Themes and Tasks in Old and Middle Indo Aryan Linguistics : Papers of the 12 World Sanskrit: Vol:V

Contents: Preface. 1. The development of proto-Indo-Iranian sc into Sanskrit/(c)ch/Masato Kobayashi. 2. Reflexivization in the Rig-Veda (and beyond)/Hans Henrich Hock. 3. The Vedic medio-passive aorists, statives and their participles: reconsidering the paradigm/Leonid Kulikov. 4. On the evolutionary changes in the old and middle Indo-Aryan systems of case and adpositions/Vit Bubenik. 5. Notes on the instrumental case of the subject/agent vs. other cases in Buddhist Sanskrit/Boris Oguibenine. 6. Prakrit-like developments in old Indo-Aryan: testing the 'Kolver-principle'/Erik Seldeslachts. 7. Iranian elements in Sanskrit/Hassan Rezai Baghbidi. 8. Further links between the Indo-Iranian substratum and the BMAC language/Georges-Jean Pinault. 9. Indo-Aryan and Dravidian convergence: gerunds and noun composition/Hartmut Scharfe. 10. The Sanskrit translation of the Avestan Haoma Liturgy in the light of recent research/John S. Sheldon. 11. A preliminary study of Gandhari lexicography/Andrew Glass. 12. Lexicon-directed segmentation and tagging in Sanskrit/Gerard Huet. Index.

"The present volume contains twelve of the sixteen papers presented at the linguistics section of the 12 World Sanskrit Conference (Helsinki, Finland, 13-18 July, 2003). The papers span a wide range of topics and time depth, extending from common Indo-Iranian all the way to Modern Indo-Aryan. The problems and tasks addressed in these contributions pertain to the historical phonology of Sanskrit, Vedic morphosyntax, the evolutionary morphosyntax of Indo Aryan, the Syntax of Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit, Old Indo-Aryan etymologies, Iranian Loanwords in Sanskrit, ancient Central and South Asian language contacts, the Sanskrit translation of the Avestan Haoma Liturgy, Gandhari lexicography, and the computer processing of Sanskrit. A trend which can be discerned in some of these papers, as well as in present-day Sanskrit studies in general, is the ever-increasing impact of modern linguistic theories on, in particular, phonology and syntax. Computational linguistics, which has much to offer in terms of utility and challenges, is a newcomer in the field." (jacket)