Professor Hans Hock, from University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA will be delivering a seminar titled "Some Issues in Comparative Linguistics: Indo-Aryan and Dravidian". 

Abstract

A well-known controversy in Indo-Aryan linguistics centers on the question whether phonological reconstruction based on Modern Indo-Aryan can recover Old Indo-Aryan (Vedic Sanskrit) or only some form of Apabhraṁśa; see Pattanayak 1966, Katre 1968, Sen 1973, and Miranda 1978. I demonstrate that if we limit ourselves to the “peninsular” varieties of Indo-Aryan, reconstructions do not go beyond Apabhraṁśa, except that the retention of stop + r clusters in Gujarati provides hints at an earlier stage. Once the “Dardic” languages of the northwest are added, however, reconstructions begin to more fully approximate Old Indo-Aryan. Important conclusions are that comparative linguistics must draw on the evidence of all the languages and dialects (not just majority languages or those with a literary tradition) and that reconstructions must EXPLAIN the attested facts. Further, the fact that if properly pursued in this way comparative reconstruction approximates Old Indo-Aryan provides an important verification of the soundness of comparative linguistic methodology.

Dravidian comparative linguistics has yielded a “Standard” model of reconstructed Proto-Dravidian, with a triple contrast dental : alveolar : retroflex, with agglutinative morphology, and with severe restrictions on the occurrence of more than one finite verb per complex sentence; see e.g. Caldwell 1875, Krishnamurti 2003. However, work by Ramasamy (1981), Lakshmi Bai (1985), and Steever (1987) has cast doubts on the last of these features. Questions have also been raised regarding morphology; see Murugaiyan & Pilot-Raichoor 2004, Pilot-Raichoor 2012. Finally, Zvelebil (1970), Tikkanen (1987), and Hock (1996) have expressed concerns about reconstructing the contrast dental : alveolar : retroflex for the stops. Their proposal to account for alveolar and retroflex stops in terms of assimilations to preceding alveolar and retroflex sonorants has met with vigorous disapproval by scholars like Bh. Krishnamurti and P. S. Subrahmanyam; and there has also been a fair amount of resistance to the notion that agglutinative morphology is not original in Dravidian. In this part of my talk I argue that the methodology of comparative linguistics favors the “non-Standard” proposals and requires a serious rethinking of Dravidian comparative reconstruction. I conclude by considering the implications of these findings for theories regarding the origin of “India as a Linguistic Area”.

About the Speaker

Professor Hans Hock is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics, Professor Emeritus of Germanic Languages and Literatures and Professor Emeritus of Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies Classics at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA. His research interests are: Historical and comparative linguistics, language contact, language and ideology, typology, phrasal prosody.