Apbharamsa Hindi Kosha

The present volume mainly consists of original research papers. It is not a collection or anthology in which specialists of the different aspects of Kashmirian use or study of language were invited to write essays surveying the aspects best known to them or to produce state-of-the-art reports about the scholarly study of the aspects. An effort, however, has been made in the Introduction to provide the general background that a reader may need in order to situate the papers in the proper intellectual and historical context. The Introduction further outlines the themes that could and should be particularly explored to lead us to a fuller and sharper understanding of Kashmir’s analytical engagement with language. The appendices toward the end of the volume then complement the Introduction by presenting objective and practical information about the manuscripts etc. of works in Sanskrit. The volume could connect the results of the work done in the past with the work to be done in the future by adding to knowledge in the present because of the articles it attracted from veteran as well as upcoming researchers. The reader will find here discussions bearing upon texts, as well as discussions bearing upon the authors of texts; discussions devoted to elucidating single passages, as well as discussions exploring instances of intertextuality; and discussions exclusively addressing individual grammars, as well as discussions engaging in the relation of one grammatical school with another.

This volume presents the advances in the ongoing research on Brahmi and its daughter scripts used in the present day India. It brings together two main trends: evolutionary-historical development and linguistic grounding. This is the first attempt to cross-fertilize palaeography and linguistics. The palaeographic papers cover the main issues in the decipherment of the Indus Valley script, the origin and evolution of Brahmi, and the palaeographic methods and considerations employed in the decipherment of scripts. These present different trends and arguments of writers on the origin of Brahmi as having been around the Mauryan era or at a much earlier stage, relate to broader historical and cultural issues. They also deal with the need for the use of established and more current palaeographic techniques in classifying regional and stylistic variants of scripts. The linguistic papers in the volume explore the issues of the roots of the orthographic unit aksara in Vedic phonetics, its claim as a minimal articulatory phonetic unit, and the properties of Brahmi as a generative writing system. The philosophical and linguistic underpinning of the concept aksara is shown to thread its use in the varieties of treatises, from the Vedas to phonetic texts. The papers help in providing linguistic evidence for historical accounts of the script as an invention at a given time or as an evolving evolutionary system, apart from relating the development of the script to the linguistic history of India. Palaeographers — epigraphists, linguists and computational scientists, will find this volume interesting and useful.