The ‘Masculine – Feminine’ Opposition and Contiguous to It in Languages and Culture of Ancient and Modern India

Abstract

The paper is dedicated to problems of formation and development of the opposition ‘masculine – feminine’ all the way along the evolution of culture and languages of the ancient and contemporary India. For ancient period of the Indian culture, represented by the phase of Vedas and by the later stage of Brāhmaṇas, the Vedic language and Early Sanskrit were correspondingly the two most important and functionally specified versions of one common language, namely, of the Ancient Indo-Aryan. The Vedic variant of the latter is manifested in texts of Vedas, first of all in Rgveda, while Sanskrit finds its earliest representation in Brāhmaṇas, the prosaic commentaries on Vedas. It was inside those two language versions and groups of texts that the universal theory of mithuná as a system of twin objects filling up the existing universe, was elaborated. In each and every one of mithuná pairs, the participants were internally connected by ritually and sexually important gender-asymmetrical dichotomy of ‘masculine – feminine’. The first, “masculine”, component of this latter opposition was the bearer of the dominant role, while the second was always functioning as a recessive one. This system of mithuná, mirroring the sexual ties between people or anthropomorphic creatures of different genders (specially between gods), was originally active mostly with the animate nouns, but later on, at the epoch of Brāhmaṇas, it has also spread through processes of metaphorization onto the great massive of inanimate substantives. Its role became relevant for the constituents of different linguistic levels – such as, e.g., syllabic structure of lexemes, the set of the typical features of word-classes, the grammatical categories of the word-forms, the associations of nouns with different functional styles, etc. – the concrete samples of the structures of those types are in detail analyzed in the paper. Methodologically the paper is based on combination of the philological method with standard mechanisms of investigating the dead language semantics and also with certain elements of structural linguistics approach. It is also demonstrated in the paper that for contemporary speakers of the New Indo-Aryan languages any ritualistic or cultural values implicated by the ancient concept of mithuná have practically stopped to exist, but the central opposition of ‘masculine – feminine’ and the additional dichotomies like ‘greater – less’ or ‘even – odd’ together with formal means of expressing the corresponding meanings also have been rudimentarily preserved in New Indo-Aryan.