An attempt at an annotated Swadesh wordlist for Vedic Sanskrit

Artem Trofimov (School for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, RANEPA, Moscow; artemii.trofimov@gmail.com)

Journal of Language Relationship, № 18/3-4, 2020 - p.227-248

Abstract: The goal of the present paper is to illustrate certain philological and semantic issues that arise during the compilation of the 110-item Swadesh wordlist for the Vedic language, which is itself a necessary procedure for any satisfactory lexicostatistical analysis of Indo-Iranian and Indo-European data. The language of the Atharva Veda, the second of the Vedas, was chosen as the main idiom, since it does not have quite as many lacunae and is more stylistically neutral than the other texts. For the purposes of the wordlist, I have applied the semantic specifications currently used in the GLBD (Global Lexicostatistical Database). The text of the Atharva Veda was subsequently compared with the Rig Veda in order to obtain more reliable and comprehensive results and to study linguistic evolution at the early stages of development of the Vedic language. Research shows that 87 items of the Vedic list are more or less uncontroversial. Six meanings correspond to different items in the Atharva Veda and the Rig Veda; there are also three cases of consistent morphological differences between the two texts. In 10 cases, it was necessary to choose the most appropriate candidate from a variety of synonyms. Only four lacunae remain in the text of Atharva Veda. Finally, there are five cases of suppletive stems and five cases of synonymy. The study shows that the Swadesh list for Vedic can be successfully compiled based on textual data and with the application of a strict semantic standart.

Keywords: lexicostatistics, Swadesh list, Vedic language, Atharva Veda, Rig Veda, synonymy, suppletivism

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