Vedic Theory of the Origin of Speech

$35
Item Code: IHL140
Author: Dr. Ravi Prakash Arya and Joseph Skulj
Publisher: Indian Foundation for Vedic Science, Rohtak, Haryana
Edition: 2008
ISBN: 8187710470
Pages: 180
Cover: Hardcover
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Book Description
From the Jacket

The present work makes a humble reappraisal of the observations of Vedic seers on the origin and evolution of first speech on this planet. Findings here set aside conventional regarding the origin of speech and tries to present the actual picture behind the caption ‘Divine Origin of Speech.’ This work also attempts to discover the sequence of origin of various phonemic sounds. The first ever origin of action sounds and their development into attributives and final culmination into agent sounds. It also underlies those rules that determine the origin of other languages of Indo-European stock from their original source directly or indirectly. The present work also takes into account various phonetic theories evolved by various linguists from time to time in the light of new findings of the present study.

About the Author

Joseph Skulj
Born in 1937 in Slovenia, then part of Yugoslavia. Slovenian is his mother tongue.

His primary education was in Slovenia; all the of secondary and university education, he received in Toronto, Canada. In 1961, he did his Bachelor degree in Applied Science in Chemical Engineering from University of Toronto. In 1963, he became a member of the Association of Professional Engineers of Ontario and is still a member. He managed many projects during his professional career in the sphere of Chemical Engineering and also outside the field of Chemistry.
During his high school days he had an opportunity, at St. Michaels College School, to study Latin, Greek, French and German. He also took some lessons in Russian. After retirement from Kodak as a Technical Consultant, he began studying Sanskrit at the Hindu Institute of Learning Toronto Canada. His special Interests are: Historical linguistics and the correlation with Genetics, Sanskrit and Indian history. He is the Member of the Society for Slovene Studies.

He has done lot of research work in the historical linguistics particularly dealing with the origin and affinity of Slave languages. He has been a keen participant of International seminars, workshops and conferences on linguistics, history and archaeology. He has to his credit no. of research papers published and presented to various International conferences.

Dr. Ravi Prakash Arya
A world renowned Vedic Scholar, Philologist, and Historian. A prolific speaker and writer who has written on wide variety of subjects and who has traveled widely to deliver popular and academic talks on various topics of Vedas, Indian History, Linguistics, Philosophy, Culture and Scientific Indian heritage. Dr. Ravi Prakash is doing a pioneering work for preserving and propagating the universal and scientific Vedic heritage of India under the auspices of ‘Indian Foundation for Vedic science’. He has so far produced around 70 research papers and 30 books running into 40 volumes on the various aspects of Vedas, Indian History and Culture. He is also the editor of reputed quarterly Research Journal ‘Vedic Science’ and ‘World Vedic Calendar’ circulated around 30 countries of the world.

Preface

Linguistics, the scientific study of language, can reach more deeply into the human past than the most ancient written records. It compares related languages to reconstruct their immediate progenitors and eventually their ultimate ancestor, or proto-language. The proto-language in turn illuminates the lives of its speakers and locates them in time and place.

The science developed from the study of the Vedic (Indo-European) family of languages, by far the largest in number of languages and number of speakers. Nearly half of the world’s population speaks Vedic (Indo-European) family of language as a first language; six of the 10 languages in which Scientific American appears-English, French, German, Italian, Russian and Spanish-belong to this family.

Our work indicates that the Vedic (Sanskrit) originated in India and other language of European or Indian family originated as daughter languages when the Sanskrit speaking Indians migrated to various parts of western hemisphere from time to time. This subject will be discussed exclusively in our forthcoming book ‘Origin of Indo Europeans’.

The reconstruction of ancient languages may be likened to the method used by molecular biologists in their quest to understand the evolution of life. The biochemist identifies molecular elements that perform similar functions in widely divergent species to infer the characteristics of the primordial cell from which they are presumed to have descended. So does the linguist seek correspondences in grammar, syntax, vocabulary and vocalization among known languages in order to reconstruct their immediate forebears and ultimately the original tongue. Living languages can be compared directly with the another; dead languages that have survived in written form can usually be vocalized by inference from internal linguistic evidence. Phonology-the study of word sounds-is all-important to historical linguists because sounds are more stable over the centuries than are meanings.

Early studies of Vedic (Indo-European) family of languages focused on those languages that were most familiar to the original European researchers: the Italic, Celtic, Germanic, Baltic and Slavic families. Affinities between these and the “Indian” languages spoken in far away Indian were noticed by European travelers as early as the 16th century. That they might all share a common ancestor was first proposed in 1786 by Sir He thus launched what came to be known as the Indo-European hypothesis, which served as the principal stimulus to the founders of historical linguistics in the 19th century. In fact, now the time has come that the name indo European can be re-christened as Vedic family of languages.

Armenia’s State Museum, in Yerevan’s Republic Square, houses thousands of artifacts of early Vedic culture found throughout the territory of Armenia. The collection, biggest in the world in its number and variety has many artifacts dating back to as far as so-called Stone Age. One of the treasures of the museum is carts, or pulling wagons, dating back to early second millennium BC. The wagons along with hundreds of other artifacts such as spears, swords, arrowheads and pottery, were found from the archaeological dig at Lchashen, near Lake Sevan. The wagons for the most part have been preserved carefully and are relatively in good condition. They are the oldest surviving carts of such sort in the European world.

More recent evidence now places the probable origin of the Indo-European language from Sanskrit of India via western Asia. Three generations of archaeologists and linguists have thus far excavated and deciphered manuscripts close to a dozen ancient languages from sites in modern Turkey and as far cast as Tocharia, in modern Turkistan. Their observations, together with new ideas in pure linguistic theory, have made it necessary to revise the canons of linguistic evolution.

The route of migrations of Sanskrit speaking Indian lie somewhere in the crescent that curves around the southern shores of the Black Sea, south from the Balkan peninsula, east across ancient Anatolia (today the non-European territories of Turkey) and north to the Caucasus Mountains. Here the agricultural revolution created the food surplus that impelled the migrants from India to found villages and city-states from which, about 6,000 years ago, they began their migrations over the Eurasian continent and into history. Here it may not out of context to quote from a paper by Casey C. Bennet and Frederika A. Kaestle titled ‘Reanalysis of Eurasian Population History: Ancient DNA Evidence of Population Affinities’, which was published in Human Biology, August 2006 v. 78 no. 4, pp. 413-440. There it states:

In our forthcoming paper we (Joseph Skulj and co-authors), are making a case, based on linguistic, genetic and zoo archaeological evidence that the Indo-Aryans and Slavs have their origin in the Indus Valley, not Europe, and that their split occurred before the origin of farming. The genetic spread, however, took place north of the Black Sea. This is not to say that the cultural influence was not present south of the Black Sea.

It appears that some of the migrants reached Anatolia from the India around 2000 B.C. and established the Hittite kingdom, which held all of Anatolia in its power by 1400 B.C. Its official language was among the first of the Indo-European languages to find its way into writing. Early in this century, Bedrich Hrozny, a linguist at Vienna University and later at Charles University in Prague, deciphered Hittite inscriptions (written in cuneiform, the ancient writing system based on wedge-shaped symbols) on tablets that had been found in the liberary of the capital at Hattusas, 200 kilometres east of modern Ankara. The liberary also contained cuneiform tablets in two related languages: Luwian and Palaic. The evolution of Luwian could be traced in later hieroglyphic inscriptions made around 1200 B.C., after the fall of the Hittite Empire. To this emerging family of Anatolian languages linguists added Lydian (closer to Hittite) and Lycian (closer to Luwian), known from inscriptions dating back to late in the first millennium B.C.

The appearance of Hittite and other Anatolian languages at the turn of the third to the second millennium B.C. sets an absolute chronological limit for the break-up of the Vedic language. It can be maintained that Anatolian departed from the parent Sanskrit no later than the fourth millennium B.C. and possibly much earlier.

Introduction

When we take up the study of language, the first and foremost question arises as to how when and where the language originated. More the linguists troubled their head in this direction, less they achieved success. So far it has remained an unsolved conundrum. The more it was solved, the more it became complex. Now many linguistic societies in the world have banned to raise this question again on the forum. Vedic (Indo-European) family of languages being the ancient most of all the families of languages of the world. if we are able to search the root of Indo-European Languages, the problem of the origin and evolution of almost all the languages of the world will be solved. Among the hosts of theories put forwarded on the origin of speech, one is regarding the divine origin of speech. So long it has been contended by almost all the scholars both at home and abroad that the Vedas are the propounder of this theory. In this connection a number of observations made by Vedic seers have been cited, e.g.

‘Sanskrit is the scientifically standardized language grammatically defined great Rsis.’

‘Scholars created a standardized language, it was spoken earlier by various illiterate persons.

‘As a result of the operation/raja the standardization of language, Rgveda, Samaveda, Yajurveda and Atharvaveda for documented.’

‘The statement by an expert most person in a particular field can be taken as evidence.’

‘Owing to the three forms of matter: Agni (energy in the observer space), Vayu (field particles in the intermediate space) and Ravi (light in the light space), three Vedas-Rgveda, Yajurveda and Sannaveda - evolved for the accomplishment of yajna (the process of creation).

‘On account of three forms of energy (tapta) in three spaces, three Vedas or couplets of knowledge came into being. On account of Agni (energy in observer space) came into being couplets called Rcas or Rgveda, on account of Vayu (field or electric force in intermediate space) came into being Yajusas or Yajuveda and on account of Surya (light in light space) came into being Samaveda or Samans.

‘The couplets that are known as Rgveda, Yajuveda, Samaveda and Atharvaveda are the exhalations of the created world.’

Simply quoting these observations without understanding the actual intended sense of the speakers, everybody assumed without applying mind that they support the divine origin of speech. Nobody least bothered about the real meaning of divine and about the system or method that was followed to determine the origin of various names/words’ etc. by the ancient Indian etymologists and other authorities who discussed at length the factors behind the origin of various names.

The present paper, as it does, instead of treading the bitten track and going by the repeated statements on the divine origin of speech, prefers to make and humble reappraisal of the observations of Vedic seers in the light of etymological method of inquiry adopted by ancient Indian etymologists, linguists and grammarians in determining the primitive origin of language. It also re-interprets and establishes the relevancy of the citations quoted above and others as well with regard to the Vedic theory of the origin of speech deduced on the basis of etymological method of inquiry and thus tries to present the actual picture behind the caption ‘Divine Origin of Speech.’

Preface 1
Introduction 5
Types of Speech 8
Origin of Akhyatas or Action Sounds 11
Origin of Names (Agent Sounds) 34
Divine Origin of Speech 38
Origin of Vedas 43
Sequence of Evolution of Phonemes 49
Origin and Evolution of European Languages Phonological Analysis 68
Morphological Analysis 74
Evolution of the Lithuanian Language 126
Evolution of the Avesta Language 128
Evolution of the Greek Language 133
Evolution of the Latn Language 135
Evolution of Old Slav. And other Slavic languages 137
Vedic Origin of Numbers in the World Languages 143
Initial Mutations in Vedic Family of Languages 169
Review of the idea of Classification of IE Languages as Centum and Satam group 173
Vedic Family of Languages 178
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