Sanskrit and PIE

[Arun Gupta]

So, 95% to 96% of the vocabulary of Rigvedic Sanskrit is "not foreign".
"Not foreign" presumably means that the words conform to the general
patterns for RV Sanskrit words.

Of the not-foreign RV Sanskrit words, how many are Indo-European in origin ?
(i.e., have corresponding words in a sufficient number of other
Indo-European languages to be confident that these words were in
Proto-Indo-European, or were borrowed sufficiently early -- well before
Indo-Aryan entry into India -- from other languages during the theorized
Indo-European language dispersal) ?

Surely the answer is not anywhere close to 95% !(  If it is that high, what
reason is there not to believe in OIT ? )

Thank you,
-arun gupta






Arlo Griffiths  <griffithsa at RULLET.LEIDENUNIV.NL> wrote:

[snip, for brevity]
>In Indo-Iranian Journal 38 (1995), p. 261, Kuiper was able to present a
>more exact figure: "We owe it to the computer that it is now known. A Dr.
>Alexander Lubotsky kindly informs me, the sum total [of Rigvedic lexemes -
>AG] is 100063. The percentage of the foreign  works [sic, read: words]
>listed there [in Kuiper 1991] is not, accordingly, ``at least five per
>cent'' ..., but 3.8 per cent. If only `words sensu stricto' were counted
>(As in Aryans, p. 95), the percentage might be well over 4 per cent."