Introduction

....

Mauritius offers a distinctive and fertile ground for examining these dynamics. The island’s linguistic mosaic is shaped by centuries of colonisation, slavery, and indentured migration. It comprises English, French, Mauritian Creole, and several ancestral languages such as Tamil, Bhojpuri, Urdu, Telugu, and Hindi. Despite constitutional recognition of linguistic pluralism, the hierarchy of usage reveals an imbalance: English and French dominate education, administration, and media; Mauritian Creole functions as the lingua franca of everyday interaction, while ancestral languages are largely restricted to ceremonial or religious spheres. Within this complex sociolinguistic ecology, the Tamil language occupies a unique position. Introduced by South Indian indentured labourers during the nineteenth century, Tamil has long served as a cornerstone of spiritual, cultural, and communal identity among Mauritian Tamils. Yet, although it continues to thrive in temples and religious rituals, its everyday communicative use has sharply declined, particularly among younger generations. This dual existence, symbolic preservation alongside functional erosion, illustrates the challenges faced by heritage languages in maintaining both relevance and vitality. Understanding the processes that sustain or undermine Tamil in Mauritius is therefore critical to the broader discourse on language maintenance and shift. It provides insights into how multilingual communities negotiate linguistic identity, education, and modernity amid globalisation. Moreover, examining Tamil in the Mauritian context contributes to comparative scholarship on diaspora, heritage-language revitalisation, and ethnolinguistic resilience.

.... (Chapter 1 - Introduction)

Abstract

Historical language contact between the Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages of South Asia has been written about extensively. Previous literature, however, has focused largely on possible Dravidian contact-induced features in Old Indo-Aryan (namely Vedic and Classical Sanskrit). Much less work has been done to sort out the extent of Dravidian influence on Indo-Aryan at later stages in its development. In many cases, as well, the previous literature has not adopted a sufficiently principled approach to the identification and investigation of these putative Dravidian contact-induced features. This thesis addresses these shortcoming in the previous literature by first developing a general theoretical framework for the holistic study of historical contact-induced features in language, and then by beginning to apply this framework to the case study of the origin and spread of the dative-subject construction in Indo-Aryan, an areal feature of South Asia which I argue began emerging in early New Indo-Aryan due, in part, to contact with Dravidian.

* https://kb.osu.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/04672380-17c7-5925-b43e-81711770c672/content

* https://kb.osu.edu/items/6a24ae21-05ce-5f02-a1ed-6f00f611ba8c

In this paper I analyze serial verbs in Tamil and provide an extension to Baker's (1989) analysis. The main argument rests on two facts:

a. Tamil serial verbs have a different order from the one proposed by Baker;

b. Tamil serial verbs differ in that the two verbs get different tense specifications.

I will try to show that these facts can be derived from the same underlying principles of UG that Baker assumes. Unlike Baker, I will assume that Infl and Agr head separate projections. This is important for my analysis, which is to propose a featural relation between Infl and Agr. The paper is organized as follows. In section 1 I present very briefly Baker's analysis. In section 2 and 3 I discuss the general properties of serial verbs and apply syntactic tests to the verbs to show that they are indeed serial verbs. I also show that Baker's analysis is inadequate for Tamil. In section 4 I present my modifications and show that it deals with Tamil serial verbs better than Baker's analysis. Section 5 concludes the paper.

Florian Réveilhac

In the Name of Gods. In Search of Divine Epithets Through Luwic Personal Names 471

Kinship and History in South Asia presents four papers given at a small conference of kinship studies scholars, “Kinship and History in South Asia,” at the University of Toronto in 1973. They draw upon one another and show several common concerns, particularly the theoretical importance of Dravidian systems. Yey they remain specialist studies, each within its own raison d’être. Brendra E. F. Beck contributes a study of the “kinship nucleus” in Tamil folklore, Levi-Straussian both in its treatment of kinship and of mythology. George L. Hart’s study of woman and the sacred in the ancient Tamil literature of the Sangam attempts to elucidate this literature in its own terms, and also to relate it to Beck’s “kinship nucleus.” Thomas R. Trautmann presents a critical examination of the evidence for cross-cousin marriage in early North India, attempting to determine historical fact from literary materials. Narendra K. Wagle offers a survey of the kinship categories to be found in the Pali Jatakas.

Volume 2, The 1st Millennium and the Eastern Mediterranean Interface

During the 1st millennium BCE, Pre-Classical Anatolia acted as a melting pot and crossroads of languages, cultures and peoples. The political map of the world changed after the collapse of the Bronze Age, the horizon of sea routes was expanded to new interregional networks, new writing systems emerged including the alphabets. The Mediterranean world changed dramatically, and Indo-European languages – Luwic, Lydian, but also Phrygian and Greek – interacted with increasing intensity with each other and with the neighbouring idioms and cultures of the Syro-Mesopotamian, Iranian and Aegean worlds. With an innovative combination of linguistic, historical and philological work, this book will provide a state-of-the-art description of the contacts at the linguistic and cultural boundary between the East and the West.

There's a specific chapter I identified as being interesting:

* 155 Tarḫuntaš-trġ(n)ds. Troodos? Matteo Vigo

This book contains studies on the symbolic significance of the landscape for the communities inhabiting the central Anatolian plateau and the Upper Euphrates and Tigris valleys in the 2nd-1st millennia BC. Some of the scholars who attended to the international conference Sacred Landscapes of Hittites and Luwians held in Florence in February 2014, present here contributions on the religious, symbolic and social landscapes of Anatolia between the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age. Archaeologists, hittitologists and historians highlight how the ancient populations perceived many elements of the environment, like mountains, rivers and rocks, but also atmospheric agents, and natural phenomena as essential part of their religious and ideological world. Analysing landscapes, architectures and topographies built by the Anatolian communities in the second and first millennia BC, the framework of a symbolic construction intended for specific actions and practices clearly emerges.

This book constitutes a study of the lexicon of cereals as witnessed by the Mycenaean inscriptions. The study focuses both on the nouns used to designate cereals, on their compounds and derivatives, and on the terms with which they relate (adjectives, theonyms, toponyms, etc.). The volume is divided into three chapters. The first chapter analyses the six Mycenaean terms together with their derivatives and compounds - phonetically transcribed - which designate cereals or include their names: wheat, barley, wheat flour, barley flour, bakers (= those who bake bread) together with others nouns belonging to the same semantic field, such as seed. The second chapter focuses on three Mycenaean logograms designating cereals: *120, *121 and *129, interpreted respectively as wheat, barley and flour. The third chapter describes the wide set of terms appearing contextually in the inscriptions in which cereals are attested, and groups them according to their meaning: human and divine recipients, toponyms, adjectives, other administrative terms, etc. Finally, the conclusions present an overall assessment of the data analysed in the previous chapters, that is an assessment affecting the economic, political, social and religious sphere of the Mycenaean civilisation.

The topic of the Anatolian panthea in the Bronze Age deals with Hattian, Hittite, Palaean, Luwian and Hurrian gods who have been worshiped in the Kingdom of Ḫatti. In such a context, along with trying to keep a balanced and methodologically-aware approach in our original research, we realized that a multi-authored work such as the present volume, with papers written by some of the major experts of Anatolian religious history, would represent an invaluable contribution to the advancement of a complex and vast field. This collection of essays is the result of the workshop Theonyms, Panthea and Syncretisms in Hittite Anatolia and Northern Syria, held at the University of Verona on 25th and 26th March 2022. Colleagues with different areas of expertise pertaining to the topic of Anatolian religions contributed to an extremely successful event.

The present work aims at an analysis of the category of reflexivity in Anatolian languages, taking Hittite Reflexivpartikel =z(a) as a starting point and analysing its uses in the earliest period. The analysis also focuses on the other Anatolian languages with «clitic reflexive pronouns» (Luwian, Palaic, Lycian and Lydian), the uses of which will also be examined, touching on other topics relevant here, such as the possible use of a nominal head reflexive in Luvic and the traces of reflexive clitics in verbal desinences of the middle voice. Finally, the postulated framework for the proto-language is traced, accepting the hypothesis that reflexives originate from the pronominal system and explaining its various stages of formal and functional evolution.

Niya Prakrit, a dialect of Central Asian Gāndhārī, served as the administrative language of the former Shanshan kingdom (3rd–4th century CE; Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, Northwest China). The corpus consists of around 1,000 administrative documents and letters.Niels Schoubben presents the first comprehensive study of language contact in Niya Prakrit, highlighting the profound influence exerted by Iranian languages. Through a systematic analysis of over 100 loanwords, Niels Schoubben demonstrates that most Iranian elements derive from Bactrian, a Middle Iranian language formerly spoken in present-day Afghanistan. He further argues that Bactrian also influenced Niya Prakrit’s grammatical structure, particularly its past tense constructions. Earlier claims of substrate influence from an unattested sister language of Tocharian A and B (the so-called “Tocharian C”) are reassessed and found to be unconvincing. Instead, the author proposes that Niya Prakrit acquired its distinctive features through its use as a chancellery idiom by Kushan officials who spoke Bactrian as a native language. The volume concludes with three appendices and detailed indices and will be of interest to Indologists, Iranianists, Indo-Europeanists, and historians of Central Asia. 

This dissertation investigates the linguistic contacts between Tocharian A and B and Khotanese and Tumshuqese, four languages once spoken in the Tarim basin, whose manuscripts can be dated from the 5th to the 10th c. CE. It offers the first comprehensive analysis of the Khotanese and Tumshuqese loanwords in Tocharian A and B. One of the conclusions of this dissertation is that the influence of Khotanese and Tumshuqese on Tocharian was much more extensive than previously thought and it spanned over almost two millennia, from the early Iron Age until the extinction of the four languages at the end of the first millennium CE. In fact, it is possible to distinguish this group of loanwords from the loanwords from Old Steppe Iranian, an unidentified Old Iranian language only known from loanwords into Tocharian, by means of precise sound correspondences. Moreover, the relative chronology of the Khotanese and Tumshuqese loanwords in Tocharian allows a unique glimpse into the linguistic prehistory of the two Eastern Middle Iranian languages.

This dissertation discusses the Indo-Iranian loanwords in the Uralic languages. The loanwords that have been suggested in earlier research are critically analyzed and commented based on modern views of Uralic and Indo-Iranian historical phonology and etymology. The etymologies are analyzed on the basis of the general methods of loanword research: arguments of phonology, distribution and semantics are taken into account. In addition to the analyzis of older etymological proposals, also some new etymologies are presented. Also the research history of the topic is discussed.

The aim of this study is to establish rules for the sound substitutions and bring new light to the relative chronology of the loanwords. Because the phoneme systems of Proto-Indo-Iranian, Proto-Iranian and later Iranian languages were very different from those of Proto-Uralic and its daughter languages, the phonemes of the Indo-Iranian donor languages have been substituted in various ways in the Uralic languages. Differences reflect both conditional developments (different substitutions in different environments) and chronological differences, and it is often difficult to distinguish between the two.

Special attention is also paid to the distribution of loanwords and the use of distribution as a criterion in dating the loanwords. Contrary to views expressed in many earlier works, it is shown that the distribution is not a very good criterion, as the distribution of loanwords within the Uralic language family forms a rather complicated picture due to loss of words in some branches. A notable problem is the parallel borrowing of same Indo-Iranian words to various branches of the Uralic family. It is not always easy to distinguish the parallel borrowings from the earlier loanwords into the common proto-language, and in earlier research the parallel loans have not received enough attention, despite their key importance to the chronology of the loanwords.

The results of this study reinforce the stratigraphy of Indo-Iranian loanwords (Pre-Indo-Iranian, Proto-Indo-Iranian, Proto-Iranian and later Iranian loanwords) that has been prevalent in recent decays. However, it is shown that many of the substitution rules are open to different interpretations and some words are difficult to assign to a certain loanword layer. A notable result of this study is also that many of the etymologies presented in earlier works are uncertain or unconvincing, and there are also cases in which some other archaic Indo-European source is more probable donor language than Indo-Iranian.

In this paper, some problematic early Indo-European loan etymologies for Uralic words are discussed and criticized and alternative solutions are offered for most of them. In recent research there has been much criticism of early Indo-European, especially ProtoIndo-European, loanwords into Proto-Uralic or early Uralic languages, and in this paper some etymologies criticized in recent research are commented on in greater detail in order to show that alternative solutions are often possible. Some problematic etymologies that have not received comment in recent years are also scrutinized. The paper also includes a discussion of the methodology for research into prehistoric loanwords.

Abstract

Old Tamil Sangam literature can offer some very concrete information about a number of local kings and chieftains (Pāri, Ōri, Āy, Naḷḷi, Pēkaṉ etc.) and occasionally also their relations with the three great dynasties Pāṇṭya, Cōḻa and Cēra. The three dynasties use special symbols, which are partly derived from nature: tiger (puli) – the emblem of the Cōḻa Kings; fish (mīṉ) – the symbol of the Pāṇṭyas. The Western Cēras use a ‘military’ symbol, viz. the bow (vil). Kings and chieftains (vēḷir) are referred to on various occasions; they fulfil various roles, among other things also that of ‘sponsors’ of the poets. References to chieftains and other ‘political’ figures in Sangam literature are made with regard to war and partly other social functions as can be seen in the standard formulas appearing with these figures.
The paper sums up some of the roles of the castes according to the Poruḷatikāram of the Tolkāppiyam grammar and then deals with the ‘positive’ attributes of kings and chieftains. For example, they possess strong or quick bows (val vil, 33x), long lances (neṭu vēl, 29x) or sharp lances (kūr vēl, 10x), (great) moving chariots (iyal tēr, 21x) or strong chariots (tēr vaṇ, 8x), and strong horses (mā vaṇ, 11x) or big horses (neṭu mā, 5x). Their hands are wide (taṭam kai, 46x) and liberal (kai vaṇ, 18x) and they perform victorious battles (vel pōr, 36x) and good battles (nal pōr, 7x). They have a reputation for liberality (vaṇ pukaḻ, 5x), in fact, they experience joy in liberality (vaṇ makiḻ, 14x). They enjoy excellence (cīr keḻu, 14x), abundant fame (urai cāl, 19x) or great fame (name) (peru peyar, 36x). There are also negative attributes. The paper will document some selected ‘qualifications’ of the ‘men of war’.

Abstract

Numerous pre-modern literary works in Tamil begin with a lengthy description of a country and a city. This convention is a stock element of texts belonging to the kāppiyam and purāṇam genres, which can be defined as long narrative poems and mythological narrations, respectively. Such descriptions are particularly numerous in talapurāṇams, i.e., texts dealing with the mythology of sacred sites. This article discusses the description of the country and the city in the Kāñcippurāṇam (KP), a talapurāṇam of the city of Kanchipuram composed in the late 18th century by the author Civañāṉa Muṉivar. It will be shown that the description of Kanchipuram and its surroundings in the introductory chapters of the KP, rather than aiming at a realistic portrayal, is strongly based on Tamil literary conventions that can be traced back to ancient Tamil literature, but also to influential texts of the medieval period, such as the Kamparāmāyaṇam or the Periyapurāṇam. Moreover, the article examines how Civañāṉa Muṉivar correlates the literary landscape that he describes with the real-world geography of the region around Kanchipuram and Śaiva devotional topography, thus creating a complex multi-layered landscape.