Sprach- und literaturwissenschaftliche Fakultät - Historisch-vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft

Felix Otter (Marburg University): A brief introduction to the Aśoka inscriptions: Language and History

The edicts of the Maurya king Aśoka written in various Early Middle Indic dialects are among the most important textual sources for the history of Ancient India. Inscribed on rock faces and stone pillars, these texts have come down to us in their original form without ever having been subject to the vagaries of a scribal tradition. In this class we will acquaint ourselves with the grammar and lexicon of the edicts and learn the basics of the scripts in which they were written, Brāhmī and Kharoṣṭhī. In the final session, we will attempt to read one of the longer edicts in full.

Stefan Baums (LMU): Buddhist Middle Indic: Pāli and Gāndhārī

Buddhist texts are preserved for us in two Middle Indo-Aryan languages with very different transmission histories. One is the literary language Pali, probably based on a Western Indian dialect, and exported to Southern India and Sri Lanka, from where it spread to Southeast Asia and became the sacred language of Theravāda Buddhism to this day. Pali is the only Indian language in which a complete Buddhist canon and set of commentaries, as well as many later texts, are preserved for us. Gāndhārī, on the other hand, is the language of the northwestern region of Gandhāra (northern Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan), and preserved to us in more than a thousand inscriptions as well as about one hundred and fifty mostly Buddhist birch-bark and palm-leaf manuscripts discovered in recent years. Gāndhārī was replaced by Sanskrit by the fourth century CE, after about five hundred years of attested use and also serving as an important language for the earliest Buddhist transmission to Central Asia and China. In this class, we will introduce the grammars of Pali and Gāndhārī, build on the Kharoṣṭhī script introduced in the Aśoka class, and read a selection of Buddhist texts in parallel Pali and Gāndhārī versions.

Middle Iranian

Benedikt Peschl (FU): Middle Persian and Parthian from a comparative-historical perspective

Middle Persian and Parthian are two closely related Middle Iranian languages, often subsumed under the umbrella term Western Middle Iranian (WMIr). They are attested in a rich variety of religious (Zoroastrian, Manichaean, Christian), inscriptional and administrative texts dating from the 1^st c. BCE until the 10^th c. CE. Building on a short survey of these corpora, the course will offer an outline of the historical phonology, morphosyntax and word formation of WMIr against the background of Early (Indo-)Iranian. It will also address some of the challenges posed by the writing systems used, questions of internal diachrony and language contact, and sociolinguistic aspects of Middle Persian and Parthian as literary languages. Short text samples will illustrate the features discussed.

Alessandro Del Tomba (Sapienza, Roma): Introduction to Khotanese historical grammar

Khotanese is an Eastern Middle Iranian language that was once spoken and written in the southwest of the Tarim Basin (present-day Xīnjiāng Uyghur Autonomous Region of China). The extant Khotanese corpus consists of Buddhist religious and other literary and medical texts, as well as secular and administrative documents. These manuscripts, dating from the 5th to the 10th centuries CE, reflect various linguistic stages, traditionally grouped under the labels of Old and Late Khotanese. The earliest stages exhibit a highly complex grammar, underscoring Khotanese as one of the most conservative Middle Iranian languages. This course provides a linguistic and cultural introduction to Khotanese, focusing on phonological and morphological developments from Proto-Iranian to Old Khotanese, and from Old Khotanese to its latest attested stages. Major typological shifts will also be outlined.