Substratum in Vedic Sanskrit

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The presence of non-Indo-European vocabulary and retroflex consonants in Vedic Sanskrit is generally taken by linguists to indicate the influence of a non-Indo-European speaking substratum population, variously identified as Proto-Dravidian[1] or Proto- or "Para"-Munda.[2]

Contents

[edit] Phonology

Retroflex phomemes are found throughout Dravidian and Munda and are reconstructed for proto-Dravidian and proto-Munda and are thus clearly an areal feature of the Indian subcontinent. They are reconstructible for neither Proto-Indo-European nor for Proto-Indo-Iranian. The acquisition of the phonological trait by early Indo-Aryan upon its arrival in the Indian subcontinent is thus unsurprising, but it does not allow to identify the donor language (Munda or Dravidian). Since the adoption of a retroflex series does not affect poetic meter, it is impossible to say if it predates the early portions of the Rigveda; all that can be said for certain is that at the time of the redaction of the Rigveda (ca. 800 BC), the retroflex series had become part of Sanskrit phonology.

[edit] Vocabulary

Kuiper (1991) collects 380 words he identifies as non-Indo-European in the Rigveda. P. Thieme (1994) criticizes Kuiper's list as overly inclusive, and reduces the count to a total of 344 "secure" non-Indo-European words in the Rigveda. Subtracting local non-Indo-European toponyms and personal names, there is a remaining total of 211-250 "foreign" lexemes in Rigvedic Sanskrit, amounting to ca. 2% of the vocabulary. Kuiper (1955) notes that these are limited to local flora and fauna, craftsmanship and agriculture, a pattern typical of linguistic substratum (comparable to the Pre-Greek substrate case).[3]

But H. Hock (1975, 1984) rejected the Dravidian substratum list of grammatical and syntactical features created by M.B. Emeneau (1956, 1969,1974), F.B.J. Kuiper (1967) and Massica (1976).P. Thieme (1994) examined and rejected Kuiper’s (1991) list of 380 words from the Rigveda, constituting four percent of the Rigvedic vocabulary in toto, gave Indoaryan or Sanskrit etymologies for most of these words, and characterized Kuiper’s exercise as an example of a misplaced “zeal for hunting up Dravidian loans in Sanskrit”. Rahul Peter Das, likewise rejects (1994) Kuiper’s list, and emphasises that there is “not a single case in which a communis opinio has been found confirming the foreign origin of a Rgvedic (and probably Vedic in general) word”.

Critics argue that the "substratum" influences from Dravidian and Munda could equally well be adstratum influences through mutual contact without conquest, or superstratum given the advanced nature of the precedent Mature Harappan culture.

Mayrhofer identifies a "prefixing" language, based on recurring prefixes like ka- or ki-, compared to the Austro-Asiatic article by Witzel (1999:12) H. Hock (1975, 1984) rejected the Dravidian substratum list of grammatical and syntactical features created by M.B. Emeneau (1956, 1969,1974), F.B.J. Kuiper (1967) and Massica (1976).

Examples include: kavandha "barrel", kākambīra a certain tree, kavaṣa "straddle-legged", kakardu "wooden stick", kapardin "with a hair-knot" kimīd a demon, śimidā a demoness, kilāsa "spotted, leprous", kiyāmbu a water plant, kīnāśa "ploughman", kumāra "boy", kulāya "nest", kuliśa "ax", kuluṅga "antelope" (Kuruṅga name of a chieftain of the Turvaśa).

There are many straightforward loans from Dravidian into Sanskrit, like nāraṅgaḥ "orange" (first attested in the Sushruta Samhita, ca. 4th century AD) that belong to a later (post-Vedic) period and are as such unsuited to establish the origin of the loans in Rigvedic Sanskrit.

[edit] Identification

A concern raised in the identification of the substrate is that there is large time gap between the comparative materials, which can be seen as a serious methodological drawback.[4]

[edit] Dravidian

While Dravidian languages are primarily confined to the South of India, there is a striking exception: the Brahui (which is spoken in parts of Baluchistan), the linguistic equivalent of a relict population, perhaps indicating that Dravidian languages were formerly much more widespread and were supplanted by the incoming Indo-Aryan languages.[5] However other evidence suggests that Brahui language resulted from migrations less than a thousand years ago, a position argued by Joseph Elfenbein and Hans Hock,[6]. Witzel (1999:18) finds Dravidian loans only from the middle Rigvedic period, or "c. 1450 BCE", suggesting that linguistic contact between Indo-Aryans and Dravidians only occurred as the Indo-Aryans expanded beyond the Punjab. The Rigveda does, still, have a "small but precious handful of Vedic forms for which Dravidian etymologies are certain" (Zvelebil 1990:81), including kulāya "nest", kulpha "ankle", daṇḍa "stick", kūla "slope", bila "hollow", khala "threshing floor".

[edit] Munda

Kuiper (1991) identifies the donor language as Proto-Munda. Witzel (1999) prefers "Para-Munda", a language related, but not ancestral to the contemporary Munda languages, which he identifies as "Harappan", the language of the Harappan civilization. Witzel (1999:5) argues that there are signs of Para-Munda influence in the earliest level of the Rigveda, and of Dravidian in later levels. Witzel also speculates that Dravidian immigrated into the Panjab only in middle Rgvedic times.[7]

[edit] Substratum vs. adstratum

Some Indoeuropeanists (Such as Hock 1975, 1984, 1996, Hamp 1996, Tikkanen 1987 and Jamison 1989) maintain that the traits commonly identified as substrate influence can also be explained as an adstratum influences, or that internal explanations for these traits should be preferred.[8]

Literature on linguistic contact phenomena (Thomason & Kaufman 1988 pp141-144) maintain that while separate internal explanations are indeed possible for all of the innovative traits in Indic early contact influence from Dravidian is the only one explanation that can explain all of the traits at once - it becomes a question of explanatory economy. Thomason & Kaufman likewise conclude that the situation of the Dravidian influence of Indic, namely a wide range of phonological and grammatical contact phenomena but no exchange loanwords is symptomatic for contact situations where large populations shift from one language to the other in this case from Dravidian to Proto-Indo-Aryan.

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ (Parpola 2005) writes: "...numerous loanwords and even structural borrowings from Dravidian have been identified in Sanskrit texts composed in northwestern India at the end of the second and first half of the first millennium BCE, before any intensive contact between North and South India. External evidence thus suggests that the Harappans most probably spoke a Dravidian language."
  2. ^ Witzel (1999:5)
  3. ^ Witzel (1999:6)
  4. ^ Bryant 2001, p. 82 - the syntax of the Rigveda is being compared with a reconstructed proto-Dravidian. The first completely intelligible, datable, and sufficiently long and complete epigraphs that might be of some use in linguistic comparison are the Tamil inscriptions of the Pallava dynasty of about 550 c.e. (Zvelebil 1990), two entire millennia after the commonly accepted date for the Rgveda. Similarly there is much less material available for comparative Munda and the interval in their case is at least three millennia.
  5. ^ (Mallory 1989)[page # needed]: "The most obvious explanation of this situation is that the Dravidian languages once occupied nearly all of the Indian subcontinent and it is the intrusion of Indo-Aryans that engulfed them in north India leaving but a few isolated enclaves."
  6. ^ Hans Henrich Hock, The Problem of Time in South Asian Convergence (pdf: [1]; H. Elfenbein, "A periplous of the 'Brahui problem'", Studia Iranica 16 (1987), 215-233, quoted Witzel (2000:1).
  7. ^ Witzel (1999:32)
  8. ^ Bryant 2001, p. 78-84

[edit] References

  • Bryant, Edwin (2001), The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture, Oxford University Press
  • F. B. Kuiper, Rigvedic loanwords, in: Studia Indologica, ed. Spies, Bonn (1955)
  • F. B. Kuiper, Aryans in the Rigveda, Rodopi (1991).
  • Mallory, JP (1989), In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology, and Myth, London: Thames & Hudson
  • Th. Oberlies, review of Kuiper (1991), IIJ 37 (1994), 333-349.
  • Parpola, Asko (1998), "Aryan Languages, Archaeological Cultures, and Sinkiang: Where Did Proto-Iranian Come into Being and How Did It Spread?", in Mair, The Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Peoples of Eastern and Central Asia, Washington, D.C.: Institute for the Study of Man
  • Michael Witzel, Substrate Languages in Old Indo-Aryan (Rgvedic, Middle and Late Vedic) EJVS VOL. 5 (1999), ISSUE 1 (September)

[edit] See also