Themes and Tasks in Old and Middle Indo-Aryan Linguistics (Volume 5)

The present volume contains twelve of the sixteen papers presented at the Linguistics section of the 12th World Sanskrit Conference (elsinki, Final and, 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 general focus is, nevertheless, on Old and (early) Middle Indo-Iranian. The papers have been arranged thematically as follows: historical phonology of Old Indo-Aryan (Kobayashi), Vedic morphosyntax (Hock, Kulikov), evolutionary aspects of Indo-Aryan morphosyntax (Bubenik, Oguibenine), Old Indo Aryan etymology (Seldeslachts), loanwords and substrata/convergence at various stages of Indo-Aryan/-Iraman (Baghbidi, Pinault, Scharfe), Sanskrit translation of Avestan (Sheldon), Gandhari lexicography (Glass), and computer processing of Sanskrit (Huet). At the end of the volume there is a brief index giving selected technical terms, proper names, and Sanskrit words of particular interest treated at length in one or several articles. 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.