Morphologische Varianz und semantische Konkurrenz: Verbalabstrakta im Rig-Veda.

• Author: Klein, Jared S.
• Position: Book Review

Morphologische Varianz und semantische Konkurrenz: Verbalabstrakta im Rig-Veda. By STEFAN NIEDERREITER. Arbeiten aus der Abteilung "Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft" Graz, vol. 16. Graz: LEYKAM BUCHVERLAGSGESELLSCHAFT, 2001. Pp. 80.

The published version of a Diplomarbeit at the University of Salzburg, this slight little volume--slight both in size and in content--treats the exceedingly subtle semantic relationships obtaining between Rigvedic simplex nouns in -ti and root nouns, s-stem neuters, barytone a-stems, and tu-stems, all of which fall under the general category of nouns of action. Since ti- stems are probably to be judged the fundamental nouns of process in Indo-European, (1) the focus of the inquiry is to see how the other noun types just mentioned differ in their semantics from this touchstone category. Part of the difficulty--and this accounts for the thinness of the volume in both senses previously noted--is that the investigation is limited to the Rigveda, where the number of instances of these various categories built to the same root (twenty-five such families of forms are represented, seventeen of which oppose the ti-stem to only one other form (2)), the data forming the basis of N's conclusions, is usually very small. Add to this the frequent obscurity of Rigvedic semantics, and one arrives all too often at a non liquet in attempting to assess the relationships studied here. In the following paragraphs I will perhaps overstate the author's conclusions by selecting what I consider to be the best case for a contrast in each instance, occasionally citing passages other than those which he has selected.

Among the fairly clear patterns that emerge is the strong tendency of root nouns to undergo concretization relative to the processive ti-derivatives. This is best seen in the pairs bhuti- 'a coming into existence'/bhu- 'world', juti- 'impetus'/ju- 'racehorse', and isti- 'a driving, sending, hastening'/is- 'nourishment'. In the last of these cases, however, Niederreiter has failed to distinguish ist[i.sub.1]- 'wish' from ist[i.sub.2]- 'a hastening, etc.', and in the one passage he presents, he picks the wrong isti-, thereby undermining his conclusions. For in X.44.9d suta istau maghavan bodhy abhagah "Become one who takes a portion in (our) pressed (soma) (and) in (our) wish, O liberal one," the sense of ist[i.sub.1]- has itself been concretized from processive to resultative: the wish as a product of wishing. Niederreiter would...