Problems of Reconstruction in Indo-Aryan

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Problems of econstruction in Indo-Aryan

SUMITRA MANGESH KATRE

INDIAN INS TTUT E OF ADVANCED STIJDY . SIMLA1968


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PREFACETHE six 'ectures presented here were delivered between 21 st

and 23 rd October 1967 at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study.Rashtrapati Nivas. Simla as Visiting Professor during a Seminar onLanguage and Society in India organised by the IIAS in the secondhalf of October. It was a privilege to be able to present my lecturesto some of the distinguished participants of this Seminar and thescholars attached to the IIAS during a busy fortnight. However. dueto the fact that I was required to leave Simla earlier than originallyanticipated. these lectures had to be compressed and delivered onthree successive days by combining the subject matter of two lectureson each day. Consequently in the presentation I could not dealwith as many problems as would have been desirable. and perhapssome of the clarity which was the main objective of these lecturesmight have been sacrificed. I profited considerably from the livelydiscussions that these lectures evoked, in spite of their technicalnature. and I enjoyed being with friends specialising in many disciplines of study.

I had the privilege of delivering a course of seminar lectures on someof these problems of reconstruction in Indo-Aryan at the SummerInstitute organised by the University of Illinois at Urbana towardsthe close of June this yea r. T he genesis of these lectures lies in mybeing originally requested by the School of Oriental and AfricanStudies, University of London, to review the fascicles of Sir RalphTurner's Comparative Dictionary of Indo-Aryan Languages.Subsequently during the Spring of 1966 I was on an educational tourof United Sta tes and during my stay in the University of Texas atAustin, delivered two courses of lectures on the diachronic study of

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Indo-Aryan and a descrip tive study of the Languages of South Asia.Some of these problems dealt with here force fully impinged themselveson me in the course of discussions with my pupils in U.S.A. and else-where, and when I received an invitation from Dr. Nihar Ra njanRAY to deliver a course of six lectures at the lIAS this yearI thought this would be a good subject to choose. particularlyin the conlext of the rather tremendous importance given to thelanguage situation in our country. It was a pleasant surprise to me.therefore, when I learnt that Dr. R ay was organising a specialSeminar on LANGUAGE AND SOCIETY IN INDIA. and I re-quested him to arrange my series of lectures during that seminarso that I would have the advantage of judging the reaction ofscholars specialising in other fields to the linguist's way of lookingat languagp The vig rous discussions at the session s of the seminarand persona! exchanges at other times provided a suitable background.If I have failed to elicit a proper response the fault mllst be entirelymine. not that of linguistics. which has a great responsibility inth e Indian situation.

The publication of a work of such capital impol'tance as thatof Sir Ralph Turner on a Comparative Dictionary of the Indo-A ryan Languages has made my task comparatively easier. Trainedin his school and nurtured in the tradition which he and JulesBloch established in E urope, I have also had the uruqu'e privilegeof ushering in a new era in linguistic study in our country throughmy connection with D eccan College. with collaboration of a newgeneration of linguists from Europe and United States during thepast two decades. Standing somewhat as a bridge between these twocomplementary approaches it has been my task in these lectures tospell out problems on comparative re(;onstruction, taking my materialprimarily from Indo-Aryan and the work of Sir Ralph Turner,but occasionally also from other pioneers such as T . Burrow andM.. B. E meneau an d F. B. ]. K uiper in the field of D ravidianand MUI)c;lii studies. Where required have also added personally

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collected mat eria l not recorded by these earlier authori ties.Though Ihese lectures are prima rily addressed to those who ' have

hasic knowledge of compa rati e and modern lingui stics they havea bearin g on wider problems wh i h are eng . the attention ofour gove rnmeni s and education is ts and even creative writers. l-fowarc our grei'.t re giona l languages to be modern ised ? Ho ,/ a re Ih"yto be E'nriched) How can Hind i. the official langua ge of the U nion .develop according to the directive principles enunciated in s ct;un35 1 of the Constitufon ? T he linguistic wea lth tha t India possesseshas not heen properly evaluated . in spi te of the great Lingu;s licSlI r of India wl1ich was proba bly the first Ul11queachievement of this country I!1 the beginning of thiscenlury . (, mode rn languages have been gradually grOWinginto that great t r ~ d i t i o n which is characteristic of the Ian u ::Ies ofmode'" advanced nations and are not inf 'rior to the m In theirstructure or vocabulary. But they, as languages f culture. are at adislance from the common vernaculars of the people, and thesubstandard and dialectal forms which are rich and va rying findno place in the standard lex icons. While our educat ional policyenccurages them to become media of communication from schoolto universi;" levels and the reorgani sation of states on linguistic basisemphasises their use as languages of administration, they are stillnot national languages within their own sphere because of this linguistic.distance belween the majority of speakers and the minority of elites .It is essential that this distance be annihilated, through a wideningprocess of education. But ling\.istic history shows that these steps are notsufficient to standard;se them over the whole length and breadth ofthe country. The forces and choices that im pinge on linguisticcommunication are of such varied character that it is impossible tolegislate for a common standard . D ifferences will persist in spiteof conscious enforcement of norms. What is more important isto take a lesson i (Jrn hi story, and in applying linguistic techniquesfor the enrichment of our languages we discover for ourselves the

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processes which have been in existence III the shaping of ourlinguistic history.

It is often argued that while most linguistic change is a resultof an unconscious process which affects the transmission of thelanguage from generation to generation, no one can predict whatwould be the result of language planning and language engineering.In so far as vocabulary items are concerned, we may cite thehistory of American English. A merican Speech, the journal whichrecords the specific use of new expressions, indicates the varyingfate of new coinages. Most of these have a very limited life. Ifcreation of words must be taken recourse to. we might rememberthe analogy given by Pataiijali in his Mahcibhci:rya: when youwish to make use of pots and pans you can go to a potter andask him to supply the se items , and if not in stock, he can manufacturethem; but if you wish to express yourself you do not go to alexicographer and ask him to manufacture expressions which arenot already admitted in the actual lexicon of the people. It isprecisely in this context that a comparative reconstruction of Indo-Aryan, Dravidian or M U l f ~ i i - in fact of al l the three side byside will indicate the manner in which through an unconscious processof h is torical choice of intruding forms each linguistic subarea hasdeveloped and enriched its own particular field. This knowledge.l am sure, wi}) be extremely useful to the language planner andlanguage engineer, for he will have before him not only what theSanskrit and modern literary languages have achieved by way oflexemes in their total lexicons, but through what processes suchenrichment has been achieved. And if in this process, he also acquiresthe additional information regarding the unrecorded wealth whichis reposing in the substandard and dialect forms, and applies thesame technique of comparative reconstruction he will discover themain lines of development which have affected linguistic forms inthis country. The chief trouble is that those who have been mainlyconcerned with coining of new expreSSIons have failed to take their

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inspiration from the achievements o f Ollr languages themselves in thecourse of history , the most important in this being Sanskrit. th e'langua ge of gods ' which has achieved its development in Ind ia bya co ntinuin g process of sanskritisalion. W e may take our inspira tionfrom Sanskrit which be camc a ran -I nd ia n lan guage of cuhu rethrough sllch a process of assimila t in the variegated cu liure of thesuh cont :llcnl and in it , tu rn inA\l E' ll': ing the r ~ , of cult ure al ('exrrCSSlon.T h ~ rrocess of nationalising our reg ional languaaes in v0lves th e

redeemi ng of expressions cur ren t in the various dialects anell within standard or substnndard usa ge thro ugh a

(cnscious pro(ess of education, so that the gu lf belwee n the highlystandardised lang uage of culture and th e vernacul ar is redLl ed toalmosl nil by this two-fold procedure. This role of our languagesmust be first attained before wc can think of shaping th e link-lan guage. This is true of Hindi itself , fo r wi thin Its own territory itis often 'foreign ' to spe a kers of substandard forms alld dia le ,: tsOnce thi s nationalisa t ion process has been accomplished the selti\1gur of a link-language within a multilingual situation will be rertucedto il s lowest complex ity.

Wha t th ese lectures, therefore. indicate are not only problemswhich arise in the comparative reconstruction of Indo-Arya n. onstricl utilisation of basic fa c to rs of space-time-society coordinatesor parametres, as a part and parcel of mod ern linguist ic approaches.but also some applications of these principles in lrying to shape ourlan gua ges and equip lhem for the new tas\.;s they will be c a ! !upon to perfor m. I have myseH desisted from ex tend ing my approa chto thi s type of application in the scholarly interest of my mamsubject: comparative linguistics on which I was invited to speakby the' Ind ian In sti tu te of Adva.n d S tudy .

There now remains the pleasant duty of acknowle g ing mygratitude to many friends who have made these lectures possible .In the first pla ce I mu st refer here to my old friend D r . Nih a r

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R anjan R ay, D irector of liAS. for his kind invitation to givethis course of lectures in Simla during the current academic yearof the Institute, and for the excellent arrangements he made forthe Seminar on Language and Society. I cannot forget his hospitalityand sunny smile which havt. made the lIAS a warm centre ofactivity and fruitful research despite the inclement wea ther andintellectual isolation of Simla, and his able band of co-workers whohave made the Institute what it is today. I must thank my youngfriends Braj and Yamuna K acchru, products of the DeccanC ollege Language Project and currently in charge of the Summer Institute at the University of Illinois . Urbana. for inviting me to conduct a semina r on Indo-Aryan during June 1967. To G ordon and Anna Fairbanks. sometime visiting Deccan College ( 1955-56. 1958-59) on the

anguage Project, and my hosts at Illinois University l owe alot; many of the problems dealt with here were worked out at theirtemporary residence at Campaign-Urbana during the Summer Institute.Fairbanks has been engaged on problems of controlled reconstructionfer a number of years sillce he first came to Deccan College in 1955 andwe may hope to get a modern diachronic study of Indo-Aryanfrom him shortly, giving us resolutions of some of the moot problemsof both phonology and morphology. My stay with him has beenmemorable. and my regret is that I have not been able to show himthe typescript of these lectures before pubrication and benefit fromhi s friendly criticism. To my colleagues in Deccan College '1ndelsewhere in India. - -for they have spread to every nook and cornerof this country and have even gone to Europe and United States , I am deeply beholden. I have profited greatly by discussions withthem and they have participated with me without complaint yearin and year out since 1955 when we have been conducting theSummer Schools of Linguistics without a break. It is my proudprivilege. therefore, to dedicate this small volume to my colleagues inthe field who have shared with me in this unique opportunity ofbuilding lip a new tradition of linguistic studies in our country.

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Some of us, of the older generation, have had their field day, andit is to the younger scholars that I look forward to the develop-ment of a real Indian school of linguistics, assimilating the best that isin our own tradition from the great Piil)ini and T olkappiyanar withthat from Europe and America.

I mu st not fail to record here my great appreciation of theassistance I have received from all members of the lIAS and ofthe printers in carrying out such complicated typography withouttoo many errors.18th December 1967 S. M. KATHE

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CONT E NTS

PrefaceAbbreviations Vll lIn troduction

On the Process of Reconstru ction 19Misch-Reconstruc lion or the P rocess of Contamination 34On Contro lled Historical Reconstruction 49Defe ctive W ord Fo rms in Indo-A rya n 60On Some Applications of Reconstruction 82

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Problems of Reconstruction in Indo-Aryan

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