[tied] Re: the true nature of (back from my vacation)

----- Original Message -----

From: richardwordingham

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Monday, July 22, 2002 1:01 PM

Subject: [tied] Re: the true nature of <buddha>

> Why is the base form cited as {budH}, admittedly the dictionary form, rather than {bHodH}?  My argument for the latter is (1) that one can derive the zero grade from the gun.a, but not vice versa - e.g. /vis./ and /vyas/ (if my memory serves me right) and (2) bH- keeps a form of Grassmann's Law as a synchronic rule.

 

Because Panini and the other Old Indian grammarians took {budH} to represent the root in their synchronic grammar of Sanskrit. They did not reconstruct any protostages of Old Indo-Aryan (which is why they would not have formulated Grassmann's Law the way we do on the basis of comparative data, as a diachronic dissimilation rule), and historical considerations had no role to play in their system. They used forms like /bHodH/ as abstract intermediate stages in derivation (say, {budH} + -sya- --> bodHsya- --> bHodHsya- --> bHotsya-), but the derivation was not supposed to reflect the historical development of the word. They recognised "saMprasa:ran.a" ablaut relations like /vis./ ~ /vyas./, /grabH/ ~ /gRbH/ or /vac/ ~ /uk/ as a separate type, but this kind of apophony struck them as aberrant.

> What evolutionary stage would *bHudH-to- correspond to?  It looks PIE but my understanding was that voicing was regressively assimilated in PIE, at least in the formation of verbal adjectives in -to.  I have come across this assertion as an objection to the antiquity of the Latin synchronic rule -VGt- > -V:Ct- (G = voiced consonant, C =
voiceless consonant), e.g. in the formation of past participles.

 

The question is, among other things, if the *dH series was _distinctively_ voiced in PIE. *bHudH-tó- is, shall we say, the underlying form of the adjective in PIE. What the surface phonetic realisation was is still open to debate. _If_ assimilated, *bHudH-to- should have been realised as [bHutsto-] > Old Indic *bHutta- (not the actual form, of course). Note, however, that in transparent derivatives it's possible at any point to cancel the effects of phonetic processes operating at the morpheme juncture and thus "restore" the underliers.

 

Piotr