Re: [cybalist] SV: Re: avestan and vedic

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 2127
Date: 2000-04-14

 
----- Original Message -----
From: Sergejus Tarasovas
To: cybalist@egroups.com
Sent: Friday, April 14, 2000 9:12 AM
Subject: RE: [cybalist] SV: Re: avestan and vedic

Mark:
> Am I correct? Balto-Slavic (and Uralic) got its
> loans from Iranian, and NOT Indic.

NOT correct. There are unambiguois  traces of Indic presence in the
territory to the north of the Azov sea, and a number of putative Indic loans
in Slavic (I'm not sure for  Baltic).

Sergei
 
Sergei,
 
I agree about early Indic presence in the North Pontic region (which, combined with the undisputably Indic character of the Mitanni/Hurrian loans, seems to force us to assume a rather deep date for the separation of Indic from the rest of Indo-Iranian (Iranian as well as residual "basal" groups which evade dichotomic classification) -- 2000 BC at the very, very latest. I'd be greatly interested in those Indic loans in Slavic. Which lexemes do you have in mind, and what's the evidence for their being specifically Indic?
 
To all:
 
Talking of Indic. When we say "Sanskrit" (also in this list), we usually mean Old Indic in general, which isn't quite correct. Classical Sanskrit was an artificially codified language based on spoken Late Old Indic (in an attempt to make in "perennial", i.e. save it from change and variation), quite different from Early Old Indic, whose literary version we call Vedic. Vedic is also chronologically stratified, which is scarcely odd, considering that the Vedic literature was composed and assembled over a period of several hundred years. In some respects Vedic is as different from Classical Sanskrit as the latter is from Pali and the Prakrits (the Middle Indic languages and dialects as spoken between ca. 500 BC and AD 1100). The grammar of Vedic was enormously complicated, full of irregularities and fossilised archaic forms; that of Classical Sanskrit was much simpler and neater. The vocabulary of Late Old Indic grew enormously, partly because of increased contact with pre-Aryan populations as the Indo-Aryans spread over India. It has been argued that early Vedic was strongly influenced by hypothetical "non-Vedic Indo-Aryan" languages which had preceded it into the Indus Valley in wave after wave of pastoralist colonisation; it also absorbed some Dravidian vocabulary and features.
 
Piotr