Indo-Aryan words in Hurrian

[Rajarshi Banerjee]

<INDOLOGY at LISTSERV.LIV.AC.UK>




This is an old canard, perpetuated by SS Misra (Aryan Problem 1992) and
Norman (1995, Erdosy's Indo_Aryan vol.)
As has been known for long, satta in satta-vartana 'seven turns' has been
influenced by Hurrite  'seven' (J. Friedrich 1940) and is not a reflex of
the much later MIA satta 'seven'; in the same vein, the words starting with
b- such as bi- did not receive their b- from a MIA pronunciation of vi,  as
Misra maintains, but are due to the fact that Mitanni does not allow
initial v- (Diakonoff 1971: 30, 45). In sum, the Mitanni IA words are not
Prakritic but (pre-)Rgvedic.

explnations are:

1.  Could be produced by analogy with the Hurrian word for 7.
2.  Might well be an artifact of the writing system.
3.  Manifests a very common sound change, not one unique to OIA->MIA.

well if the hurrian word for 7 is not close to satta then
we do indeed have to think about a transition

sapta->satta.

Our image of OIA is just from the vedas.
The first snap shot of any colloqial indic form is from 400 BC.

Its some what an artificial assumption that till 400 BC
only vedic or classical sanskrit was spoken and no sound changes occured.

If sapta->satta or v->b is a common sound change why should it be restricted
to just MIA
such changes could have happened many times eg it does seem to be happening
in mitanni.

Is this change so natural?
mordern indian languages are full of geminates
or stops like in satta showing a tendency to preserve the meter of a word
What about mordern kurdish dialects armenian turkish etc
were such stops in hurrian due to sumerian/akkadian influence. What about
elamite?
arabic does have such stops but not as much as tamil or panjabi I think.