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Some preliminary argumentations about Baṅgāṇī pronominal and nominal declension
No full textBaṅgāṇī, an Indo-Aryan language spoken in the so-called Baṅgāṇ area, a land enclosed by the Pabar and the Tons rivers (Uttarkāśī district, Uttarākhaṇḍ state), shows in its grammar and lexicon some peculiar features still rather controversial. The debate is still in course, due to the lack of enough documentation available, as the majority of scholars complains about. Moreover Baṅgāṇī, among the Western Pahāṛī languages of New Indo-Ayan, is now esteemed as a critically endangered language by the UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger. The paper presents the preliminary results of a fieldwork research with Baṅgāṇī mother-tongue speakers and the unique elicited text available. In particular a description of Baṅgāṇī pronominal and nominal declension, focusing on the case marking and agreement system of the Subject-like and Object-like arguments of intransitive and transitive clauses (in perfective and non-perfective tenses), is offered. The comparison between the data that I collected enabled me to offer a good amount of Baṅgāṇī sentences exemplifying the function of the different forms, and thus to understand their use in depth, that is to shed light on the peculiarities of Baṅgāṇī case marking system
In Search of Regional/Local (deśī) Words for ‘Intoxicant’ in First-Millennium India
No full textWhile, as a consequence of recent studies, we can now have a good image
of ‘intoxicant’ in Sanskrit literature, the same is not true for Middle Indo-Aryan literature,
except perhaps for Pāli. In this paper two texts written in Prakrit and Ardha-Māgadhī respectively
will be taken into examination, focusing especially on those words not linked to
Sanskrit tradition, and normally known as deśī, ‘regional’, words. In particular, the second
text analysed, which is part of the Jain Śvetāmbara Canon, will give me the opportunity
to look at the use of deśī words meaning ‘intoxicant’ and/or concerning ‘drinking culture’
in the Deśīnāmamālā, Hemacandra’s lexicon of Prakrit deśī words. The result of the analysis
reveals that local, regional ‘drinking traditions’, in some cases part of non-Indo-Aryan
ethno linguistic groups, can be found beside the pan-indian, cosmopolitan Sanskrit culture
Il lessico botanico ne “Il Viaggio all’Indie Orientali” del Padre F. Vincenzo Maria di S. Caterina da Siena (1672)
Full text linkIn the middle of the XVII century the Discalced Carmelite Padre Vincenzo Maria of Saint Caterina of Siena visited India and, when he returned, drew up his travel account, titled Il Viaggio alle Indie Orientali. This work plays a key role in the context of Italian travel accounts about India. However, despite its importance, it is rather surprising that no significant research has been conducted to investigate in deep this text, edited for the last time in 1683. The aim of the present paper is to pursue its analysis, in particular offering an etymological research and a critical examination of a consistent part of the botanical terms mentioned and explained by Padre Vincenzo Maria. As we will show, many of these terms appeared for the first time, in an Italian text and in some few cases in an European one, in Padre Vincenzo Maria’ s work
Rājasthānī features in medieval Braj prose texts: the case of Differential Object Marking and verbal agreement in perfective clauses
Full text linkOne of the few scholars who paid attention to the ‘dark’ period of the evolution of NIA from late MIA was Luigi Pio Tessitori. The studies of this scholar resulted in his well-known Grammar of the Old Western Rajasthani. In the introduction of his Grammar, Tessitori advanced the hypothesis that probably in this first period of NIA there was an intermediate form of speech that surely separated Old Western Rājasthānī from what he called an Old form of Western Hindī, but in which these two linguistic varieties of Western NIA merged together. Tessitori called Old Eastern Rājasthānī this old intermediate form of speech. As stated by himself, one of Tessitori’s future objectives would be to find some proof to demonstrate or to invalidate this hypothesis. However, due to his untimely death, he was not able to do this. Due to the fact that at the present there’s lack of specific studies on this topic, the present study intend to pursue Tessitori’s hypothesis using some medieval published texts in Braj-bhāṣā prose. Even if the language of this kind of texts could be classified as a form of Braj, we will see that these texts show a language different from classical Braj, where many examples of a typical characteristic of Māravāṛī (i.e. Rājasthānī) are attested: the agreement of O with main verb, in a perfective construction, even if O presents an overt marking with the DAT/ACC postposition. Therefore these texts show the existence of a feature of convergence between different varieties. In the last section I will conclude that this seems to be in agreement with Tessitori’s hypothesis, but a more detailed study on language contact involved in the evolution and formation of Western Hindī dialects is necessary to validate this hypothesis
The restoration of the ergative case marking of ‘A’ in perfective clauses in New Indo-Aryan
No full textThe development of the ergative construction in the New Indo-Aryan period is still not totally clear. In particular we don’t know the process of grammaticalization of the new analytical ergative marker, the postposition ne, found, among others, in Hindī and Pañjābī. This study tries to demonstrate that if it is true that the “macro-history” of this form suggests that the discriminatory function of case marking is clearly important in the beginning of its process of diffusion and stabilization, it is also true that there is no single interpretation as regards its high initial variability. In fact, starting from data taken from prose texts written in the old Hindī literary variety known as Braj-bhāṣā, the full set of conditions on case alternations for A in the perfective aspect is really complex
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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