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Curzon Language Family Series
The Indo-Aryan Languages
The Indo-Aryan languages are spoken by at least 700 million people throughout India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka and the Maldive Islands. They have a claim to great antiquity, with the earliest Vedic Sanskrit texts dating to the end of the second millennium B.C. With texts in Old Indo-Aryan, Middle Indo-Aryan and Modern Indo-Aryan, this language family supplies a historical documentation of language change over a longer period than any other subgroup of Indo-European. This volume is divided into two main sections dealing with general matters and individual languages. Each chapter on the individual language covers the phonology and grammar (morphology and syntax) of the language and its writing system, and gives the historical background and information concerning the geography of the language and the number of its speakers.
- GenresLanguageLinguistics
1088 pages, Paperback
First published September 9, 2003
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June 2, 2009
THE INDO-ARYAN LANGUAGES, edited by George Cardona and Dhanesh Jain, is a typical installment of the Routledge Language Family Services, which seeks to give brief but insightful descriptions of as many languages in a family as possible. With this volume, Routledge has certainly outdone themselves, giving us over a thousand pages of linguistic goodness.
The first three chapters cover the language family in general. These are the General Introduction, "Sociolinguistics of the Indo-Aryan Languages" and "Writing Systems of the Indo-Aryan Languages". I am generally satisfied with the General Introduction's presentation of the debate over the Indo-European Urheimat and the influence from the substrate. However, I think it would have been better if George Cardona and Dhanesh Jain had laid out the devout Hindu line on this branch of linguistics, for they see Sanskrit as a perfect language of divine origin and the real parent of the Indo-European family, and they claim that Indo-European linguistics is a racist or colonialist science. That would better prepare readers for the nutjobs that discussions of these languages in public fora inevitably attract. Then there are three chapters on Middle Indo-Aryan. One covers Sanskrit, the second Asokan Prakrit and Pali, and the third Prakrits and Apabhramsa. The bulk of the book is dedicated to single-chapter descriptions of modern languages: Hindu, Urdu, Bangla, Asamiya, Oriya, Maithili, Magahi, Bhojpuri, Nepali, Panjabi, Sindhi, Gujarati, Marathi, Konkani, Sinhala, Dardic, and Kashmiri.
While I have training in Indo-European linguistics, my academic knowledge of this particularly family stops with Sanskrit, so I cannot give it much of a critical review. But for linguaphiles, this is sure to be an entertaining read and an exhaustive source of information.
The first three chapters cover the language family in general. These are the General Introduction, "Sociolinguistics of the Indo-Aryan Languages" and "Writing Systems of the Indo-Aryan Languages". I am generally satisfied with the General Introduction's presentation of the debate over the Indo-European Urheimat and the influence from the substrate. However, I think it would have been better if George Cardona and Dhanesh Jain had laid out the devout Hindu line on this branch of linguistics, for they see Sanskrit as a perfect language of divine origin and the real parent of the Indo-European family, and they claim that Indo-European linguistics is a racist or colonialist science. That would better prepare readers for the nutjobs that discussions of these languages in public fora inevitably attract. Then there are three chapters on Middle Indo-Aryan. One covers Sanskrit, the second Asokan Prakrit and Pali, and the third Prakrits and Apabhramsa. The bulk of the book is dedicated to single-chapter descriptions of modern languages: Hindu, Urdu, Bangla, Asamiya, Oriya, Maithili, Magahi, Bhojpuri, Nepali, Panjabi, Sindhi, Gujarati, Marathi, Konkani, Sinhala, Dardic, and Kashmiri.
While I have training in Indo-European linguistics, my academic knowledge of this particularly family stops with Sanskrit, so I cannot give it much of a critical review. But for linguaphiles, this is sure to be an entertaining read and an exhaustive source of information.
Displaying 1 of 1 review