On Fri, 21 Feb 2003 03:29:44 -0000, "S.Kalyanaraman
<
kalyan97@...>" <
kalyan97@...> wrote:
>I assume that the type of work done by FBJ Kuiper (1991, Aryans in
>the Rigveda, Amsterdam, Rodopi) is an attempt at identifying what
>you call substratal traces. He suggests that about 6 to 9 percent of
>Rigvedic words are loans from non-Indo-aryan languages. Ain't they a
>lot?
No, it's a very small number. Especially considering the fact that
they only occur in peripheral vocabulary (plant and animal names,
personal, tribal and geographical names).
>If such words have also been found in some of the Prakrit
>lexicons (say, Hemacandra des'ina_mama_la_), treating them as
>offspring from Pre-Indo-Aryan substrate -- PIAS), can't some
>progress be made?
Threating _what_ as offspring from "PIAS"?
>How to deal with the isolates such as Nahali and Burushaski?
Burushaski and Nahali are apparently not the source of the oldest
substrate found in Rigvedic.
>How about Baluchi and other Bal dialects?
Baluchi is a relatively recent arrival from North-Central Iran.
>Are you suggesting that linguistic studies on PIAS are at a dead-end
>without cracking the IV writing system?
They are in principle separate issues. We can assume for the time
being that the IVC script encodes a single language, the "IVC
language", but that does not mean that all the substrate (non-IE)
words found in the Vedas must necessarily derive from this IVC
language. Some non-IE words may have been picked up outside of India
(in which case we would perhaps expect to see the same stratum in
Iranian), and any number of spoken languages may have been in use in
the Northwestern part of the suncontinent (just as today we have
Indo-Aryan, Dardic/Nuristani, Brahui and Baluchi spoken in the area).
The sooner Indo-Aryan entered the area, the more IVC words we'd expect
to find in the substrate. In the unlikely case that the IVC language
was itself an early form of Indo-Aryan, the presence of a non-IE
language such as Burushaski in the area even today would also account
for the substrate (although Burushaski itself is not the source). At
the same time, the presence of at least two non-IE languages
(Burushaski and "language X") right in the middle of what partisans of
the IVC-language = Early Indo-Aryan hypothesis consider to be the IE
Urheimat, and the absence of any trace of non-Indo-Iranian IE
languages (with the possible exception of pre-Bangani) is
problematical to say the least.
=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...