Le desideratif en vedique.

• Author: Jamison, Stephanie W.
• Position: Book review

Le desideratif en vedique. By FRANCOIS HEENEN. Leiden Studies in Indo-European, vol. 13. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006. Pp. 267.

A revision and enlargement of Heenen's 2002 University of Vienna doctoral thesis under the direction of H. Eichner and Ch. Werba, this work treats in remarkable detail the verbal category of the desiderative throughout Vedic literature. This is a by now familiar--and welcome--type of Vedic grammatical monograph, one organized around and exhaustively examining a particular verbal formation. As is usual with such works, the volume opens with discussion of general issues concerning the category (pp. 1-73), especially its formation and its function, and this discussion is followed by a much longer treatment of all the individual desiderative stems in alphabetical order (pp. 74-247).

This monographic conspectus is not only the more substantial but also the more valuable part of the book. Each entry contains a listing of every paradigmatic form attested to the stem in question, with every occurrence in every text identified; a summary of this information in terms of period of attestation (including survival into Epic and Classical Sanskrit), voice, and preverb; identification of the root to which it is built, related desiderative stems (if any), Avestan cognate (if any), relevant secondary literature (if any); semantics of the simplex as well as of preverb lexemes and their case frames. Since there are, by his count (p. 4), 148 different stems with over 1750 attestations, simply the collection and display of the primary data required heroic labors, and because the formation was at its most productive and innovative in the period of Brahmana prose, the tabular listing brings together data that is difficult, or, at the least, time-consuming, to assemble otherwise. The author's purview extends from the Rig Veda into the period of the Upanisads and older Srauta Sutras, and this particularly large range allows the development of the formation to be followed for much of its living history.

In each section this tabular display is followed by discussion of whatever the author deems relevant, and always includes a treatment of the particular nuance(s) of "desiderativity" expressed by the stem. Each such discussion contains extensive textual citations of the stem in context, with translation, and the author does not shrink from tackling difficult and puzzling passages or from confronting the philological problems they raise. Given his...