Re: [tied] Re: Indo-Iranian

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 23224
Date: 2003-06-14

The "Dardic" languages are just a collection of genetically heterogeneous Northwest Indic languages that happen to be spoken in the Karakoram region and that have developed some shared areal features. There's nothing in them that couldn't have developed from Middle Indo-Aryan dialects.
 
http://www.monitor.net/~jmko/karakoram/dard.htm
 
The (para-)Indic loans in Mitanni Hurrian are, as to their form, more archaic than any otherwise known form of Indic. Vedic is simply the oldest literary form of Old Indic, whose elements were drawn from a mixture of vernacular dialects. Classical Sanskrit is not the ancestor of the Prakrits but an artificially codified literary language (strongly influenced by Vedic, but also by the Prakrits!). Its relation to the post-Vedic Indic languages is like that of Classical or Mediaeval Latin to the Romance languages.
 
Piotr
 
 
----- Original Message -----
From: Alexander Stolbov
To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Saturday, June 14, 2003 12:01 PM
Subject: Re: [tied] Re: Indo-Iranian

 
----- Original Message -----
From: "Piotr Gasiorowski" <piotr.gasiorowski@...>
Sent: Friday, June 13, 2003 10:31 PM
Subject: Re: [tied] Re: Indo-Iranian

>  Dardic is a collective term for some hard-to-classify
> northwestern members of the Indic branch -- their proximity is geographical
> rather than genetic.
 
 
Am I right, comparing this situation with the "Semito-Hamitic" family?
At first all non-Semitic Afro-Asiatic languages were classified as Hamitic, however later it was demonstrated that they form a few independent groups in the framework of the Afro-Asiatic family, and some of them (Egyptian ?) could be closer to Semitic than to any other AA branch.
 
If so, a few questions arise.
1) Are there among the Dardic languages some ones which are closer to the post-Sanskrit Indian (i.e. non-Dardic Indo-Aryan) languages than to other Dardic subgroups?
 
2) How should we classify Mitanni Indo-Aryan? 
Variants (D.1, D.2 etc. - different Dardic subgroups):
 
                        Indo-Aryan
                /  \ 
        Mitanni A.   \
                    non-Mitanni A.
                   /       |  \    \ 
               Sanskrit   D.1  D.2  ...   
                | | | |
               Prakrits 
 
or 
                             Indo-Aryan
                /   |   \  \   \
       Mitanni A.   |   D.1 D.2 ...    
                 Sanskrit  
                 | | | |
                Prakrits 
 
or
                            Indo-Aryan
                /    |  \    \ 
     non-Dardic IA  D.1  D.2  ...   
      /      \                          
 Sanskrit      \
 | | | |    Mitanni A.
Prakrits 
 
3) What is the place of Vedic language in these schemes? 
Are there among the Dardic languages some ones which are as close to Vedic as the post-Sanskrit languages?