Search results for "Sanskrit"

The Tense-Aspect system between ontogeny and phylogeny: Evidence from the Proto-Indo-European “Injunctive”

2006

This paper examines early inflectional morphology related to the tense-aspect system of Pre-Indo-European by establishing a correlation between ontogeny and phylogeny in language acquisition and development. It will be argued that historical linguistics can shed light on the long-standing debate over the emergence of tense-aspect morphology. More specifically, the so-called Injunctive forms, which are assumed to be the most ancient verbal inflected items tracing back to the Pre-Indo-European language (see, among others, Lehmann 2002), permit us to infer that the initial grammar of the Proto-language was lacking tense morphology. In other words, the residual category of the Injunctive, which…

Towards a reconstruction of Indo-European culture: semantic functions of IE *men-

2002

Indo-European language reconstruction has allowed us to advance some hypotheses with regard to possible reconstructing cultural contents of what has been defined “Indo-European ideology” (Campanile 1992). The method of textual comparison, which compares no longer and not merely single lexical items or single syntactic constructions, but the whole literary systems too, is able to bring out linguistic and extra-linguistic reference contexts. The interest in reconstructing the Indo-European “basic lexicon” is renewed in the light of recent typological criteria of root classification (according to their active or stative meaning): the focus today is on drawing up the so-called “global etymologi…

Libertà e diritti tra India e Europa. Per un approccio genealogico ai valori culturali

2009

Freedom and Rights between India and Europe. A Genealogical Approach to Cultural Values - This paper will deal with the issue of human rights and multiculturalism away from cultural relativism and universalism while taking inspiration from Nietzsche’s Moral Genealogy. In particular, the concepts of karma, dharma and trivarga (an indian traditional form of particularism in the law) will be explained as they are expressed in the Bhagavad Gita, one of the most important texts of Indian philosophical literature. From this analysis it will emerge the impossibility of deducing the idea of human rights from the Sanskrit text. Not because the Bhagavad Gita adopts a communitarian conception of the s…

Il culto dei gatti in India. Continuità ed evoluzione di credenze e pratiche religiose dall’India vedica all’India contemporanea

2019

Cat as an animal is a sporadic presence in Vedic mythology and Brahmanic works on rituals, while it appears in a few cult practices of contemporary popular religiosity in India. This article holds that in Indian devotional practices, the cat is conceived as an animal with an ambiguous nature. It also suggests that the cat cult is linked with the need to tame chaos, violence, and con$ict, and to place them in a controlled, orderly, and pacified cosmos. To understand these phenomena, this article studies, from a multidisciplinary perspective, contemporary religious practices in the light of the Indian tradition, and suggests that the cat cult was subject to substantial Brahmanization.

Linguistica Lettica, Nr. 27

2019

Il corpo della parola. Inni, poemi e performance nell'India antica e contemporanea

2021

Nella storia culturale dell’India la riflessione sulla Parola e sui suoi molteplici significati attraversa ambiti e discipline diversi, intersecantisi a loro volta tra loro, nelle riflessioni che riguardano il mito, il rituale, la poesia, la scienza, la storia, il teatro, in una serie incessante di implicazioni e di allusioni che potremmo descrivere come un albero, le cui vertiginose ramificazioni abbracciano un arco di tempo che si estende dal corpus vedico all’India contemporanea. I diversi aspetti e i vari usi della parola investono sia il contesto pubblico sia quello privato, la sfera politica così come quella religiosa, dove performance, dottrine, riti e speculazioni fissano i confini …

Divinità e colori nell'universo vedico

2008

Color symbolism in Vedic Deities

On syntactic diagnostics as tests for telicity in ancient Indo-European languages. Evidence from Vedic and Greek

2017

The aim of this paper is to assay the reliability of completive and durative adverbials as linguistic tests for telicity in a historical perspective. Until now such tests have been applied only to contemporary languages, which provide both written and spoken corpora. However, if the compatibility with for/in-adverbials is a reliable test, it should function not only crosslinguistically, but also with ancient and reconstructed languages. I will use digital corpora of Vedic Sanskrit and Homeric Greek texts to explore the compatibility of temporal expressions with a selected sample of verbs that derive from a previous Indo-European common stage.

Deissi spaziale e verbi di movimento in vedico

2016

This study is part of a broader research project on temporal and spatial deixis in the Proto-Indo-European language. Specifically, the aim of this paper is to investigate the basic motion verbs go and come in Vedic. The deictic component of PATH has often been considered as inherent to the lexical semantics of these verbs cross-linguistically. However, I will show that Vedic i “go”, gā “go; come; step” and gam “go; come” express a deictically-neutral meaning of ‘moving along a path’, which is not characterized with regard to both MANNER and PATH. Data suggest that these verbs can take on a deictic interpretation by cooccurring with specific particles, adverbs, demonstratives, and personal p…

Proto-Indo-European verbal suppletion and emerging paradigms

2008

The existence of suppletion in a Proto-Indo-European language is still a question of debate (García Ramón 2002). While the evidence for such a phenomenon has been widely recognized within the verbal system of most Indo-European languages, some scholars describe it as a recent monoglot development which characterizes the history of each single language without involving a previous common stage. According to Strunk (1977), the hypothesis of a PIE suppletive paradigm based on the alternation of verbal roots such as *es- and *bhu- “be”, or *ei-/i- and *gwa-/ gwem - “go”, must be ruled out because it violates the so-called criterium-b, i.e. complementary distribution of the forms involved in a s…