Rgvedic Word Concordance.

• Author: Jamison, Stephanie W.
• Position: Review

By ALEXANDER LUBOTSKY. Two volumes. American Oriental Society Series, no. 82. New Haven: AMERICAN ORIENTAL SOCIETY, 1997. Pp. xii + 1667. $125 per set.

It is unfortunately the case that the best and most valuable books are those about which we have the least to say - as every reviewer knows who finds his verbal craft stimulated by mistakes, misunderstandings, and weak arguments, but whose streams of eloquence run dry in the face of simple achievement. On this principle, this review could be the shortest appearing in the journal: "This is an indispensable tool for anyone working on the Rig Veda; we are indebted to Prof. Lubotsky for the enormous labor of producing it and to the Society for publishing it, especially at comparatively low cost; and everyone should go out and buy it."

However, I owe the author and his work more words than that, and will proceed to describe exactly what it is and does and why you need it. This massive two-volume set presents every word in the Rig Veda, with its frequency and the text of all the padas in which it occurs, arranged according to the usual grammatical norms: nominal stems and verbal roots.

When I first heard of this project, I was somewhat dubious about its value, as I thought it would be simply a mechanical, computer-generated remaking of H. Grassmann's indispensable but much out of date Worterbuch zum Rig-Veda (1st ed., 1872). One of the strengths of Grassmann is that he regularly provides the relevant syntactic context of the word in question, and this information has been sifted, by human mind, from whatever is irrelevant in the verse. Though we may often disagree with Grassmann's judgments in this or that case, it has always been clear that making such judgments, rather than automatically providing, say, the four or five adjacent words, was crucial for a text where word order obeys rhetoric more often than strict syntactic constituency. Therefore, I thought, merely providing the pada in which each Rigvedic word is embedded would represent a retreat from Grassmann's use of human decision-making.

And so it would have been, if that were the purpose of this work, but it serves quite different ends. The author(1) himself states that it may be of limited use for investigating syntax and semantics; its real significance is "as a tool for studying Rgvedic metrical phenomena and Rgvedic formulae" (p. vii). One of the most important strains of Rigvedic scholarship in recent years has been the increased...