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Substratum Influence on Indo-Aryan Grammar

Jeffrey Clark von Munkwitz-Smith
Thesis Supervisor: Professor Indira Y. Junghare
University of Minnesota, 1995

Section One is a history of the controversy over the influence of substrata -Dravidian and Munda, primarily -on Indo-Aryan, beginning with August Friedrich PottUs 1833 assertion that the Old Indo-Aryan retroflex consonants had their roots in Dravidian and finishing with Madhav Deshpande's 1993 work on the sociolinguistics of Sanskrit and Prakrit. Included in the discussion is the notion, first advanced by Murray Emeneau and taken up, more recently, by Colin Masica, of South Asia as a linguistic area. The conclusion is reached that, despite the somewhat convincing arguments advanced by Hans Hock and others against substratum influence, the sheer volume of evidence, though circumstantial, does point to early substratum - particularly Dravidian influence on Indo-Aryan.

Section Two is a review of the evolution of the grammar of counterfactual statements in Indo-Aryan and an examination of the connection between the form used in those statements and that of past habitual statements in the South Asian linguistic area in light of Bruce Pray's 1980 assertion that the use of a single form for those two types of statements in the Dakhini Urdu-Telangana Telugu micro-linguistic area was the result of Telugu influence. The conclusion is reached that the use of a single form was most likely the result of internal development in Indo-Aryan that spread to several other languages, of various language families, in the South Asian linguistic area. Further, while not all languages in that linguistic area share the feature, it is sufficiently widespread to be considered a characteristic of the linguistic area.



Rajesh Bhatt
Tue Jan 21 17:38:40 EST 1997