[INDOLOGY] Hindi v Sanskrit

Fri Aug 21 14:12:15 UTC 2015

Dear Professor Hart and Colleagues,
The morphosyntax and word order in Old and Pre-old Tamil are very 
captivating and intriguing.The only structure where we notice a strict 
and regular constituent order is in the case of “determinans- 
determinatum”. In other cases the order of constituent is conditioned 
mostly by “information structure” rather than the strictly syntactic 
functions.

I would like to complete the bibliographical reference and add few more 
publications on the issue.

Our work on a selected corpus of Classical Tamil has been published: A. 
Murugaiyan et Christiane Pilot-Raichoor, (2004) « Les prédications 
indifférenciées en dravidien : témoins d'une évolution typologique 
archaïque », /Les constituants prédicatifs et la diversité des langues, 
(Mémoires de la Sociéte Linguistique de Paris/, tome 14), Louvain, 
Peeters, p. 155-177.

We are currently working on an extended corpus of the Sangam literature.

Pilot-Raichoor has published another important article based on the 
Tamil-Brāhmī corpus

(2012)“Tamil Brahmi inscriptions: a Critical Landmark in the History of 
the Dravidian Languages” in Appasamy Murugaiyan (Ed.) /New Dimensions in 
Tamil Epigraphy: /(Papers from symposia held at Ecole Pratique des 
Hautes Etudes, Section des Sciences historiques et philologiques, Paris 
in 2005 and 2006; and few special papers), CreA publishers, Chennai, 
317-349.

On the Sangam texts, there is an article on what is known as “Dative 
Subjects” among the South Asian linguists: A. Murugaiyan, 2004. « Note 
sur les prédications expérientielles en tamoul classique », /Bulletin de 
la Société de Linguistique de Paris, /99, p. 363-382.

On the Tamil Inscriptions I have published two articles:

A. Murugaiyan. 2012. «Hero Stone Inscriptions in Tamil (450-650 CE.): 
Text to Meaning: A Functional Perspective», Appasamy Murugaiyan (Ed.) 
/New Dimensions in Tamil Epigraphy: /(Papers from symposia held at Ecole 
Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Section des Sciences historiques et 
philologiques, Paris in 2005 and 2006; and few special papers), CreA 
publishers, Chennai, 316-351.

And A. Murugaiyan. 2015. Identifying Basic Constituent Order in Old 
Tamil: Issues in historical linguistics with Special Reference to Tamil 
Epigraphic texts (400-650 CE). /International Journal of Dravidian 
Linguistics, /Vol. 44 No. 2. 1-18.

Best wishes,
A. Murugaiyan

	*Appasamy Murugaiyan*
EPHE-UMR 7528 Mondes iranien et indien
27 rue Paul-Bert
94204- Ivry-sur-Seine. France

Le 19/08/2015 02:20, George Hart a écrit :
> This is fascinating — thanks. I have gone over a good part of Sangam 
> literature carefully and cannot remember ever finding a relative 
> clause, though of course this doesn’t mean they didn’t exist. 
> Certainly they are fairly common in modern Tamil. It would be 
> interesting to know when they first appear in the literature and 
> whether they are documented in other premodern Dravidian literatures. 
> Regarding word order, it is true, as Susan Herring shows, that old 
> Tamil often does not put the finite verb at the end. But it should be 
> noted that in the case of  converbials (adverbial participials) and 
> adjectival participles, the verb form always comes at the end of its 
> phrase — nothing after it can be construed with it unless it is the 
> noun construed with the participial adjective, in which case the noun 
> must directly follow it or (occasionally) be very near it. In this 
> way, the word order of old Tamil is thoroughly constrained, as far as 
> I can see. Sanskrit, obviously, is completely different, allowing 
> related words to be far apart.
>
> I am looking forward to finding out about the theories of 
> Pilot-Ramichoor and Murugaiyan about pre-old-Tamil morphology — hope 
> they are published.
>
> I am glad my mistake (saying Hindi was right-branching) led to a very 
> intriguing discussion. George Hart
>
>> On Aug 18, 2015, at 9:37 AM, Hock, Hans Henrich <hhhock at illinois.edu 
>> <mailto:hhhock at illinois.edu>> wrote:
>>
>> Let me add a few more cents’ worth.
>>
>> The idea that Indo-Aryan, including Sanskrit, fundamentally differs 
>> from Dravidian in its syntactic typology, though sanctioned by a 
>> certain “tradition” in South Asian linguistics, is problematic on 
>> several counts.
>>
>> First, the only area in which (most of) Modern Indo-Aryan can be said 
>> to be robustly right-branching is that of Complement structures 
>> (marked by /ki/ke/jo/je/) — a relatively recent phenomenon, 
>> reflecting Persian influence. (Some of the languages also are 
>> beginning to adopt postnominal, center-embedded relative clauses, 
>> most likely based on the English model.)
>>
>> Earlier Indo-Aryan is essentially left-branching, but with a fair 
>> amount of word-order (and not just phrase-order) freedom, depending 
>> on genre. This freedom is often contrasted with the supposedly very 
>> rigid structure of Modern Dravidian. However, Susan Herring has 
>> furnished excellent evidence from Old Tamil attesting to a fair 
>> amount of phrase-order freedom, includiing structures that are 
>> verb-initial, with all other elements extraposed to the right. I have 
>> observed similar freedom (through interviews) in a colloquial variety 
>> of Modern Kannada, and I suspect that the rigidity attributed to the 
>> modern (literary) languages is an effect of diglossia, similar to the 
>> relatively more rigid sentence structure of modern literary German, 
>> as contrasted with colloquial or dialectal varieties.
>>
>> Another feature shared by traditional Indo-Aryan, including Sanskrit, 
>> and Dravidian is the fact that relativization can be encoded both in 
>> nonfinite form, through (relative) participles, and in finite form, 
>> through relative-correlative structures. The latter had for a long 
>> time been considered to be Indo-Aryan borrowings in Dravidian (and 
>> some linguists considered the Indo-Aryan counterparts to somehow 
>> reflect an innovation, triggered by contact with Dravidian); but 
>> starting with research by Ramasamy, Lakshmi Bai, and Steever, it has 
>> become clear that the structures are indigenous to Dravidian, and I 
>> have presented arguments and evidence that the Sanskrit/Indo-Aryan 
>> structures are inherited from Proto-Indo-European.
>>
>> There is, however, one important behavioral difference: Dravidian 
>> relative clauses can only precede their correlative counterparts; in 
>> Sanskrit/Indo-Aryan (and PIE) they can either precede or follow (and 
>> in some cases both precede and follow, one on each side). Whether 
>> this should be considered evidence for “right branching” or “mixed 
>> right- and left-branching” might be subject to debate (fueled, in 
>> many cases, by theory-internal or even ideological considerations). 
>> What is important to know, however, is that relative-correlatives are 
>> a common phenomenon in languages that would otherwise be considered 
>> “rigid” SOV/verb-final or left-branching.
>>
>> One more thing that is worth bearing in mind. Recent publications by 
>> Pilot-Raichoor (with Murugaiyan) suggest that prehistoric (i.e. 
>> pre-Old Tamil) Dravidian may have been very different in its 
>> morphology and, by implication, in its morphosyntax, with traces 
>> still observable in Old Tamil and elsewhere. At this point, these 
>> publications do not seem to have been subjected to the (obligatory) 
>> vetting process; from personal experience I know that many 
>> Dravidologists are skeptical. Nevertheless, this work suggests that 
>> we need to be cautious concerning claims about the syntactic 
>> similarities and differences between Indo-Aryan and Dravidian at, 
>> say, 1500 BC.
>>
>> All the best,
>>
>> Hans Henrich Hock
>>
>>
>>
>> On 18 Aug 2015, at 07:58, Robert Zydenbos <zydenbos at uni-muenchen.de 
>> <mailto:zydenbos at uni-muenchen.de>> wrote:
>>
>>> George Hart wrote:
>>>
>>>> Of course, Sanskrit compounds can seem
>>>> difficult if one’s native language does not mimic their syntax. Both
>>>> Hindi and Sanskrit are right-branching, whereas Dravidian is
>>>> left-branching.
>>>
>>> Please allow me a bit of nit-picking. If by 'left-branching' we mean
>>> that, e.g., attributes precede the substantives to which they refer,
>>> then both Sanskrit and Hindi (and all the rest of the so-called
>>> Indogermanic / Indo-European languages of India, i.e., 'Indo-Aryan') are
>>> quite left-branching indeed. The so-called 'genitive' in Hindi (which is
>>> actually a kind of adjective, inflected kā-ke-kī according to the gender
>>> and case of the following substantive) already illustrates this.
>>>
>>> Of course it is possible for genitives in Sanskrit or (very rarely)
>>> Hindi to follow the substantives to which they refer, esp. for metrical
>>> reasons in verse. But it seems that also in Sanskrit prose, genitives,
>>> as attributive words, as a rule precede that to which they refer – which
>>> is precisely not the tendency in a language such as Latin, which has a
>>> more clearly right-branching tendency. I think that this syntactic
>>> feature is one more bit of evidence that the Indo-Aryan languages were
>>> heavily Dravidianized already from their earliest historical beginnings,
>>> as F.B.J. Kuijper and others have pointed out.
>>>
>>>> Naturally, people who speak those languages find
>>>> Sanskrit compounds, which are left-branching like Dravidian languages,
>>>> somewhat difficult.
>>>
>>> Indeed the internal structure of samāsas is left-branching, which may
>>> explain why an author like Rāmānujācārya in Tamiḻnāḍu sometimes uses
>>> very long compounds such as are uncommon among philosophical authors.
>>>
>>> Stella Sandahl wrote:
>>>
>>>> The Sanskrit compound is not at all as complicated as students (and 
>>>> even teachers) like to think.
>>>
>>> Indeed. Though there may be statistically determinable average limits of
>>> quick comprehension among ordinary readers, I am sure that it is largely
>>> a matter of what one is accustomed to.
>>>
>>> RZ
>>>
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>>
>
>
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