[INDOLOGY] Fun media piece about the Mitanni: Sanskrit in Ancient Syria

[George Thompson]

Dear George

I apologize for my slow response.  I've been dealing with my wife's health
issues [worrisome but not life-threatening].

As far as I can tell ādi is not attested in Vedic.  As for Skt. in general,
I don't have the resources to check right now.   As for horses, they are of
course common in Vedic, but riding horses is relatively rare, at least in
the RV, and when they are yoked, it is often hard to tell whether they are
yoked to chariots or to wagons.

Also, I recently got an email from a stranger who has informed me that the
Mitanni text has some loanwords from Middle Indo-Aryan!

This is why I am not interested in these OIT debates.

George

On Tue, Jun 30, 2015 at 3:44 PM, George Hart <glhart at berkeley.edu> wrote:

> Dear George,
>
> This brings to mind a question. In the Tamil Sangam texts, the fast gait
> (gallop, canter?) of a horse is called ādi (Tamil āti), always in the
> context of pulling a chariot. It would appear that people had some
> familiarity with Sanskrit texts on horse training.  It would be interesting
> (though, of course, unlikely) if the Hittite equivalent of that term
> appears in Kikkuli’s treatise, as that would suggest origins way back in
> PIE. Does anyone have any idea whether ādi is used in Sanskrit texts on
> horses and if so where? I’m not sure when horses first appeared in the
> Tamil area. Thanks, George
>
> On Jun 30, 2015, at 12:19 PM, George Thompson <gthomgt at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
>
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: George Thompson <gthomgt at gmail.com>
> Date: Tue, Jun 30, 2015 at 3:16 PM
> Subject: Re: [INDOLOGY] Fun media piece about the Mitanni: Sanskrit in
> Ancient Syria
> To: Nagaraj Paturi <nagarajpaturi at gmail.com>
>
>
> Dear Prof. Paturi,
>
> These 'ancient pastoral nomads' were pre-literate.  They didn't write any
> horse-training books.  The horse-training book was written by someone named
> Kikkuli, and he wrote it in Hittite, not Vedic.  In his Hittite
> horse-training manual there are some clearly pre-Vedic words that refer to
> horse-training and certain Vedic gods.  Kikkuli was transcribing into
> Hittite the words of these pre-Vedic nomads who taught the Hittites about
> horse-training.
>
> The article that Dominik refers to is a a rather teasing critique of Modi,
> et al.  It is not scholarly, but it gets the facts right for the most
> part.  Its main point is that the OIT theory is not supported by any good
> evidence.  It cites reliable sources like Anthony and the encyclopedia of
> IE by Mallory and Adams.  If you want to consider what Vedicists think
> about this, see Mayrhofer and Thieme, just as a start.
>
> Best wishes, as always,
>
> George
>
> On Tue, Jun 30, 2015 at 2:05 PM, Nagaraj Paturi <nagarajpaturi at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> The article has this sentence:
>>
>> So much so that 3,500 years later, modern Indians would celebrate the
>> language of these ancient pastoral nomads all the way out in Bangkok city.
>>
>> The sentence matches with the earlier part of the article, if  'ancient
>> pastoral nomads' is improved as 'ancient pastoral charioteer
>> horse-trainer-book-writing mercenary hymn-singing hymn-documenting nomads'
>>
>>
>> --
>> Prof.Nagaraj Paturi
>> Hyderabad-500044
>>
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