Even in pre-literate societies the language
of hieratic poetry is generally "high-style" (conservative, formal,
highly formulaic, purified of elements thought to degrade poetic diction) and
rather different from common speech. It also tends to level out regional
differences if a common tradition extends over a large geographical area.
The Vedas were orally composed over a period of 1000 years or so, by poets who
were not all native speakers of the same synchronic vernacular and who
belonged to different chronological layers in the development of Old Indo-Aryan.
Vedic is a rather complex product of spoken Old Indo-Aryan -- the language
of poetry, coexisting with the language (or languages) of everyday
communication. The analysis of the internal heterogeneity of Vedic allows
us at identify various vernacular influences, but what was not recorded cannot
be studied directly.
Dravidian influence appears to
be non-existent in early Rigvedic, where the non-IE substratal or adstratal
elements come mainly from a prefixing language called "Para-Munda" by Witzel
because of its putative Austroasiatic connections (there are also other non-IE
loans from even more enigmatic substratal languages, such as Masica's "Language
X"). The influx of Dravidian loans begins quite suddenly in middle Rigvedic and
continues into the late and post-Rigvedic periods.
Piotr
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Thursday, February 14, 2002 2:38 PM
Subject: Re: [tied] MIA and Vedic
Piotr, are the following two categories mentioned different:
1) the dialects which resulted in Vedic and 2) the vernacular varieties of Old
Indo-Aryan? Would both include Proto-Munda and
Proto-Dravidian?