Article
17th Summer School of Spoken Sanskrit, Institute of South Asia, Heidelberg University
The initial idea of this volume, as the editors admit in the Preface, was modest – to discuss the inter-translatability of technical terms between Sanskrit and Tamil. But in the course of debates and discussions they had with colleagues, they realized a wider range of problems and formed a much broader perspective of the interactions between the Sanskrit and Tamil traditions.
In this article we present three unpublished Sanskrit / Tocharian A bilingual texts of Mtr cea's Varrhavarastotra from the Berlin Turfan Collection: THT 1495, THT 1649 fgm. a and THT 1886. We analyze the Tocharian text, propose conjectures for lacunae and discuss the problem of the metrical structure of the Tocharian translation. The most important text, THT 1495, allows shedding light on the meaning of the obscure Tocharian A noun muki.
This is a short overview of the linguistic features (phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon) of the Indo-Aryan group of the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family, with a representative bibliography.
The Indo-Aryan languages (sometimes also referred to, misleadingly and not quite correctly, as Indic, with special focus on Sanskrit) represent the largest group of the Indo-European both by the total number of speakers of the present-day Indo-Aryan languages (approx. one and a half billion of the total three billion speakers of Indo-European languages) and by the number of languages (ca. 225 languages recognized, for instance, by Ethnologue, thus making up more than half of all Indo-European languages listed by this source). The largest Indo-Aryan languages include Hindi and Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi, Marathi, Rajasthani and Gujarati. At present, Indo-Aryan languages are spoken, above all, on the Indian subcontinent, also referred to as South Asia.
It is commonly believed that post-Vedic and late Sanskrit texts attest overall confusing of the active and middle inflection, so that both types of endings can be employed nearly interchangeably, at least for several verbs. This paper demonstrates that, even in spite of the fact that the active/middle opposition becomes heavily deteriorated by the end of the OIA period, it is not entirely devoid of any functional weight. In particular, the -ya-presents normally inflected in the active in early (Vedic) language, such as śudhyati/-te ‘becomes clean’, become common with the middle inflection from the Sūtra period onwards. The paper argues that the choice of the inflection (active/middle) is mainly determined by metrical reasons.
In the present paper we demonstrate that the small Tocharian A fragment THT 1846 belongs to the same leaf as A 425a (THT 1059a) and thus extends our knowledge of the Sanskrit–Tocharian A bilingual text of the Udānavarga.