Early Vedic – Introduction, Part 1
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Keydana, Götz
Dahl, Eystein
Aufderheide, Tim Felix
This lecture gives an introduction to the Early Vedic language and the history of the Indo-Aryan peoples.
 Welcome to our series on early Vedic. My name is Götzge Kajdana and I'm a professor of general and indian linguistics at Göttingen University. In my research I concentrate on the phonology and the syntax of the indian languages such as Greek and Vedic. My name is Tim Felix Aufdeide and I'm currently a PhD student at the University of Zurich and my research focuses on the prosodic structure and certain topics in the syntax of early Vedic. My name is Aisendal and I am currently serving as head of the department of the Department of Language and Culture at UIT, the Arctic University of Norway. My research interests are concerned with morphosyntics and semantics especially tense aspects semantics and alignment in Vedic, Greek, Latin and Hittite. Well now that you know the three of us it's my turn to provide you with some basics. Let us get started. In this lesson the first of our three-part introductory section we will deal with the linguistic affiliation and external history of early Vedic. First I'm going to present to you some basic information on early Vedic and its speakers. Then we will talk about the linguistic affiliation of early Vedic before moving on to its central Asian origins and the migratory routes that ultimately let the Vedic people to their new home on the Indian subcontinent. We will also see how the inherited lexicon of early Vedic was shaped by language contact and learn about a fascinating episode in the history of the ancient Near East that might appear rather marginal at first but is very important for determining the position of early Vedic among the other Indo-Iranian languages, Mitanni-Indo-Aryan. Without any further ado let us begin our lesson. As you might already know early Vedic as a tested in the famous rikveda is a pre-modern Indo-European language that preserved the great many features nowadays reconstructed for the proto-language by historical linguistics. It was spoken by Indo-Iranian tribes for a time period of more than 1,000 years roughly starting in the early mid-second millennium and lasting until the late first millennium before before Common Era. These tribes migrated from Central Asia to Northwest India and arrived there or more specifically in the so-called Greater Punjab around the year 1800 before Common Era and subsequently spread over the entire north of the subcontinent. Unfortunately there are hardly any archaeological traces of either their migrations or their material culture but instead they have left us with a huge corpus of admirably well preserved texts that allow for almost any kind of linguistic study to be pursued. Now it is time to address briefly the historically problematic and given to misunderstandings and politically motivated misuse in the past somewhat controversial term Aryan. The speakers of early Vedic identify themselves as Arya or Arya which originally means nothing but simply hospitable or later on noble. They share this particular self-designation with the Iranians which also call themselves Arya as we learn from the Avesta and from the old Persian inscriptions. These people however do not only call themselves Aryan but also their language. Thus we find in the Vedic Shankayana Aranyaka the notion of Aryan speech Aryavag and on the Iranian side this is matched by the adverbial used Arya which means written in Aryan in the context of their reals famous Bisutun inscription. We see that Aryan as a self-designation is mainly based on a common language spoken and understood by all members of a tribe. Secondarily and to a lesser degree it also has some implications to the cultural background of its speakers. As this Aryan is the only language fit for communication with the gods and ritual. Most certainly however it is not an ethnical let alone racial term. Therefore it is only correct to speak of Aryan or Indo-Aryan if we talk about the speakers of early Vedic and its later varieties. Okay let us return from such serious but nevertheless important matter back to linguistics. From a linguistic point of view early Vedic is the most authentic representative of what is often called Old Indo-Aryan or Sanskrit. This is due to the fact that Mitanni Indo-Aryan to which we will come back later in this video is only attested fragmentarily and because classical Sanskrit is a highly standard-desised literary language regulated by the doctrine of native grammar. Vedic as a whole is best considered as a continuum of fairly similar dialects of which just some defining isoclosses can be identified with certainty and though we can only reconstruct a limited number of dialectal features that set them apart from each other we can localize the core areas from which they from rich certain innovations started to spread. On this slide we see a dandrogram of the older Indo-Aryan languages and the position of Vedic among them. As you can infer from this chart and as I already mentioned frequently in this video Vedic is a member of the Indo-Aryan branch of Indo-Iranian which in turn is a branch of the Indo-European language family. Vedic or rather the dialects group under this name are historically related to the slightly older variety of Mitanni and classical Sanskrit or Basha. The exact nature of these relations however is quite intricate and some details still remind uncertain as you can as I have tried to show by the dotted line here and here. The same is true for the relation of the Vedic dialects to the middle Indo-Aryan vernaculars that later emerge from them. If we follow the Indo-Aryan branch upward to the proto-Indo-Iranian node we see that Vedic is also closely related to the old Iranian language namely old and young of Eston as well as old Persian. Next we take a look at the prehistory of the Vedic people and their Central Asian origins. This map shows you the geographic horizon of the Indo-Iranian people at the beginning of the second millennium before common era. We have the Indo-Iranian homeland in Central Asia and on the southern fringe of Siberia. In cultural area or archaeological complex called Andronovo up here. Just south to the Andronovo culture along the banks of the upper Oxos River we find the Bactria Magiana archaeological complex or short BMAC whose urban culture influenced the proto-Indo-Aryan tribes strongly. Those on their way to northern Mesopotamia where they seem to have been the driving force in erecting the Mitanni Empire. As well as those heading for the Greater Punjab the later tribes of early Vedic India here the area of the Rig Veda. On this slide you can see a view of the Eurasian step in eastern Kazakhstan and just like this I released very similar to this picture we have to imagine the landscape of the Indo-Iranian homeland. As we have seen on the map the proto-Indo-Iranian people are commonly associated with an archaeological complex that goes by the name of Andronovo. It is a Bronx age culture that flourished in this area through the second and early first millennium before common era. According to archaeological findings the Andronovo people were most probably semi-nomadic pastoralists. Those small villages some of them even with fortifications have been excavated. The livestock included cattle, sheep, goats and most importantly to ensure their mobility in the steps horses. Furthermore they not only knew how to forge bronze weapons and tools but also how to build spoke wheeled chariots which likely gave them a military advantage over many of their neighbors and which might explain the historical success in expanding their territories. We have also seen on the map that groups of proto-Indo-Iranians that is speakers of early varieties of Indo-Iran dialects left the ancestral home in Central Asia at the beginning of the second millennium before common era and myriad it to the Thaus. And as we have already discussed this must have happened in at least two separate movements that both went through the lens of the BMAG culture. You can get an impression though faded of the BMAG culture at this time and in particular its flourishing cities from the from this view of the runes of Gurnoetepel. Now I think it is a good time to take a closer look at the Indo-Iran tribes that ended up in the ancient Near East the so-called Mitanni Indo-Irians. We know from historical records like the cuneiform tablet on this slide a letter issued by King Tushrata that speakers of an Indo-Iran variety were present in the Mitanni empire which lasted roughly from the 15th to the middle of the 13th century before common era. The fact that among other pieces of evidence the ragnal names of the Mitanni dynasty have Indo-Iran etymologies further suggests that Indo-Irians must have been a very important and politically influential group within the otherwise Harian society of Mitanni to which they nevertheless assimilated over the course of time. We do know all this from fragments of their clearly Indo-Iran language that survive in various cuneiform texts from different traditions. This nebenüberlieferung comprises texts written in Harian, Hittite and Akkadian what makes identifying the material a difficult task at times. The two most important of these sources are written in Hittite. The first being a treaty between the Hittite King Shupiluli Umar and his ally Shatibhatsa of Mitanni where a number of gods are called upon whose names we also know from Vedic India. The second text that comprises many words of Indo-Iran origin is a treatise on horse training by a man called Kikuli who served in the Hittite Empire. The corpus of Mitanni Indo-Iran however consists only of a handful of lexical items mostly personal names in Hippological vocabulary as the Mitanni Indo-Irians must have been famous for excellent for being excellent horse breeders and trainers. In this chart we have some of these lexical items from Mitanni Indo-Iran and we will discuss what they can tell us about its historical position among the Indo-Iranian languages. In the first row there is Mitanni Indo-Iran Aikar which corresponds to Vedic Aikar. The interesting thing here is the stem extension of this numeral by the suffix Ka which is absent in old Iranian as a western ayiwa shows. From the words in the second row and the third row namely Ashwa and Vahana we can infer that the so-called primary pelletels of Proto-Indo-Iranian have like in Vedic already become frictives in Mitanni Indo-Iran as they are represented by cuneiform signs for the sound sh. Here and you see in the examples there oops there and there. In the last row containing Mitanni Indo-Iran Majda and Vedic Meeda we see that unlike Vedic Mitanni Indo-Iran still tolerated the voicing of sibilance by a simulation and did not yet replace the sequence Az by Ihi word internally. So we have the Ihi and Vedic but we still have the Ash presumably Ash in Mitanni Indo-Iran. This is a fascinating process that belongs together with others to a complex of historical repair strategies in early Vedic that prevent the surfacing of voice sibilance. The material just presented demonstrates that Mitanni is rather an archaic dialect of Proto-Indo-Iran than one of Proto-Iranian let alone Proto-Indo-Iranian since typical Indian innovations like retroflection and similar traits are still absent as far as we can tell from their representation in cuneiform writing. Thus the Indo-Iran words from Mitanni are the earliest traces of Indo-Iran and their providers with a valuable terminus postquem for the migration of Indo-Iran tribes to the northwest of India and the dating of their earliest texts. Before we end this first lesson we should also consider what the lexicon of early Vedic, the inherited as well as the borrowed, can teach us about the linguistic background of the later Vedic tribes and how language contact influenced early Vedic first during their migration and then upon their arrival on Indian soil. The lexicon of early Vedic is for the most part inherited from Proto-Indo-European which shows most strikingly in a huge number of inherited verbs. This is why early Vedic is central to the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European lexicon. Yet not only small chunks of the Vedic lexicon like single words are directly inherited from the Proto language but also whole phrases, little sentences so to speak, come in to the formulaic repertoire we find in the poetry of many ancient Indo-European languages. In Vedic, a Western and Greek for example, the art of poetry is compared to craftsmanship and poets are thus said to be carpenters of words as the early Vedic, Mantram ataksham from the Rigveda, Old-Avestan maathrim tasha and the famous Apeyon tecontes in Greek from the Odes of Pinda vividly illustrate. Although it is true that more than 90% of the early Vedic lexicon is inherited from Proto- Indo-European or Proto-Indo-Iranian, there are few loanwords. The sources of these however are often difficult to identify as our knowledge of the linguistic landscape of Bronze Age Central Asia and Northwest India is actually quite poor. Thus we can hardly ever exclude the possibility of influences from unknown languages, maybe as direct sources for loanwords or as intermediaries. All these problems aside we can at least identify three layers of early loans into Vedic. The first consists of loans from the bean-mec culture in Central Asia like Angshu, a name for a soma plant, Ustra, camel and Istika brick. These pre-Rig Vedic loans are also found in Old Iranian and Tukarian who also happened to be in close contact with the bean-mec people. The second layer comprises words borrowing from some unknown yet partially reconstructible Austro-Aveic language or languages whose speakers must have been living in the greater Punjab at the time that the older parts of the Rigveda have been composed. Two important examples from this layer would be Pippala, the Berry of the Ficus religiosa and Langala, the plough. The letter shows that these Austro-Atheistic people of ancient North India were agriculturalists and that the arriving Indo-Aryans took over certain words from them. Finally there are very few loan words from some early form of Dravidian like Pala, fruit that occur in the later parts of the Rigveda. This is it for our first introductory lesson. In the next video we are going to talk about the Vedas and the transmission. Thank you for your attention or in Sanskrit, Baha Vuh, Ganya Vadaha. Take care and goodbye.
 Welcome to our series on early Vedic. My name is Götzge Kajdana and I'm a professor of  general and indian linguistics at Göttingen University. In my research I  concentrate on the phonology and the syntax of the indian languages such as  Greek and Vedic. My name is Tim Felix Aufdeide and I'm currently a PhD student  at the University of Zurich and my research focuses on the prosodic  structure and certain topics in the syntax of early Vedic. My name is Aisendal  and I am currently serving as head of the department of the Department of  Language and Culture at UIT, the Arctic University of Norway. My research interests  are concerned with morphosyntics and semantics especially tense aspects  semantics and alignment in Vedic, Greek, Latin and Hittite. Well now that you  know the three of us it's my turn to provide you with some basics. Let us get  started. In this lesson the first of our three-part introductory section we will  deal with the linguistic affiliation and external history of early Vedic. First  I'm going to present to you some basic information on early Vedic and its  speakers. Then we will talk about the linguistic affiliation of early Vedic  before moving on to its central Asian origins and the migratory routes that  ultimately let the Vedic people to their new home on the Indian subcontinent. We  will also see how the inherited lexicon of early Vedic was shaped by language  contact and learn about a fascinating episode in the history of the ancient  Near East that might appear rather marginal at first but is very important  for determining the position of early Vedic among the other Indo-Iranian  languages, Mitanni-Indo-Aryan. Without any further ado let us begin our lesson. As  you might already know early Vedic as a tested in the famous rikveda is a  pre-modern Indo-European language that preserved the great many features  nowadays reconstructed for the proto-language by historical linguistics.  It was spoken by Indo-Iranian tribes for a time period of more than 1,000 years  roughly starting in the early mid-second millennium and lasting until the late  first millennium before before Common Era. These tribes migrated from Central  Asia to Northwest India and arrived there or more specifically in the so-called  Greater Punjab around the year 1800 before Common Era and subsequently  spread over the entire north of the subcontinent. Unfortunately there are  hardly any archaeological traces of either their migrations or their  material culture but instead they have left us with a huge corpus of admirably  well preserved texts that allow for almost any kind of linguistic study to  be pursued. Now it is time to address briefly the historically problematic and  given to misunderstandings and politically motivated misuse in the  past somewhat controversial term Aryan. The speakers of early Vedic identify  themselves as Arya or Arya which originally means nothing but simply  hospitable or later on noble. They share this particular self-designation with  the Iranians which also call themselves Arya as we learn from the  Avesta and from the old Persian inscriptions. These people however do  not only call themselves Aryan but also their language. Thus we find in the  Vedic Shankayana Aranyaka the notion of Aryan speech Aryavag and on the  Iranian side this is matched by the adverbial used Arya which means written  in Aryan in the context of their reals famous Bisutun inscription. We see that  Aryan as a self-designation is mainly based on a common language spoken  and understood by all members of a tribe. Secondarily and to a lesser degree it  also has some implications to the cultural background of its speakers. As  this Aryan is the only language fit for communication with  the gods and ritual. Most certainly however it is not an ethnical let alone  racial term. Therefore it is only correct to speak of Aryan or Indo-Aryan  if we talk about the speakers of early Vedic and its later varieties. Okay let  us return from such serious but nevertheless important matter back to  linguistics. From a linguistic point of view early Vedic is the most authentic  representative of what is often called Old Indo-Aryan or Sanskrit. This is due  to the fact that Mitanni Indo-Aryan to which we will come back later in this  video is only attested fragmentarily and because classical Sanskrit is a highly  standard-desised literary language regulated by the doctrine of native  grammar. Vedic as a whole is best considered as a continuum of fairly  similar dialects of which just some defining isoclosses can be identified  with certainty and though we can only reconstruct a limited number of dialectal  features that set them apart from each other we can localize the core areas  from which they from rich certain innovations started to spread. On this  slide we see a dandrogram of the older Indo-Aryan languages and the position of  Vedic among them. As you can infer from this chart and as I already mentioned  frequently in this video Vedic is a member of the Indo-Aryan branch of  Indo-Iranian which in turn is a branch of the Indo-European language family.  Vedic or rather the dialects group under this name are historically related to  the slightly older variety of Mitanni and classical Sanskrit or Basha. The exact  nature of these relations however is quite intricate and some details still  remind uncertain as you can as I have tried to show by the dotted line here  and here. The same is true for the relation of the Vedic dialects to the  middle Indo-Aryan vernaculars that later emerge from them. If we follow the  Indo-Aryan branch upward to the proto-Indo-Iranian node we see that Vedic  is also closely related to the old Iranian language namely old and young  of Eston as well as old Persian. Next we take a look at the prehistory of the  Vedic people and their Central Asian origins. This map shows you the geographic  horizon of the Indo-Iranian people at the beginning of the second millennium  before common era. We have the Indo-Iranian homeland in Central Asia  and on the southern fringe of Siberia. In cultural area or archaeological  complex called Andronovo up here. Just south to the Andronovo culture along the  banks of the upper Oxos River we find the Bactria Magiana archaeological  complex or short BMAC whose urban culture influenced the proto-Indo-Aryan  tribes strongly. Those on their way to northern Mesopotamia where they seem to  have been the driving force in erecting the Mitanni Empire. As well as those  heading for the Greater Punjab the later tribes of early Vedic India here the  area of the Rig Veda. On this slide you can see a view of the Eurasian step in  eastern Kazakhstan and just like this I released very similar to this picture we  have to imagine the landscape of the Indo-Iranian homeland. As we have seen on  the map the proto-Indo-Iranian people are commonly associated with an  archaeological complex that goes by the name of Andronovo. It is a Bronx age  culture that flourished in this area through the second and early first  millennium before common era. According to archaeological findings the Andronovo  people were most probably semi-nomadic pastoralists. Those small villages some  of them even with fortifications have been excavated. The livestock included  cattle, sheep, goats and most importantly to ensure their mobility in the steps  horses. Furthermore they not only knew how to forge bronze weapons and tools but  also how to build spoke wheeled chariots which likely gave them a military  advantage over many of their neighbors and which might explain the historical  success in expanding their territories. We have also seen on the map that groups  of proto-Indo-Iranians that is speakers of early varieties of Indo-Iran  dialects left the ancestral home in Central Asia at the beginning of the  second millennium before common era and myriad it to the Thaus. And as we have  already discussed this must have happened in at least two separate movements  that both went through the lens of the BMAG culture. You can get an impression  though faded of the BMAG culture at this time and in particular its flourishing  cities from the from this view of the runes of Gurnoetepel. Now I think it is a  good time to take a closer look at the Indo-Iran tribes that ended up in the  ancient Near East the so-called Mitanni Indo-Irians. We know from historical  records like the cuneiform tablet on this slide a letter issued by King Tushrata  that speakers of an Indo-Iran variety were present in the Mitanni  empire which lasted roughly from the 15th to the middle of the 13th century  before common era. The fact that among other pieces of evidence the ragnal  names of the Mitanni dynasty have Indo-Iran etymologies further suggests  that Indo-Irians must have been a very important and politically influential  group within the otherwise Harian society of Mitanni to which they  nevertheless assimilated over the course of time. We do know all this from  fragments of their clearly Indo-Iran language that survive in various cuneiform  texts from different traditions. This nebenüberlieferung comprises texts  written in Harian, Hittite and Akkadian what makes identifying the material a  difficult task at times. The two most important of these sources are written  in Hittite. The first being a treaty between the Hittite King Shupiluli  Umar and his ally Shatibhatsa of Mitanni where a number of gods are called upon  whose names we also know from Vedic India. The second text that comprises many  words of Indo-Iran origin is a treatise on horse training by a man called  Kikuli who served in the Hittite Empire. The corpus of Mitanni Indo-Iran  however consists only of a handful of lexical items mostly personal names in  Hippological vocabulary as the Mitanni Indo-Irians must have been famous for  excellent for being excellent horse breeders and trainers. In this chart we  have some of these lexical items from Mitanni Indo-Iran and we will discuss  what they can tell us about its historical position among the Indo-Iranian  languages. In the first row there is Mitanni Indo-Iran Aikar which corresponds  to Vedic Aikar. The interesting thing here is the stem extension of this  numeral by the suffix Ka which is absent in old Iranian as a western ayiwa  shows. From the words in the second row and the third row namely Ashwa and  Vahana we can infer that the so-called primary pelletels of Proto-Indo-Iranian  have like in Vedic already become frictives in Mitanni Indo-Iran as they  are represented by cuneiform signs for the sound sh. Here and you see in the  examples there oops there and there. In the last row containing Mitanni  Indo-Iran Majda and Vedic Meeda we see that unlike Vedic Mitanni Indo-Iran  still tolerated the voicing of sibilance by a simulation and did not yet  replace the sequence Az by Ihi word internally. So we have the Ihi and Vedic  but we still have the Ash presumably Ash in Mitanni Indo-Iran. This is a  fascinating process that belongs together with others to a complex of  historical repair strategies in early Vedic that prevent the surfacing of  voice sibilance. The material just presented demonstrates that Mitanni  is rather an archaic dialect of Proto-Indo-Iran than one of Proto-Iranian  let alone Proto-Indo-Iranian since typical Indian innovations like  retroflection and similar traits are still absent as far as we can tell from  their representation in cuneiform writing. Thus the Indo-Iran words from  Mitanni are the earliest traces of Indo-Iran and their providers with a  valuable terminus postquem for the migration of Indo-Iran tribes to the  northwest of India and the dating of their earliest texts. Before we end this  first lesson we should also consider what the lexicon of early Vedic, the  inherited as well as the borrowed, can teach us about the linguistic background  of the later Vedic tribes and how language contact influenced early Vedic  first during their migration and then upon their arrival on Indian soil. The  lexicon of early Vedic is for the most part inherited from Proto-Indo-European  which shows most strikingly in a huge number of inherited verbs. This is why  early Vedic is central to the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European  lexicon. Yet not only small chunks of the Vedic lexicon like single words are  directly inherited from the Proto language but also whole phrases, little  sentences so to speak, come in to the formulaic repertoire we find in the  poetry of many ancient Indo-European languages. In Vedic, a Western and Greek  for example, the art of poetry is compared to craftsmanship and poets are  thus said to be carpenters of words as the early Vedic,  Mantram ataksham from the Rigveda, Old-Avestan maathrim tasha and the famous  Apeyon tecontes in Greek from the Odes of Pinda vividly illustrate. Although it is  true that more than 90% of the early Vedic lexicon is inherited from Proto-  Indo-European or Proto-Indo-Iranian, there are few loanwords. The sources of  these however are often difficult to identify as our knowledge of the  linguistic landscape of Bronze Age Central Asia and Northwest India is  actually quite poor. Thus we can hardly ever exclude the possibility of  influences from unknown languages, maybe as direct sources for loanwords or as  intermediaries. All these problems aside we can at least identify three layers of  early loans into Vedic. The first consists of loans from the bean-mec culture in  Central Asia like Angshu, a name for a soma plant, Ustra, camel and Istika brick.  These pre-Rig Vedic loans are also found in Old Iranian and Tukarian who also  happened to be in close contact with the bean-mec people. The second layer  comprises words borrowing from some unknown yet partially reconstructible  Austro-Aveic language or languages whose speakers must have been living in the  greater Punjab at the time that the older parts of the Rigveda have been  composed. Two important examples from this layer would be Pippala, the Berry of  the Ficus religiosa and Langala, the plough. The letter shows that these  Austro-Atheistic people of ancient North India were agriculturalists and that  the arriving Indo-Aryans took over certain words from them. Finally there  are very few loan words from some early form of Dravidian like Pala, fruit that  occur in the later parts of the Rigveda. This is it for our first introductory  lesson. In the next video we are going to talk about the Vedas and the  transmission. Thank you for your attention or in Sanskrit, Baha Vuh,  Ganya Vadaha. Take care and goodbye.
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