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uh-ē sabʰa hal-y-ā v-y-ā rāṇā 3SG.DIST-PL all walk-PFV-M.PL go-PFV-M.PL ? They all left, sons of the soil cʰaɗ-ē gʰar pahinj-ā dāṇā abandon-SUBJ.3.SG home.M REFL.GEN-M.PL ? Leaving their ancestral land vakʰar-a vikʰ-a visār-ē sār-ā all? step.M-PL forget-SUBJ.3.SG all-M.PL Forgetting all the footprints, never looking back sakʰara sukʰ-a sār-ē pyārā Sukkur comfort.M-PL all-M.PL dear Leaving behind Sukkur, comforts, and their homeland mānī mānu=vār-ī macʰī j-e sā̃ palō bread.F honour=relating-F fish GEN-? with pallo...

The basic idea of Greater Magadha is that it was a culture separate from Vedic/Brahmanical Hinduism focused around the Magadha region, roughly around present-day Bihar and neighbouring areas. This culture did not hold the supremacy needed for it to be documented as well as Brahmanical Hinduism has been, but we can find clues of its existence through its interactions with Brahmanical Hinduism and traces in the other religious traditions, such as Jainism and Ājīvikism....

There is a weird developing cultural trend in some circles of treating Hindi as a sole inheritor of Sanskrit. Obviously, this is tied to the political centralisation around certain religious ideologies, which seem to have an obsession for a singular national language (invariably Hindi). But a lot of the arguments for this special status of Hindi are grounded in linguistic nonsense. I responded to one instance of this on Twitter, but it was a long thread that isn’t really nice to view on there so this blog post is a form of that....

Recently, I’ve been working on mapping the languages of South Asia by organising the scholarly work that has been done on individual varieties—this means sociolinguistic surveys, grammatical descriptions of standardised dialects, and any other fieldwork-based study of language. At first the goal was to organise the works that I read and reference in a way that is (1) useful to others, and (2) easy to browse through, but I came to realise that it can be useful beyond that, for more general-purpose language mapping....

This is a list of Indo-Aryan lexical items whch can be traced to Indo-European yet have no preserved Sanskrit intermediaries. Certain *ārtá: MIA āṭā ‘flour’, Hindi āṭā, Punjabi āṭṭā, Romani (j)aro … (Turner: 1338) PIIr. *HārHtás ’that which is ground’, vriddhi-form of *Hr̥H-tás ‘ground’ < PIE *h₂elh₁- ’to grind’; cf. MIA āṭā, Persian ārd ‘flour’, Avestan aṣ̌a ‘ground’, Old Armenian ałam ’to grind’. Doesn’t seem that the r in the cluster has been preserved in any NIA language (Romani (j)aro has the usual t → r / V_V change), but lack of MIA dental attā ~ ātā supports the presence of r which causes retroflexion....