2 posts tagged “indo-aryan”

She-Wolves and Godesses in Sanskrit are and odd bunch. You have two types of ī-stems in Sanskrit (and also in Indo-european) the hysterodynamic and proterodynamic ones.

vṛkī- 'she-wolf' is one of the Hysterodynamic ones (which is quite rare).

nom. vṛkīs  ( < *-iH-s)
acc. vṛkyam ( < *-iH-ém)
gen. vṛkyas ( < *iH-ós )

devī- 'godess' is Proterodynamic

nom. devī (< *-iH)
gen. devī-m (< *-iH-m)
acc. devyās (< *-iéH-s)

The most striking of this is, that 2 perfectly feminine words, perfectly animate and all, have two different flections and on top of that, one takes the nominative marker *-s while the other doesn't.

I'm imagining that at some earlier indo-european stage some cluster *Hs must have assimilated or something along those lines. But I have not quite figured out how these paradigms would work pre-syncope. And rather than leaving you all in the dark, I thought I'd post this up, and see if any readers have bright ideas where the nom. *-sg comes from, or why it is absent.

Beekes doesn't reconstruct it for PIE as far as I can tell. But then we would have to assyume quite a bizarre analogy. But any thoughts are welcome!

One of the bigger mysteries of the Indo-Iranian branch is its reflexes of the Indo-European *l. As a rules all *l's become *r. In the Iranian branch this is well attested; Avestan, Old and Middle Persian all have this regularly. Then all of a sudden in Modern Persian this /l/ starts showing up again in etymologically logical places. How did this happen? I have no idea. I'd rather not tuch on the Iranian branch right now, since I know nothing about it.

I know slightly more about the Indo-Aryan branch though. Here also as a rule all *l's change into *r, creating a sort of 'Japanese-like' Indo-European as I like to see it. In Vedic Sanskrit, especially the Rig Veda, there's next to no /l/'s, even words that in Classical Sanskrit have an /l/, still reliably have an /r/ in Vedic.

aram ~ alam 'enough'
roman ~ loman 'hair on the body of men and beasts'
rabh- ~ labh- 'to receive'
ramb- ~ lamb- ''to hang down'
rikh- ~ likh- 'to write'

And the list goes on endlessly. A bit too often for my liking, the 'newer' form retains a historical *l, while it does happen that a etymological *r becomes an *l, this is not quite as common.

An example of that is the root kḷp- 'to be in order' for example (the only root with a vocalic l) which is often compared to Latin corpus.

So as time progresses, Sanskrit gets more and more /l/'s, of which many seem to be etymologicaly correect, but some come from *r.

To explain this theory some people have tried to come up with dialectal change. Some say there must have been an r-only-dialect  and an l-only-dialect. And that due to influence of the l-only-dialect the r-only-dialect started using /l/. This seems like an okay explanation, but I do find it a bit problematic.

Not all roots that have an /r/ have a /l/ counterpart, and remarkably often only the roots that historically are supposed to have an /l/ get it. So other people proposed an r-only-dialect to explain vedic, an l-only-dialect for 'wrong l's' and an l/r-dialect to explain the etymologically correct l's.

This seems like a terrible difficult explanation, but I must say I can't come up with a better explanation. What I can come up with though, is a little observation I made about the distribution.

As I said there's only one verb out there with a vocalic l, and that's kḷp-, so at least at one point a vocalic l was phonotactically forbidden, and probably in all dialects. But if it was forbidden you would expect verbs to have an l in full grade and vocalic r in zero-grade sometimes. But no such alternation exists between a hypothetical root *lak that alternates between **ṛc for example. This is of course suspicious, a syllable /la/ is perfectly legal in Sanskrit, but alternation isn't liked. You could say that analogy got rid of all these examples, but I personally would expect some more vocalic l roots then.

So in what kind of roots does the /l/ appear? Well almost exclusively in roots of the type laSC- where S stands for a n, m, u, i. This really is a pretty odd restraint. But did these consonants somehow influence the /r/ to turn into an /l/ ? I don't know. But I just thought I'd point out this odd distribution. Maybe it gives someone an incredible idea to explain this odd *l.