A Study of Sanskrit Loanwords in Chinese

International Journal of Linguistics

Southeast Asia was under Indian influence for more than a thousand years so that the traces of Indian civilization can be determined from a lot of evidence. The entry of Indian civilization in this region has shown that Sanskrit has merged with Thai, the national language of Thailand, and Patani Malay, the mother tongue language of Thai Malays who live in the deep south of Thailand. Borrowing is a process of language contact and language change that can happen in all languages and is not limited to borrow in the same language family or the same type of language. All of them belong to different family trees. Sanskrit is a member of the Indo-European language family, whereas the Thai language is accepted to Tai-Kadai and Patani Malay belongs to the Austronesian language family. This study aims to study consonant changes of shared Sanskrit loanwords in Thai and Patani Malay. This research employed qualitative methodology. Data were collected from documentaries. The findings showed that...

2017

This paper is a preliminary investigation into the problems the representation of the accents of Vedic Sanskrit poses to Sanskrit lexicography. The purpose is to assess the principles applied in various lexicographic works in the representation of Vedic accents and its relation to the underlying linguistic category as well as traditions of accent marking in different texts. Since the focus is on Sanskrit lexicography, we ignore the complexity of accent marking in manuscripts and the diversity of accent marking across different Indic scripts that were used to write Sanskrit over the ages. We will restrict ourselves to accent marking in Devanagari and Latin script in print, as these two are the relevant systems for virtually all of modern philological Sanskrit lexicography.

2020

A proper study of grammar presupposes an adequate study phonetics which is supplied in the cae of Sanskrit grammar by the pertinent sections in the ancient Siksa and the Pratishakhya works. Out of the several means of thought such as the activities and gestures by the face, the hands and other parts of the body, language forms the best and the most efficient one. Sounds are in fact, the vibrations produced by the air which leaves the lungs and sets the vocal cords in motion. Ancient grammarians have mentioned a few additional factors in respect of the production of sound, such as the comprehension of an object, the formation of a notion about it, a desire to express the notion formed and adequate effort to express the notion by speech. German Sanskrit scholars have found that German nouns vary based on gender. Every noun is categorized into feminine, masculine and neuter gender, just as in the case of Sanskrit. Much like how it works in Sanskrit, the ending of a verb in German chang...

Journal of South Asian Languages and Linguistics 4.2, 2017

The journal provides a peer-reviewed forum for publishing original research articles and reviews in the fi eld of South Asian languages and linguistics, with a focus on descriptive, functional and typological investigations. Descriptive analyses are encouraged to the extent that they present analyses of lesserknown languages, based on original fi eldwork. Other areas covered by the journal include language change (including contact-induced change) and sociolinguistics. The journal also publishes occasional special issues on focused themes relating to South Asian languages and linguistics for which it welcomes proposals.

Words, the building blocks of language, illumine everything. Words are, in general, acquired through a constant exposure to language during the critical period in the first language acquisition. In second language acquisition, on the other hand, the teaching-learning setting of words poses to be a highly challenging task for teachers as well as learners on the ground of various morphological inflections and phonological patterns of the words of L2 which may be different from those of the L1 of the learner. Sanskrit, an ancient and scholarly language, is the indweller of all Indian languages because of which an Indian can fairly make out the words of Sanskrit and does not require a formal learning of it. As established by the West, it also has a very close connection to Indo-European languages and thus English. The English teaching community in India has been on a relentless quest to come up with even better word-teaching practices for so many decades now. If the community can make use of the phenomenon of morphological and phonological transformations between Sanskrit and English, it will not only help the students learn words but also make them own the L2 through the Sanskrit words. The present paper concentrates on the morphological and phonological transformation of words between Sanskrit and English which is by no means exhaustive. The impetus set here is expected to stir up the interest in the teachers to carry out some research on the phenomenon and thus provide the learners the incentive for better learning.

Proceedings of the 50th Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society, 2020

This paper is concerned with the lexical representation of accentedness — i.e., the property by which certain morphemes attract word-level stress in languages in which its surface distribution is not phonologically predictable. Recent constraint-based approaches to this question diverge in whether a lexical accent is (i) an abstract prominence autosegmentally linked to an input vowel, which is thus preferentially incorporated into metrical structure (Revithiadou 1999, 2007, Alderete 2001, i.a.); or (ii) metrical structure directly pre-specified in the input (Inkelas 1999, Özçelik 2014, i.a.). I argue that only (ii) can account for the distribution of word stress in Vedic Sanskrit (Indic, Indo-European). Crucial evidence for this proposal comes from cases in which an accented vowel is eliminated in the output, which results in an apparent rightward stress shift (termed ``secondary mobility'' by Kiparsky 2010). I show that only on the metrical analysis is it possible to reconcile these rightward shifts with the phonological preference for left edge stress otherwise observed in the language.

The Volume under review comprises twelve papers authored by as many scholars that were initially presented at the 12th World Sanskrit Conference (Linguistics section) held at Helsinki Finland in July, 2003. The papers included in the Volume relate to several themes from historical phonology, morpho-syntax, etymology of OIA, to Iranian loan words and computer processing of Sanskrit. The Volume opens with "The development of PIE *sć into Sanskrit/(c)ch/" authored by Masato Kobayashi wherein the earlier positions on the issue are revisited and with ample data from PIE, PIIr, OIA and MIA, the author concludes that the PIIr *ć is considered to have been a palatal affricate, hence the *sć cluster involved three obstruent phases in two consonant slots (*st∫). Consequently, by the general rule of simplification, the clusterinitial consonant *s was lost leaving behind t∫, spread to two consonant slots. In pre-Vedic phonology "the feature [aspirated] was redundantly specified for all sibilants, as the sandhi -tś->cch reflects. Finally, [t∫] was phonemicized as an aspirate/(c) ch/and filled in the empty place of an aspirated voiceless palatal plosive in the consonant inventory of OIA." Hans Henrich Hock in "Reflexivization in the Rig-Veda (and beyond)" presents more evidence from Rig-Veda to demonstrate that "the reflexive possessive is complementary to middle voice verb inflection, marking the one constituent that cannot be expressed on the verb, namely the nominal genitive relation; and that the full reflexive (RV tanū′) is indeed a very recent innovation, whose development can still be traced in the Rig-Veda". The complementarity of the reflexive possessive and middle voice is based upon the arguments that "nominal genitive relation is fundamentally different from that of the case relations of verbal complements" and the adnominal genitive relation is not subcategorized on the verb". Rejecting Lehmann"s (1974) observation that PIE had no reflexive pronouns at all, (it marked reflexivization on the verb, as middle voice), simply meaning "own", Hock demonstrates that sva-does behave as a reflexive in several instances in Rig-Veda and that in the RV, (Book 10) there are some instances of the use of tanū′ as a clear reflexive, with verb in the active voice, which is an innovation and the first attestation of the later Vedic and Classical pattern in which a reflexive pronoun, nominal in origin (RV tanū′, later ātmán) has been reinterpreted as the major marker of reflexivization.

Journal of South Asian Languages and Linguistics, 2017

This is the first volume in the series of Indo-European short grammars announced by the Publishing house Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag, "Kurzgrammatiken indogermanischer Sprachen und Sprachstufen", or KiSS for short. This collection of grammars aims to provide basic information about the grammatical system and textual documentation of Indo-European languages in condensed form, that can be used for advanced study of the corresponding languages and for beginners alike. This new series will thus compete with another collection of Indo-European short grammars of similar format (though more diachronically oriented), Brill Introductions to Indo-European Languages, started in 2014 with the concise Avestan grammar by Michiel de Vaan and Javier Martínez (a review will appear in one of the coming issues of this journal). As the author Sabine Ziegler, Professor at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, explains in preface (p. 1), this grammar is based on her long-term experience of teaching Sanskrit to the students of Indo-European and Indology. The book consists of thirteen chapters. Chapter 1, "Einleitung" (pp. 3-8), opens with a very short, two-page, overview of the differences between Classical and Vedic Sanskrit. It is followed by a survey of Old Indian literature, from the earliest Vedic texts, R̥ gveda, onwards up to Classical Sanskrit literature, poetry (Mahākāvya) and narrative literature (collections of tales). Chapter 2, "Phonemsystem und Schrift" (pp. 9-23), presents the Sanskrit phonological system and writing system, Devanāgarī. The next short Chapter 3, "Betonung und Silbenstruktur" (pp. 24-25), explains the rules of accentuation of Classical Sanskrit forms, which are basically identical with those known from Latin (accent on the penultimate syllable unless this is short; in this latter case, the accent is on the antepenultimate). I am not sure this marginal issue (of little value for Sanskrit grammar proper, let alone Indo-European linguistics in general) deserves a separate, even short, chapter; moreover, the notation of the type bhárati, bharánti, illustrating this rule, appears quite confusing, being at odds with Vedic accentuation. A compromise notation might use underlining without accent marks (bharati, bharanti).