Talk:Indo-Aryan languages

Mitanni

It seems strange that Mitanni language would be Indo-European if its speakers are hurrian?

no, the Mitanni nobility were indo-aryan, ruling over a hurrian population. there was some confusion as to which language should be labeled "mitanni", but the term generally refers to the upper-class indo-aryan language now. see Indo-Aryan superstrate in Mitanni dab (ᛏ) 07:24, 3 Mar 2005 (UTC)

wrong numbers

@Kautilya3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Aryan_languages

• The largest in terms of native speakers are Hindustani (Hindi-Urdu, about 329 million),[2] Bengali (about 200 million), Punjabi (about 100 million),[3] Marathi (about 70 million), Gujarati (about 50 million), Bhojpuri (about 40 million), Awadhi (about 38 million), Maithili (about 30 million), Odia (about 30 million), Sindhi (about 26 million), Braj Bhasha (about 21 million), Rajasthani (about 20 million), Saraiki (about 20 million), Chhattisgarhi (about 18 million), Nepali (about 16 million), Sinhala (about 15 miilion), Assamese (about 15 million), Haryanvi (about 13 million), Kannauji (about 9 million), Bagheli (about 8 million), Kashmiri (about 6 million), Dogri (about 4 million), and Bundeli (about 3 million), Garhwali (about 3 million), Kumaoni (about 2 million), with a total number of native speakers of more than 900 million.

• i was understand in wikipedia 900 = 1086!

329+ 200+100+ 70+ 50+40 +38 +30+ 30+ 26+21+ 20+ 20+ 18 + 16 + 15+ 15 + 13 + 9+ 8 + 6 + 4+ 3+3+ 2 million=1086 million, with a total number of native speakers of more than 900 million.

What?!

Why there is no mention of just aryan alone? 2404:8000:1027:85F6:4C83:2256:B46E:F7D7 (talk) 15:07, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

Question of the day

Who coined the term "Indo-Aryan"? And when? Grierson already used the term in a matter-of-factish way at the end of the 19th century, and it is found earlier in works by William Wilson Hunter. @Dyḗwsuh₃nus, Chariotrider555, Uanfala, Joshua Jonathan, and Others: do you have a source about the ultimate provenance of the scholarly term? Austronesier (talk) 21:31, 27 April 2023 (UTC)
Forgot to ping @AryamanA. –Austronesier (talk) 21:34, 27 April 2023 (UTC)

An interesting question @Austronesier, and not just of the day!

I'd like to dig deeper, but from what I know it appears that there's no clear answer to this. At least from the documentation available. It just appeared at some point in the 1800s.

And as is a must these days, one even consulted Giptipedia, with the same result! :-) Dyḗwsuh₃nus (talk) 09:54, 11 May 2023 (UTC)

Pinging @Kashmiri as well. Dyḗwsuh₃nus (talk) 10:04, 11 May 2023 (UTC)

Hi @Dyḗwsuh₃nus, thanks for pinging, but I regret I won't be of much help here. Sanskrit grammar is the field I feel more comfortable in than the history of linguistics. — kashmīrī ^TALK 11:47, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

Superfluous template?

I don't understand the necessity of the Anchor template call in ==== {{Anchor|Old Indo-Aryan}}Old Indo-Aryan ==== — wouldn't the anchor be there anyway, by virtue of the subtitle, even if the template call were removed? — Tonymec (talk) 14:10, 3 June 2023 (UTC)

Someone please update the classification chart

The current chart/language tree implies that Vedic is the ancestor of the Prakrits , this has been refuted by later scholars such as Walter Petersen and Thomas Oberlies whose works are also cited in other Wiki Articles. I propose using a cropped version of the Indo European Language tree.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_languages#/media/File%3AIndo-European_language_tree_(with_major_international_languages_highlighted).svg Bodhiupasaka (talk) 07:37, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

The IE tree is not really doing a better job, as it suggests that Vedic and Classical Sanskrit form a disjunct branch coordinate to later MIA branches, which is also over-simplistic. Ideally, we should have a diagram that directly reflects the prose: While Old Indo-Aryan is the earliest stage of the Indo-Aryan branch, from which all known languages of the later stages Middle and New Indo-Aryan are derived, some documented Middle Indo-Aryan variants cannot fully be derived from the documented form of Old Indo-Aryan (on which Vedic and Classical Sanskrit are based), but betray features that must go back to other undocumented variants/dialects of Old Indo-Aryan. –Austronesier (talk) 15:57, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

in other words , the current chart/tree used in this article is inaccurate/false ? Thanks for concurring, I'll remove the current tree then. There are citations in other articles that state that the Prakrits have even preserved features from Proto Indo Aryan languages that were lost even in Old Indo Aryan languages such as Vedic Sanskrit. Bodhiupasaka (talk) 09:22, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

Oh, and I just remembered that User:AnonMoos has spend lots of energy in Talk:Prakrit to explain it to you over and over again since 2020. I have nothing to add to that. –Austronesier (talk) 16:03, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

Unfortunately whatever "explanation" the mentioned user has given is inaccurate as well. The anology that they state is false as well. Bodhiupasaka (talk) 09:24, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

There is NO source that says that Prakrits did not emanate from the same Old Indo-Aryan dialect continuum that included the attested forms of OIA, viz. Vedic Sanskrit and Classical Sanskrit. –Austronesier (talk) 09:36, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

What is with the all caps and the anger ? And could you explain why you reverted my edits despite you yourself implying that the Chart is inaccurate ? That chart implies that "all" Indo Aryan languages descend from Vedic Sanskrit.

"There is NO source that says that Prakrits did not emanate from the same Old Indo-Aryan dialect continuum that included the attested forms of OIA, viz. Vedic Sanskrit and Classical Sanskrit. "

I never said anything of the opposite. This is typical strawman argument. What I said was this.

"

Proto-Indo-Aryan is meant to be the predecessor of Old Indo-Aryan (1500–300 BCE), which is directly attested as Vedic and Classical Sanskrit, as well as by the Indo-Aryan superstrate in Mitanni. Indeed, Vedic Sanskrit is very close to Proto-Indo-Aryan.

Some of the Prakrits display a few minor features derived from Proto-Indo-Aryan that had already disappeared in Vedic Sanskrit."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-Aryan_language Bodhiupasaka (talk) 11:40, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

Wait, you said Indo Aryan languages descended from "Classical Sanskrit" . Pray do tell, which language would that be ? Indo Aryan languages have descended from OIA, that I don't dispute, but even Vedic can't be considered the only ancestor of them all just because it is OIA, becouse even MIA's such Prakrit preserve features of Proto Indo Aryan that were lost in Vedic Sanskrit(source mentioned in previous response). For all Indo Aryan languages to have descended solely from Vedic, the latter had to be in widespread use, for that to happen it would require a vast empire over the Indian subcontinent to mandate its use with the language eventually experiencing deviations that will ultimately turn it into separate languages. But that never happened unlike what happened to Latin that spread with the Roman Empire, then turned to Vulgar Latin and then evolved to the many Romance languages that we know today. Which is why the "analogy" that Anonmoos or whatever their name is, gave for Latin and Vedic is simply inaccurate if not downright false . Latin was literally a lingua franca used throughout much of Western Europe but the same cannot be said for Vedic which was instead a language specialized for chanting religious hymns and was confined to the priestly class of Indian society. Bodhiupasaka (talk) 11:51, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

And Forget about Vedic being the ancestor of some of the MIA's/Prakrits. There are scholars that argue that the Prakrits and Vedic developed in parallel instead. Therefore such statements of Vedic being an ancestor of the Prakrits are also disputed/don't have consensus. Below article was also quoted in another wiki articile.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/3087594

Refer page 416, first paragraph, last sentence. Bodhiupasaka (talk) 12:07, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

...you said Indo Aryan languages descended from "Classical Sanskrit" No. I said: There is NO source that says that Prakrits did not emanate from the same Old Indo-Aryan dialect continuum that included the attested forms of OIA, viz. Vedic Sanskrit and Classical Sanskrit.

The POV reflected in Petersen's article from 1912(!) is that Prakrits and Vedic are "sister" languages, which is a skewed view on the history of Prakrits that has not been pursued further in Indo-Aryan linguistics. To stay in the analogy, they are better described as "nieces" of Vedic Sanskrit. All attested IA languages are derived from a common Proto IA source. This includes Vedic and Classical Sanskrit as attested forms of Old IA, the various Prakrits as attested forms of Middle IA, and all documented forms (historical and contemporary) of New IA. The fact that there is evidence that attested Prakrits cannot be fully derived from Vedic or Classical Sanskrit as direct ancestors, does not mean that they have miraculously bypassed the Old IA stage in their development from Proto IA. It is scholarly consensus that each Prakrit went through an unattested Old IA ancestral stage that maximally differed from Vedic Sanskrit at the dialect level. The bulk of linguistic features of Middle IA varieties can be derived with ease from Vedic/Classical Sanskrit, and it is only a few characteristics that betray an ancestral Old IA stage that slightly differed from attested forms of Old IA. This fact is the very reason why scholars of IA studies are confident that the time of first documentiation does not necessarily correspond to the time of actual usage as a spoken language (hence the dating of Vedic Sanskrit back to at least two millenia before its first written attestation). –Austronesier (talk) 14:53, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

Again, you refer to Old IA as a "stage" as in Chronological. This is maybe or may not be true(I'm a little rusty right now, been a long time) but Middle IA cannot be construed as the same. The latter is a classification based more on common linguistic features rather than purely on Chronology. Hence just because Prakrits are Middle IA does not mean they supersede Vedic, Classical Sanskrit etc. This is from the Wiki Page for MIA:

"The classification reflects stages in linguistic development, rather than being strictly chronological."

Case in Point, Classical Sanskrit was synthesised from Vedic Sanskrit around the same time when Prakrits were already being spoken and the language was created/standardised from Vedic by Panini who lived around the same time when the Buddha and Mahavira were already preaching their doctrines to the masses in Prakrit. Despite being created in a time period when Prakrits were already being spoken, it is classified as Old IA ! Which implies even OIA is not strictly chronological in its basis of classification.

Weirdly in the same MIA article in Wiki:

"

The Middle Indo-Aryan languages are younger than the Old Indo-Aryan languages but were ****contemporaneous with the use of Classical Sanskrit, an Old Indo-Aryan language**** used for literary purposes."

The statement contradicts itself.

The point is the classification of Indo Aryan languages is still evolving, there is no universal consensus on what language(not just classification/group) gave rise to the Prakrits. Which is why including Vedic Sanskrit as an ancestor to the Prakrits in the chart would be misleading to the readers. Atleast I'm glad you agree that the Prakrits cannot be direct descendants of Vedic but instead "nieces".

Bodhiupasaka (talk) 07:32, 25 November 2023 (UTC)