Boris A. Zakharyin

The paper shortly describes the main periods of the history of Kashmir starting from the times of antiquity and till the beginning of the 21st century. In parallel with this changes in sociolinguistic status of the Kashmiri language are analyzed. The latter was in the past and nowadays still remains the main means of oral communication for the majority of the population of the state, but the field of its functions has turned to be considerably reduced. Urdu declared as the only official language of Jammu and Kashmir, has ousted Kashmiri from practically all the spheres of writing, printing and electronic communication, including administrative activity, management, education and mass media. Thus Kashmiri, being historically the major language of the country, characterized by ancient and rather well developed literary tradition, by now has got transformed into a language of minority which may be qualified as an “endangered” one. In case the contemporary state of things remains preserved also in future, Kashmiri may simply disappear from the linguistic map of Hindustan.

The main achievements in the sphere of epistemology obtained in Jainism, one of the most interesting trends in religious and philosophical life of India in the 1st millennium BC, are briefly characterized in the paper. Two very important Jain theories of knowledge are analyzed: the seven-points scale of approaches towards a coordinated view upon objects, named ‘Naya-vaada’, and the relative-pluralistic doctrine of relations between the subject and object of cognition which is called ‘Syaad-vaada’ and which is based on seven fundamental assertions.

The article compares variable morphosyntactic constructions in Sanskrit with corresponding Russian constructions.

The article is dedicated to the lexical-semantic and grammatical characteristics of the two main components of the field “movement in ether” – namely, the verbs pát- “to fly; to fall” and dī-/ḍī- “to fly”. The main basis for the analysis was the hymns of the Rigveda; language data from texts in Middle Indo-Aryan and New Indo-Aryan were also used. The dynamics of the semantic and formal transformations of the verbs mentioned and of their derivatives, correlating with their functioning at different phases of the evolution of Indo-Aryan, was demonstrated.

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.

A report on the international Sanskrit conference in Jaipur, Rajasthan.

A report on an international conference on South Asian languages in Paris.

The paper is dedicated to analysis of the problems of presenting the grammatical information in the text of ‘Dhātupāṭha’ which is treated by the Indian grammatical tradition as created by Pāṇini himself (V cent. b.c.) in the form of an ‘Appendix’ to his Sanskrit Grammar ‘Aṣṭādhyāyī’. Having shortly characterized certain historical problems associated with ‘Dhātupāṭha’, the author puts special stress on the fact that all the nowadays available versions of the ‘Appendix’ have reached us in presentation of the later commentators and grammarians, and thus the problem of Pāṇini’s authorship of the treatise is still remaining unsolved. The grammatical information found in ‘Dhātupāṭha’ and not quite consistently presented in it needs to be explicitly opened. That is why the most basic tenets of Sanskrit verbal grammar are — in the shortest way possible — explicated in the paper.- Thus, the paper is supplied with the data concerning verbs’ classification into 10 classes through the help of the so called “presence basis”; the roots are characterized in accordance with their correspondences with the grammemes of Active and Middle voices; the information on the so called “accentuation” in verbal roots and in forms produced from them and on the meta-lingual properties of Sanskrit tones is given; the principles of the distribution of the ‘Dhātupāṭha’ roots into 3 different groups (‘seṭ’, ‘ániṭ’and ‘veṭ’) in accordance with their interaction with the connective ‘-i-‘ are explained; the information concerning the meanings references applied to a number of roots in the ‘Dhātupāṭha’ is also provided. In conclusion, the devices of coding the grammatical information which has been important for ‘pāṇinists’ of all times and which is present in the treatise are explained through the help of the two illustrative samples extracted from one of the versions of ‘Dhātupāṭha’ (S.Katre’s).

The suggested article deals with the problems of symbolism of the special instruments (sacrificial spoons) and of the corresponding substances (melted butter or fat) in them. Two types of rituals, namely, the ‘great’ one (‘śrauta’) and the ‘home’ one (‘gRhya-‘), are briefly characterized in the paper; in both of them the personified fire or God of Fire (Agni-) was always acting as the main subject and — simultaneously — as one of the objects of the ritual. It is demonstrated in the paper that the names for sacred instruments — namely, ‘srúc-’ (masc.) “scoop” and sruvá- (fem.) “ladle”- are originally the verbal nouns generated from verbal root sru- “to stream down” and “to destroy” — and an attempt is made to explain why this split in semantics of the root is not a casual one. It is also shown in the paper that ancient Indo-Aryans believed in a kind of the so called “sexual union” (mithuná) between the sacrificial spoons and melted butter (ā́ jya-) or fat (ghRtá-) as well as in the new mithuná of the substances accumulated in spoons with Agni of the altar. The detailed descriptions of the parameters of sacrificial spoons, of the types of materials used for their manufacture, of the varieties of their usage, etc. are supplied in the paper; the special function of the scoop (srúc-), as manifested in funeral rituals, is also explained. The reasons and circumstances causing the existence of the feature of “superpurity” in sacrificial spoons and in fatty substances inside them are listed in the paper; it is also marked there that it was absolutely impossible to use the spoons in question in any everyday necessities of life.