Konditionalsatze im Satapathabrahmana.

• Author: Jamison, Stephanie W.

This volume is a welcome addition to the recent proliferation of painstaking, philologically grounded, monographic treatments of Vedic syntactic phenomena. The work it most resembles is Heinrich Hettrich's massive 1988 Untersuchungen zur Hypotaxe im Vedischen, on subordinate clauses in the Rig Veda, but it must also be read as a companion and supplement to Armand Minard's pioneering (if somewhat maddening) La Subordination dans la prose vedique of 1936, which also deals entirely with the Satapatha Brahmana.

After a brief introduction (c. 40 pp.), the book is organized according to the subordinating conjunction that signals the conditional quality of the sentence. It proceeds from those conjunctions with undoubted and exclusive conditional value - ced (pp. 39-72) and, most centrally, yadi (pp. 73-203) - to those with occasional conditional sense (with the conditional interpretation at the whim of the interpreter), namely yad (pp. 205-81) and the relative pronouns and conjunctions (including yada, yatra, yatha, etc.) (pp. 283-328). The last chapter (pp. 329-72) concerns structures subject to conditional interpretation but without overt conditional marker. (The connection between these last examples and other types of conditional sentences can seem extremely tenuous.) The collections for ced and yadi are complete. For the other subordinators the coverage is, not surprisingly, less thorough, but all examples with optatives and subjunctives seem to have been examined.

This progression makes a good deal of sense. The author can test and establish his hypotheses on the clearest set of examples before tackling the more semantically dubious ones. The breadth and depth of the treatment also nicely complement Minard's treatment, since Minard did not discuss ced or yad at all and discussed peripheral functions of yadi rather than its primary value. The clarity of this organizational scheme has a small cost, however, in that exploring certain interesting questions is discouraged by the rigidity of the system. In particular, comparison of parallel structures containing different conjunctions is handled only marginally, banished to footnotes.

Within each chapter the material is arranged systematically according to several parameters, the most important of which is mood: first the mood of the verb in the protasis, and then within those groups the mood in the apodosis. Copious examples are given and richly commented on, and we can be especially grateful to...