Harvard Oriental Series - Opera Minora – serie

Since its discovery and the initial efforts toward its critical edition, the Paippalādasaṃhitā of the Atharvaveda (PS) has attracted the attention of Vedic scholars and Indologists for several reasons. It constitutes a precious source for the study of the development of the earliest language. The text contains important information about various rites and magical practices, and hints about the oldest Indo-Iranian and Indo-European myths. All of this makes the PS a text of inestimable value for the study of Indian language and culture.

What can the classification of languages tell us about human origins and human prehistory? This book presents a popular account of the origin of language. It is intended for an audience with no prior knowledge of comparative linguistics, genetics or archaeology. The present volume is a reprint of the 2009 second edition of the book, and includes the text of the first edition (1994) with minor modifications, as well as the scientific evidence for monogenesis, and a Postscript recounting developments in the field since the original publication of the book.

Buddhist Hybrid Sanskri is not a deteriorated Sanskrit (as many believed at the discovery of Buddhist texts in Sanskrit), but, following the theoretical foundations underlying the pioneering work of Franklin Edgerton, a language with its grammar and vocabulary sui generis implemented rather consequently, which for a long period of time was used to spread the teaching of Buddha. The Reader is meant as a textbook for advanced students with an interest in non-standard Sanskrit and Middle Indo-Aryan. A substantial novelty of the Reader is that it includes extracts from representative texts either recently critically re-edited on the basis of new manuscripts or from the texts unknown at the time of Edgerton’s publications. All extracts are accompanied by commentaries explaining their grammatical peculiarities as well as by selections of specific lexical items.