TRACING VEDIC DIALECTS - People.fas.harvard.edu
TRACING VEDIC DIALECTS - People.fas.harvard.edu
TRACING VEDIC DIALECTS - People.fas.harvard.edu
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Furthermore, the comparatively great unity of Vedic Koine was reinforced<br />
continuously by the specialists of Vedic ritual, the Brahmins (cf. names like<br />
Caraka, or the wandering pupil, brahmacārin), who travelled over wide<br />
areas, like the Kuru-Pañcāla Brahmins found in the East at Janaka's court<br />
but also in the Panjab, in the Madra country. They thereby contributed to<br />
the levelling of certain dialect features, as well as to the diffusion of<br />
prestigious forms of certain areas of innnovation.<br />
In spite of this, the language of the North had a prestige of its own during<br />
the late Brāhmaṇa period; people went there to study it or liked to listen to<br />
Northern speakers. 28<br />
When variations occur in the Vedic texts, they can both reflect the locally<br />
underlying forms as well as represent such more or less widely spread<br />
prestigious forms of, e.g., the Kuru-Pañcāla or the Northern language. These<br />
features have to be distinguished from the special features of a particular<br />
Vedic school which has carried certain peculiarities of phonetic nature<br />
through its whole canon, e.g., Taittirīya súvar for 'normal' Vedic svàr, or<br />
Kapiṣṭhala yunaymi for the usual yunajmi (see below).<br />
In order to distinguish such forms from general and 'real' Vedic ones, one<br />
has to study the tradition of the texts in question as per school, from the late<br />
Vedic period to the Middle Ages, and has, then, slowly to "peel off" the<br />
various layers of textual changes like: medieval writing mistakes (MS ñch <<br />
cch, i.e Maitr. [t ch]) 29 ; medieval pronunciation and school habits like viṣṣṇu<br />
< viṣṇu in ŚB; influences of the Prātiśākhyas and of late Vedic orthoepic<br />
diaskeuasis. Finally, one has to establish the authentic form of a text (as<br />
opposed to its original form at the time of composition of the text in question,<br />
i.e., during the Vedic period). 30<br />
In the sequel, I will try to show that there was something like a Vedic Koine,<br />
but that this "<strong>edu</strong>cated Sanskrit" of the Brahmin community, which they<br />
used, as it is attested for Uddālaka Āruṇi, 31 in their disputations, from Madra<br />
(Panjab) to Videha (Bihar), existed in many local varieties based on the<br />
various forms of Old Indo-Aryan and of the underlying Prākṛt dialects<br />
spoken in the particular area. Unfortunately, we have access to only o n e<br />
28 See KB 7.6, and cf. Thieme, Pāṇ. and the Veda.<br />
29 See Lubotsky, IIJ 25<br />
30 For the doubling of consonant in ŚB, VS viṣṣṇu, ppra, etc. see Indian editions and some<br />
of the MSS; this probably goes back to Prātiśākhya influence; apparently, Uvaṭa on this<br />
topic has been misunderstood by medieval scholars.<br />
31 See ŚB 11 and BAU<br />
13