TRACING VEDIC DIALECTS - People.fas.harvard.edu

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