intentionally been made to match the morphological-grammatical one, so that poetry and linguistics were able to merge into a single consistent creation, and the afore-mentioned figure of speech can be supposed to properly document this writing tendency. The collection of relevant pieces of evidence, i.e. the quoted theonymic sequences, almost cover the entire available Ṛgvedic material. The accurate analysis of a rich typol-ogy of examples used in praise of Indra and Agni (pp. 36 ff.) demonstrates just how far this figure of speech contributes to making their portraits literally magnificent and imbued with original and extraordinary images. The author is indeed convinced that the choice of lexicon and style in the Ṛgveda already met a twofold simultaneous requirement. On the one hand, each eulogy had to be overt and unambiguous for the obvious ritual necessity. Thus, the repetition of the name of the extolled God, realised by means of its variations, the majority of which are also anaphoras, warrants the requested consistency. On the other hand, the choice of encompassing all the single inflected cases of a God's name in the same passage might have been targeted towards realising a didactic aim and determined by some sort of pride in showing off a morphologically well-fashioned language.