Early Vedic – Introduction, Part 3
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Aufderheide, Tim Felix
The topic of this lecture is the Rigveda (R̥gveda), the oldest and most well-known Vedic text in Early Vedic.
 Hello and welcome back to the third lesson in our series on early Vedic. My name is Tim Felix Aufteheide and today we are going to complete our introductory section by taking a closer look at the oldest and most famous of all Vedic texts, the Rigveda. First, I will introduce you to the structure of the text and provide you with an overview of its content. Then, we are going to talk very briefly about the poles of the Rigveda, its geographical setting, and its historical background. Finally, we discuss the form of the text in greater detail. Since the actual form of the Rigveda is very complex, we are also going to illustrate many aspects of it by means of a short text sample. Now, let us begin. The Rigveda is the most sacred text of ancient India and still plays an important role in modern Hinduism. Its text inverse is composed in a very archaic language that, as we have learned in the previous video, is called early Vedic. Furthermore, the Rigveda is distinguished by a style that often seems hieratic to the reader and which leaves even the expert wondering at times. The text was originally intended for liturgical use, of which the picture on the right gets you an impression. The Rigveda consists of 1,028 hymns in different meters that vary greatly in length, in total 10,462 stanzas. The text is divided into 10 books, or mandalas. Books 2 to 8, the so-called family books, are considered older than the remaining books, 1,9 and 10. The purpose of the hymns, as one will become aware soon after reading only a handful of them, is to praise the many gods of the Vedic pantheon and to invite them to join the priests on the sacrificial ground. Traditionally, the hymns are recited by a priest called the Hota and accompany his actions during the performance of a given ritual. On the right side, you can see a page from the Western Idisho-princepts of the Rigveda in the Vanagari script. Here, you see a part of the commentary that introduces the hymn itself, which started over here. First, even though we have not yet spoken about it, the Samita Pata, and then underneath the Pada Pata version. Then, commentary continues and so forth and so on. This chart over here shows an overview of the family books. In column 2, you find the names of the ancestral poets traditionally affiliated to each Mandala, while column 3 gives you the number of hymns for every Mandala of the family books. Mandala 2, for example, which consists of 43 hymns, is attributed to the Rigvedic family of poets that consider themselves as the descendants of a man named Khritsamada. Those poets that composed the 62 hymn Mandala number 3, however, trace their lineage back to Vishwamitra and so forth and so on. We also know the given names of the poets or rishis that compose the Rigvedic hymns. At this point, I would like to stress the fact that the millennia-old poetry of the Rigveda is, at least for the most part of it, better understood as ritual craftsmanship than as mundane art in the modern sense. Nevertheless, all of them were certainly skillful and well-trained poets that employ a plethora of different stylistic devices, including formulae of high antiquity inherited from their ancestors. It is also important to understand that they were actually paid for their work in livestock by patrons who sponsor one of the many Vedic rituals that involve the libation of soma or other offerings. Despite the limitations of this genre, some of the poets created literary masterpieces. For instance, Vishwamitra, to whom we owe him 33 of book 3, or his rival Vasishtha, with his hymn number 18 from book 7, who is actually depicted on the right. Now it is time to talk about the geographical and historical setting of the Rigveda. First, let us take another look at the map of early Vedic India. Take your time and study the geographical situation of the Rigveda that you find over here, roughly between Kabul and Delhi. As you have seen on the map, the home of the Rigveda and its hymns is the Greater Punjab, a historical region which extends roughly from Kabul to Delhi. Covering the easternmost parts of modern day Afghanistan, the north of Pakistan and the northwest of present India. The Greater Punjab includes the high mountain areas of the Hindukush and the western Himalayas, and of course the Piyatmont regions, as well as portions of the Indo-Gengetic Plain. The main rivers of this area, mentioned in the hymns, are the Indus and its numerous tributaries. Note that the Ganges River is already mentioned once in the Rigveda, albeit in one of its very late hymns. The Greater Punjab is characterized by a rather moderate inland climate. Thus, there are four seasons with cold winters, instead of only three, as is the case farther to the south and east of the subcontinent. This also means that snow melt is far more important for the water supply of the Greater Punjab than monsoon rains which hardly reach the area. I would like to stress the fact that all these geographical features agree perfectly with the information we can get from the text of the Rigveda itself. The culture of the Rigvedic people is still very similar to that of the ancestors when they left Central Asia for their new home in India. They are organized in tribes and exhibit many traits typical for a Bronze Age culture. This of course means that they did not yet know how to work iron. Just as the ancestors, they are half-nomadic pastoralists, with subsidiary hunting and gathering, but hardly any farming of crops. Their main livestock is cattle. Thus, the tribes are very mobile and do not build cities. The environment they live in is a rather bellicose one, since they are constantly fighting for new pastures and watering places for their herds. As they slowly advance toward the genetic plane, the enemies in these struggles are not only the unknown indigenous people of the greater Punjab at that time, but more often other Aryan tribes that either arrived slightly earlier or still poor in from beyond the Hindu Kush. In Rigvedic times, there are about 30 tribes that we know of. They are ruled by kings or rather sheftens and form loose confederacies from time to time in order to get the upper hand in one of their constant fights with each other. Mainly, on linguistic evidence, we can estimate that the composition of the Rigveda took place at the beginning of the later half of the second millennium. But there is and has always been some controversy around this date. What we do know for sure, however, is that the hymns were composed over the span of five generations. Now that we have familiarized ourselves with the setting of the Rigveda, it is time to discuss the actual form of its text. Being a text inverse, the Rigveda is organized in magical unings that are basically the following. Hymns or Sukta in the highest tier, then stanzas and finally verses or pardas on the lowest tier. The meter of the Rigveda is strictly syllable counting. This means that although there are clearly some tendencies toward quantitative meter and the reason it creates, it is only the number of syllables that really matters after all. The most common meters in Rigvedic poetry are the jagatih with four verses of twelve syllables each. Secondly, the Anu, the Tristub, of also four verses per stanza, but with only eleven syllables each. The Anu Stub of four times eight syllables. And the Gaya Tri, number four over here, characterized by stanzas of three verses of again eight syllables in each verse. These meters fall into two different types, the shorter diameter verses, like Anu Stub and Gaya Tri, that consist of an opening followed by a cadence, and the longer trimeter verses, such as Jagatri and Tristub, that insert the so-called break of mostly either three or four syllables between opening and cadence. In addition, trimeter verses are distinguished by having a Cesura after the fourth or fifth syllable of the verse, that separates the opening from the break, as you can see here. It comes as no surprise to the linguist that Rigvedic meter is highly sensitive for prosodic and thus also syntactical structure. Therefore, we can find that there is generally no sundae across the padda boundary, and the same holds true often for the juncture that is marked by the Cesura as well. It is worth noting that the Cesura in most of the cases coincides with the boundary between two phonological words. Although you will learn about the nature of the Vedic accent in one of the upcoming lessons on phonology, I think we should at least take a peek at the system of marking accent we find in the manuscript tradition of the Rigveda. First of all, the transmitted text of the Rigveda is accented throughout, as you can also see with those small red ink marked strokes and lines underneath in the manuscript on the right. And from the viewpoint of linguistics, the Vedic accent was most probably a pitch accent. Strangely enough, though, it is not the accented syllable that is marked in Indian manuscripts of the Rigveda, but the preceding or the following one. Consider, for example, the word Vajna, which we find over here in line 4. We see that there is a small horizontal line underneath the preceding syllable. You can in greater detail over here. And a vertical stroke above the following syllable over here or here, respectively. Both are even here in the manuscript highlighted as red as I already told you. It's either like that. You see those small red stroke here and underneath the line over there. The accented syllable itself, however, is left unmarked, but this is only the Rigvedic system of marking accent. And there are several others, some of which are more straightforward and actually mark the accented syllable. Another important feature of the Rigveda is that we have to distinguish very clearly between two historical layers. The Ur text, that is the form of the Rigveda, is originally composed by the poets and the transmitted text, which is slightly adapted by some later editors. For historical reasons, it is best to start with what we actually have, the text as it has come down to us. The text of the Rigveda you found in most edition is, as I already said, the result of a later canonization that is often referred to by the German term you see over here, namely Autoepische diascoyase. This canonization took place in the Kudur realm around the year 1000 before Common Era, or maybe a little earlier than this. The priestly editors of that time modernized the text of the Rigveda, probably by adapting it to the current language of that particular time and reason. These changes, however, were not too pervasive and the transmitted text is still very close to the original. But there are deviations from the Ur text that we are going to discuss now. The deviations of the transmitted text from the original include, among other things, the following changes. The elimination of hiatus, as in Joshi Advaram, which actually should be restored as Joshi Advaram with the Y turned back into an I in Rigveda 497A. Then changes in quantity, as in Pavaka, where we have the first A long at the transmitted text, but it actually scans metrically as Pavaka. You see the length, so to speak, changes position. Pavaka, of course, meaning pure. Then we also have the removal of epithetic vowels. Thus the transmitted kamyam has to be read as kamyam with this epithetic eye over here, meaning beloved, desired. Furthermore, we have the introduction of a very peculiar dialectal feature, namely the ʻ and ʻ. We find also in the first verse of the Rigveda that we speak later on. Also, we will see that in the course of the next section, how historical linguistics can help to reconstruct the Ur text of the Rigveda. All these deviations are mainly due to the overgeneralization of certain sandy phenomena, or they stem from the influence that Rig Vedic verses exert on each other because of their application as mantras in ritual. In most cases, these changes, by the hand of the Kuru Redactors, can be identified and subsequently removed from the text, since they are indicated by meter. In addition, they were applied very regularly and are on the whole, conspiciously more consistent with the usage of later Vedic periods. The next topic we have to address is that of recitation. The Rigveda is handed down in not only one text form, but many. The two most important and also the oldest of those are the Samhita Pāta, or continuous text, with all external sandis applied, and the Pada Pāta, or word text, which separates everything that qualifies as a word in Indian view and is thus free from most external sandy phenomena. On the right, you can see a modern manuscript copy of the Rigveda Pada Pāta. Later on, we go into more detail on all of this. But first, I want to give you an impression of the modern recitation practice of the Rigveda. The short video clip I am about to play to you shows the traditional teaching of the two first stances of the Rigveda, as performed in Basi, Maharashtra, in February 2002. You will see that the teacher first gives a kind of introduction to the hymn by stating some basic information like the in-keep hit, the god or gods it calls upon, its poet, here Madukchandas, from the Vishwamitra family, and its meter, which is typical for Agnihyam's Dighayati meter. He then starts to recite the Samhita text verse by verse, a technique called Pada Shaha in Sanskrit. His students repeat after him, but utter each Pada twice. The teacher then starts to recite the Dighayati text verse by verse, a technique called Pada Shaha in Sanskrit. He then starts to recite the Dighayati text verse by verse, a technique called Pada Shaha in Sanskrit. He then starts to recite the Dighayati text verse by verse, a technique called Pada Shaha in Sanskrit. He then starts to recite the Dighayati text verse by verse, a technique called Pada Shaha in Sanskrit. He then starts to recite the Dighayati text verse by verse, a technique called Pada Shaha in Sanskrit. He then starts to recite the Dighayati text verse by verse, a technique called Pada Shaha in Sanskrit. He then starts to recite the Dighayati text verse by verse, a technique called Pada Shaha in Sanskrit. He then starts to recite the Dighayati text verse by verse, a technique called Pada Shaha in Sanskrit. He then starts to recite the Dighayati text verse by verse, a technique called Pada Shaha in Sanskrit. He then starts to recite the Dighayati text verse by verse, a technique called Pada Shaha in Sanskrit. He then starts to recite the Dighayati text verse by verse, a technique called Pada Shaha in Sanskrit. He then starts to recite the Dighayati text verse by verse, a technique called Pada Shaha in Sanskrit. He then starts to recite the Dighayati text verse by verse, a technique called Pada Shaha in Sanskrit. After this lovely video, it is time to take a closer look at the text we just heard. Here you see the Samhita part of the very first stanza that opens the Rig Veda. First, the transmitted text in Devaynagari. Then, its metrically restored text in transliteration. And finally, in line 3, the metrical structure of the restored text. Down at the bottom, we find the English translation of the text. It calls upon Agni, the Vedic god of fire, and reads as follows. Agnim ile puruhitam yajnyasnya devam ridvijam holtaram ratnadaatamam. It translates into English as Agni duayinvog, the one place to the fore, god and priest of the sacrifice, the hoter most richly conferring treasure. The Pada part of this stanza that you can see on the upper half of this slide is obviously very different in outlook. Each word or Pada in native grammar is separated by a vertical bar, the so-called Danda you see here, here and so on. As a result, the effects of external sunday are removed and the words appear in their pause form. For example, we have devam with the anusvara instead of devam with the m at the end. And we saw other examples on the next slide. Furthermore, compounds are split by means of a sign called avagraha, this one over here and here, which is often represented by either a hyphen or an apostrophe in Latinized editions of the text. Also note that the marking of the accents follows basically the same system at the samitaparta. If, however, a given word bears no accent in the samitaparta, every single syllable of it is marked with the anudatta, the small horizontal line underneath the syllable. I have it down here and for example we have the word ilé here, which is not accented in the samitaparta and thus is marked throughout with the anudatta. For the sake of matching the text recited by the Vedas students, we continue our little sample with the second stanza of the Rigveda 1.1. The samitā text reads in restored version, of course, Agnihi purveibhir rishibhir idio nutannayruta sa devan eha vakshati. What translates into English as Agni to be invoked by ancient sages and by the present ones, he will carry the gods here to this place. Note that we encounter in idio the first instance of a deviation of the transmitter's text from the original that we can restore by the help of meter. Because if you count the syllables of verse B up here, in the transmitted text, we discover that it is short one syllable, because we count idio nutannayruta, seven syllables, but the Gayatri meter needs eight. A metrical void that can be easily undone by restoring the epynthetic I here as done in the restored text. Thus, in the end, we get a perfect Gayatri first of the syllables. From the paddha part of the stanza, we learn that the avagraha can not only separate the members of a compound, but also certain affixes and endings. Thus, bihi, the instrumental plural ending, is separated from rishi. This use of the avagraha, however, is only listed if the juncture in question exhibits regularly the effects of external sundae in the text of the samitaparta. Because in case the morphological analysis is rendered difficult due to vowel construction or similar processes, like in puhvi bihi with the i, the avagraha is not applied, although the same morpheme is separated otherwise, if you compare bihi and bihi. Both words actually do agree. This is the end of our introductory section. Starting with the next lesson, Götzkadana and I will introduce you to the phonology of early Vedic. Thank you for your attention. Or in Sanskrit, bahavod danyavadah. Take care and goodbye.
 Hello and welcome back to the third lesson in our series on early Vedic.  My name is Tim Felix Aufteheide and today we are going to complete our introductory section  by taking a closer look at the oldest and most famous of all Vedic texts, the Rigveda.  First, I will introduce you to the structure of the text and provide you with an overview of its content.  Then, we are going to talk very briefly about the poles of the Rigveda, its geographical setting,  and its historical background.  Finally, we discuss the form of the text in greater detail.  Since the actual form of the Rigveda is very complex, we are also going to illustrate many aspects of it  by means of a short text sample.  Now, let us begin.  The Rigveda is the most sacred text of ancient India and still plays an important role in modern Hinduism.  Its text inverse is composed in a very archaic language that, as we have learned in the previous video, is called early Vedic.  Furthermore, the Rigveda is distinguished by a style that often seems hieratic to the reader  and which leaves even the expert wondering at times.  The text was originally intended for liturgical use, of which the picture on the right gets you an impression.  The Rigveda consists of 1,028 hymns in different meters that vary greatly in length, in total 10,462 stanzas.  The text is divided into 10 books, or mandalas.  Books 2 to 8, the so-called family books, are considered older than the remaining books, 1,9 and 10.  The purpose of the hymns, as one will become aware soon after reading only a handful of them,  is to praise the many gods of the Vedic pantheon and to invite them to join the priests on the sacrificial ground.  Traditionally, the hymns are recited by a priest called the Hota and accompany his actions during the performance of a given ritual.  On the right side, you can see a page from the Western Idisho-princepts of the Rigveda in the Vanagari script.  Here, you see a part of the commentary that introduces the hymn itself, which started over here.  First, even though we have not yet spoken about it, the Samita Pata, and then underneath the Pada Pata version.  Then, commentary continues and so forth and so on.  This chart over here shows an overview of the family books.  In column 2, you find the names of the ancestral poets traditionally affiliated to each Mandala,  while column 3 gives you the number of hymns for every Mandala of the family books.  Mandala 2, for example, which consists of 43 hymns, is attributed to the Rigvedic family of poets  that consider themselves as the descendants of a man named Khritsamada.  Those poets that composed the 62 hymn Mandala number 3, however,  trace their lineage back to Vishwamitra and so forth and so on.  We also know the given names of the poets or rishis that compose the Rigvedic hymns.  At this point, I would like to stress the fact that the millennia-old poetry of the Rigveda  is, at least for the most part of it, better understood as ritual craftsmanship  than as mundane art in the modern sense.  Nevertheless, all of them were certainly skillful and well-trained poets  that employ a plethora of different stylistic devices, including formulae of high antiquity inherited from their ancestors.  It is also important to understand that they were actually paid for their work in livestock  by patrons who sponsor one of the many Vedic rituals that involve the libation of soma or other offerings.  Despite the limitations of this genre, some of the poets created literary masterpieces.  For instance, Vishwamitra, to whom we owe him 33 of book 3,  or his rival Vasishtha, with his hymn number 18 from book 7, who is actually depicted on the right.  Now it is time to talk about the geographical and historical setting of the Rigveda.  First, let us take another look at the map of early Vedic India.  Take your time and study the geographical situation of the Rigveda that you find over here, roughly between Kabul and Delhi.  As you have seen on the map, the home of the Rigveda and its hymns is the Greater Punjab,  a historical region which extends roughly from Kabul to Delhi.  Covering the easternmost parts of modern day Afghanistan, the north of Pakistan and the northwest of present India.  The Greater Punjab includes the high mountain areas of the Hindukush and the western Himalayas,  and of course the Piyatmont regions, as well as portions of the Indo-Gengetic Plain.  The main rivers of this area, mentioned in the hymns, are the Indus and its numerous tributaries.  Note that the Ganges River is already mentioned once in the Rigveda, albeit in one of its very late hymns.  The Greater Punjab is characterized by a rather moderate inland climate.  Thus, there are four seasons with cold winters, instead of only three,  as is the case farther to the south and east of the subcontinent.  This also means that snow melt is far more important for the water supply of the Greater Punjab  than monsoon rains which hardly reach the area.  I would like to stress the fact that all these geographical features agree perfectly  with the information we can get from the text of the Rigveda itself.  The culture of the Rigvedic people is still very similar to that of the ancestors  when they left Central Asia for their new home in India.  They are organized in tribes and exhibit many traits typical for a Bronze Age culture.  This of course means that they did not yet know how to work iron.  Just as the ancestors, they are half-nomadic pastoralists,  with subsidiary hunting and gathering, but hardly any farming of crops.  Their main livestock is cattle. Thus, the tribes are very mobile and do not build cities.  The environment they live in is a rather bellicose one,  since they are constantly fighting for new pastures and watering places for their herds.  As they slowly advance toward the genetic plane,  the enemies in these struggles are not only the unknown indigenous people  of the greater Punjab at that time, but more often other Aryan tribes  that either arrived slightly earlier or still poor in from beyond the Hindu Kush.  In Rigvedic times, there are about 30 tribes that we know of.  They are ruled by kings or rather sheftens and form loose confederacies from time to time  in order to get the upper hand in one of their constant fights with each other.  Mainly, on linguistic evidence, we can estimate that the composition of the Rigveda  took place at the beginning of the later half of the second millennium.  But there is and has always been some controversy around this date.  What we do know for sure, however, is that the hymns were composed over the span of five generations.  Now that we have familiarized ourselves with the setting of the Rigveda,  it is time to discuss the actual form of its text.  Being a text inverse, the Rigveda is organized in magical unings that are basically the following.  Hymns or Sukta in the highest tier, then stanzas and finally verses or pardas on the lowest tier.  The meter of the Rigveda is strictly syllable counting.  This means that although there are clearly some tendencies toward quantitative meter  and the reason it creates, it is only the number of syllables that really matters after all.  The most common meters in Rigvedic poetry are the jagatih with four verses of twelve syllables each.  Secondly, the Anu, the Tristub, of also four verses per stanza, but with only eleven syllables each.  The Anu Stub of four times eight syllables.  And the Gaya Tri, number four over here,  characterized by stanzas of three verses of again eight syllables in each verse.  These meters fall into two different types, the shorter diameter verses,  like Anu Stub and Gaya Tri, that consist of an opening followed by a cadence,  and the longer trimeter verses, such as Jagatri and Tristub,  that insert the so-called break of mostly either three or four syllables between opening and cadence.  In addition, trimeter verses are distinguished by having a Cesura after the fourth or fifth syllable of the verse,  that separates the opening from the break, as you can see here.  It comes as no surprise to the linguist that Rigvedic meter is highly sensitive for prosodic and thus also syntactical structure.  Therefore, we can find that there is generally no sundae across the padda boundary,  and the same holds true often for the juncture that is marked by the Cesura as well.  It is worth noting that the Cesura in most of the cases coincides with the boundary between two phonological words.  Although you will learn about the nature of the Vedic accent in one of the upcoming lessons on phonology,  I think we should at least take a peek at the system of marking accent we find in the manuscript tradition of the Rigveda.  First of all, the transmitted text of the Rigveda is accented throughout, as you can also see with those small red ink marked strokes and lines underneath in the manuscript on the right.  And from the viewpoint of linguistics, the Vedic accent was most probably a pitch accent.  Strangely enough, though, it is not the accented syllable that is marked in Indian manuscripts of the Rigveda, but the preceding or the following one.  Consider, for example, the word Vajna, which we find over here in line 4.  We see that there is a small horizontal line underneath the preceding syllable.  You can in greater detail over here.  And a vertical stroke above the following syllable over here or here, respectively.  Both are even here in the manuscript highlighted as red as I already told you.  It's either like that. You see those small red stroke here and underneath the line over there.  The accented syllable itself, however, is left unmarked, but this is only the Rigvedic system of marking accent.  And there are several others, some of which are more straightforward and actually mark the accented syllable.  Another important feature of the Rigveda is that we have to distinguish very clearly between two historical layers.  The Ur text, that is the form of the Rigveda, is originally composed by the poets and the transmitted text, which is slightly adapted by some later editors.  For historical reasons, it is best to start with what we actually have, the text as it has come down to us.  The text of the Rigveda you found in most edition is, as I already said, the result of a later canonization that is often referred to by the German term you see over here, namely Autoepische diascoyase.  This canonization took place in the Kudur realm around the year 1000 before Common Era, or maybe a little earlier than this.  The priestly editors of that time modernized the text of the Rigveda, probably by adapting it to the current language of that particular time and reason.  These changes, however, were not too pervasive and the transmitted text is still very close to the original.  But there are deviations from the Ur text that we are going to discuss now.  The deviations of the transmitted text from the original include, among other things, the following changes.  The elimination of hiatus, as in Joshi Advaram, which actually should be restored as Joshi Advaram with the Y turned back into an I in Rigveda 497A.  Then changes in quantity, as in Pavaka, where we have the first A long at the transmitted text, but it actually scans metrically as Pavaka.  You see the length, so to speak, changes position. Pavaka, of course, meaning pure.  Then we also have the removal of epithetic vowels. Thus the transmitted kamyam has to be read as kamyam with this epithetic eye over here, meaning beloved, desired.  Furthermore, we have the introduction of a very peculiar dialectal feature, namely the ʻ and ʻ. We find also in the first verse of the Rigveda that we speak later on.  Also, we will see that in the course of the next section, how historical linguistics can help to reconstruct the Ur text of the Rigveda.  All these deviations are mainly due to the overgeneralization of certain sandy phenomena, or they stem from the influence that Rig Vedic verses exert on each other because of their application as mantras in ritual.  In most cases, these changes, by the hand of the Kuru Redactors, can be identified and subsequently removed from the text, since they are indicated by meter.  In addition, they were applied very regularly and are on the whole, conspiciously more consistent with the usage of later Vedic periods.  The next topic we have to address is that of recitation.  The Rigveda is handed down in not only one text form, but many.  The two most important and also the oldest of those are the Samhita Pāta, or continuous text, with all external sandis applied, and the Pada Pāta, or word text,  which separates everything that qualifies as a word in Indian view and is thus free from most external sandy phenomena.  On the right, you can see a modern manuscript copy of the Rigveda Pada Pāta.  Later on, we go into more detail on all of this.  But first, I want to give you an impression of the modern recitation practice of the Rigveda.  The short video clip I am about to play to you shows the traditional teaching of the two first stances of the Rigveda, as performed in Basi, Maharashtra, in February 2002.  You will see that the teacher first gives a kind of introduction to the hymn by stating some basic information like the in-keep hit,  the god or gods it calls upon, its poet, here Madukchandas, from the Vishwamitra family, and its meter, which is typical for Agnihyam's Dighayati meter.  He then starts to recite the Samhita text verse by verse, a technique called Pada Shaha in Sanskrit.  His students repeat after him, but utter each Pada twice.  The teacher then starts to recite the Dighayati text verse by verse, a technique called Pada Shaha in Sanskrit.  He then starts to recite the Dighayati text verse by verse, a technique called Pada Shaha in Sanskrit.  He then starts to recite the Dighayati text verse by verse, a technique called Pada Shaha in Sanskrit.  He then starts to recite the Dighayati text verse by verse, a technique called Pada Shaha in Sanskrit.  He then starts to recite the Dighayati text verse by verse, a technique called Pada Shaha in Sanskrit.  He then starts to recite the Dighayati text verse by verse, a technique called Pada Shaha in Sanskrit.  He then starts to recite the Dighayati text verse by verse, a technique called Pada Shaha in Sanskrit.  He then starts to recite the Dighayati text verse by verse, a technique called Pada Shaha in Sanskrit.  He then starts to recite the Dighayati text verse by verse, a technique called Pada Shaha in Sanskrit.  He then starts to recite the Dighayati text verse by verse, a technique called Pada Shaha in Sanskrit.  He then starts to recite the Dighayati text verse by verse, a technique called Pada Shaha in Sanskrit.  He then starts to recite the Dighayati text verse by verse, a technique called Pada Shaha in Sanskrit.  He then starts to recite the Dighayati text verse by verse, a technique called Pada Shaha in Sanskrit.  After this lovely video, it is time to take a closer look at the text we just heard.  Here you see the Samhita part of the very first stanza that opens the Rig Veda.  First, the transmitted text in Devaynagari.  Then, its metrically restored text in transliteration.  And finally, in line 3, the metrical structure of the restored text.  Down at the bottom, we find the English translation of the text.  It calls upon Agni, the Vedic god of fire, and reads as follows.  Agnim ile puruhitam yajnyasnya devam ridvijam holtaram ratnadaatamam.  It translates into English as Agni duayinvog, the one place to the fore, god and priest of the sacrifice, the hoter most richly conferring treasure.  The Pada part of this stanza that you can see on the upper half of this slide is obviously very different in outlook.  Each word or Pada in native grammar is separated by a vertical bar, the so-called Danda you see here, here and so on.  As a result, the effects of external sunday are removed and the words appear in their pause form.  For example, we have devam with the anusvara instead of devam with the m at the end.  And we saw other examples on the next slide.  Furthermore, compounds are split by means of a sign called avagraha, this one over here and here,  which is often represented by either a hyphen or an apostrophe in Latinized editions of the text.  Also note that the marking of the accents follows basically the same system at the samitaparta.  If, however, a given word bears no accent in the samitaparta, every single syllable of it is marked with the anudatta,  the small horizontal line underneath the syllable.  I have it down here and for example we have the word ilé here,  which is not accented in the samitaparta and thus is marked throughout with the anudatta.  For the sake of matching the text recited by the Vedas students, we continue our little sample with the second stanza of the Rigveda 1.1.  The samitā text reads in restored version, of course, Agnihi purveibhir rishibhir idio nutannayruta sa devan eha vakshati.  What translates into English as Agni to be invoked by ancient sages and by the present ones, he will carry the gods here to this place.  Note that we encounter in idio the first instance of a deviation of the transmitter's text from the original that we can restore by the help of meter.  Because if you count the syllables of verse B up here, in the transmitted text, we discover that it is short one syllable,  because we count idio nutannayruta, seven syllables, but the Gayatri meter needs eight.  A metrical void that can be easily undone by restoring the epynthetic I here as done in the restored text.  Thus, in the end, we get a perfect Gayatri first of the syllables.  From the paddha part of the stanza, we learn that the avagraha can not only separate the members of a compound, but also certain affixes and endings.  Thus, bihi, the instrumental plural ending, is separated from rishi.  This use of the avagraha, however, is only listed if the juncture in question exhibits regularly the effects of external sundae in the text of the samitaparta.  Because in case the morphological analysis is rendered difficult due to vowel construction or similar processes, like in puhvi bihi with the i,  the avagraha is not applied, although the same morpheme is separated otherwise, if you compare bihi and bihi.  Both words actually do agree.  This is the end of our introductory section. Starting with the next lesson, Götzkadana and I will introduce you to the phonology of early Vedic.  Thank you for your attention. Or in Sanskrit, bahavod danyavadah. Take care and goodbye.
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