Publication Date:January 1995 Shipping:Eligible for Super Saver Shipping Availability:Usually ships in 24 hours
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Vedic Old Indian is one of our oldest rootsMay 12, 2006 2 out of 2 found this review helpful
The Rig Veda is written in the oldest Old Indian language, and what's more it is a unique even if quite extensive document, hence with nothing else from the same period to compare it with. Ms Elizarenkova refused - and she is 200% right - to retrospectively project what we may know about this language from some less old Old Indian documents to asses this unrivalled language of the Rig Veda. Consequently she has to study this language from inside. Her method is then very simple. She will not build a grammar of the language of the time when the Rig Veda was composed, but rather a stylistic study of the syntax of the particular language of the Rig Veda. First we have to understand the context in which this language was produced. She studies the Rsi, the poet-incantator-priest of those distant days, the way he worked and his social position, a hereditary quasi-divine position. Then she can enter the language itself since she understands the discursive situation that produced it. And she does it logically: vocabulary, metrics and phonetics, morphology and syntax. Every detail, every remark is deeply embedded in and enriched with the heritage collected from all the linguists who studied this language before her. That enables her to show the real position that is hers and to support it with heavy arguments contrasting it with those of her predecessors. I was very fascinated by her study of theonyms, and that of metrics in general based on the use of the repetition of some names or words, or some paradigms of names or words, to build a highly expressive oral language that can be used as an incantation in some religious ritual. I was also deeply fascinated by her study of infinitives and participles in their syntactic complexification of the sentence by appending what can be a sentence, or the equivalent of a sentence, to a verb or a noun with rich semantic possibilities varying with the formal means used to articulate the infinitive or participial clauses onto the main clause: absolute accusative, absolute genitive, absolute locative for three examples. This ancient language has the rich possibilities - if not even more - of Sanskrit and Pali and these possibilities are perfectly used by the authors to support the poetic form and at the same time to reinforce themselves from it. Finally the book is more a stylistic description of the language than a grammar of it. The grammatical presentation makes it easy to read for a linguist. The stylistic presentation she could have chosen might have made the book more dynamic but a lot less easy to penetrate linguistically. She tried to sketch that possible poetical approach in her conclusion, but that makes this conclusion stand aloof when compared to the rest of the book.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University of Paris Dauphine & University of Paris I Pantheon Sorbonne
