The Indo Aryan Languages

The Indo-Aryan languages are spoken by at least 700 million people throughout India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka and the Maldive Islands. They have a claim to great antiquity, with the earliest Vedic Sanskrit texts dating to the end of the second millennium B.C. With texts in Old Indo-Aryan, Middle Indo-Aryan and Modern Indo-Aryan, this language family supplies a historical documentation of language change over a longer period than any other subgroup of Indo-European. This volume is divided into two main sections dealing with general matters and individual languages. Each chapter on the individual language covers the phonology and grammar (morphology and syntax) of the language and its writing system, and gives the historical background and information concerning the geography of the language and the number of its speakers.

The Indo-Aryan languages are spoken by at least 700 million people throughout India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka and the Maldive Islands. They have a claim to great antiquity, with the earliest Vedic Sanskrit texts dating to the end of the second millennium B.C. With texts in Old Indo-Aryan, Middle Indo-Aryan and Modern Indo-Aryan, this language family supplies a historical documentation of language change over a longer period than any other subgroup of Indo-European. This volume is divided into two main sections dealing with general matters and individual languages. Each chapter on the individual language covers the phonology and grammar (morphology and syntax) of the language and its writing system, and gives the historical background and information concerning the geography of the language and the number of its speakers.

In his ambitious survey of the Indo-Aryan languages, Colin Masica has provided a fundamental introduction which will interest not only general and theoretical linguists but also students of one or more of these languages who want to acquaint themselves with the broader linguistic context. Generally synchronic in approach, concentrating on the phonology, morphology and syntax of the modern representatives of the group, the volume also covers their historical development, areal context, writing systems and aspects of sociolinguistics. The survey is organised not on a language-by-language basis but by topic, so that salient theoretical issues may be discussed in a comparative context.

This book presents a typological overview of the case system of Eastern Indo-Aryan (EIA) languages. It utilizes a cognitive framework to analyse and compare the case markers of seven EIA languages: Angika, Asamiya, Bhojpuri, Bangla, Magahi, Maithili and Odia. The book introduces semantic maps, which have hitherto not been used for Indian languages, to plot the scope of different case markers and facilitate cross-linguistic comparison of these languages. It also offers a detailed questionnaire specially designed for fieldwork and data collection which will be extremely useful to researchers involved in the study of case. A unique look into the linguistic traditions of South Asia, the book will be indispensable to academicians, researchers, and students of language studies, linguistics, literature, cognitive science, psychology, language technologies and South Asian studies. It will also be useful for linguists, typologists, grammarians and those interested in the study of Indian languages.

This monograph aims to close the gap in our knowledge of the nature and pace of grammatical change during the formative period of today’s Indo-Aryan languages. During the 6th-12th c. the gradual erosion of the synthetic morphology of Old Indo-Aryan resulted ultimately in the remodelling of its syntax in the direction of the New Indo-Aryan analytic type. This study concentrates on the emergence and development of the ergative construction in terms of the passive-to-ergative reanalysis and the co-existence of the ergative construction with the old and new analytic passive constructions. Special attention is paid to the actuation problem seen as the tug of war between conservative and eliminative forces during their development. Other chapters deal with the evolution of grammatical and lexical aspect, causativization, modality, absolute constructions and subordination. This study is based on a wealth of new data gleaned from original poetic works in Apabhraṃśa (by Svayaṃbhādeva, Puṣpadanta, Haribhadra, Somaprabha et al.). It contains sections dealing with descriptive techniques of Medieval Indian grammarians (esp. Hemacandra). All the Sanskrit, Prakrit and Apabhraṃśa examples are consistently parsed and translated. The opus is cast in the theoretical framework of Functional Grammar of the Prague and Amsterdam Schools. It should be of particular interest to scholars and students of Indo-Aryan and general historical linguistics, especially those interested in the issues of morphosyntactic change and typology in their sociohistorical setting.

Indo-Aryan is the term applied to that branch of the Indo-European languages which was brought into India by the Aryans and of which the oldest recorded form is to be found in the hymns of the Rgveda. From this there developed on the one hand a literary medium, called sanskrit which has been the vehicle down almost to the present day of a vast literature and on the other hand a great range of spoken forms which used by hundreds of millions have emerged as the chief language (excluding the Dravidian of southern India) of the whole of Pakistan, India, Nepal and Ceylon: Sindhi, Lahnda or Western Panjabi, Nepali, Assamese, Bengali, Oriya, Bihari, Maithilli, Awadhi, Hindi and Urdu, Rajasthani dialects Gujarati, Marathi, Konkani, Sinhalese. Indo-Aryan languages with many archaic features-the Kafiri and Dardic dialects-are still spoken in the valleys of the Hindukush on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border, while the Gypsies of Europe and Asia, like the Doms of Hunza, still use forms of the Indo-Aryan dialect they brought out of India. In the far south Sinhalese was carried from Ceylon out into the Indian Ocean to the Maldive Islands. In this book, originally planned to be a volume of the Linguistic Survey of India, the author has tried to do for these languages in their development from Sanskrit something of what Meyer-Lubke in his Romanisches Etymologisches Worterbuch did for the Romance Languages and Latin. Under some 15000 Sanskrit head-words are set out forms each has assumed both in Middle Indo-Aryan (Pali, Sanskrit, etc.) and in the modern languages, thus presenting a picture of linguistic development over some three millennia. The words quoted in this way number about 140000. This volume, compiled by Lady Turner, contains indexes, arranged language by language, of all these words.

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This work shows the development of languages from Sanskrit. Under some 15,000 Sanskrit head-words are set out forms each has assumed both in Middle Indo-Aryan and in the modern languages, presenting a picture of linguistic development over some three millennia.