Themes and Tasks in Old and Middle Indo-Aryan Linguistics

by Bertil Tikkanen and Heinrich Hettrich

The present volume contains twelve of the sixteen papers presented at the Linguistics Section of the 12th World Sanskrit Conference (Helsinki, Finland, 13-18 July, 2003)  T

he 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.