These [Mitanni] numerals and divine and personal names are the oldest actual specimens of any Aryan speech which we possess. The forms deserve special attention. They are already quite distinctly Satem forms ; in fact, they are very nearly pure Indic. Certainly they are much more nearly akin to Sanskrit than to any of the Iranian dialects that later constituted the western wing of the Indo-Iranian family. Thus among the deities Nasatya is the Sanskrit form as opposed to the Zend Naonhaitya and all the four gods are prominent in the oldest Veda, while in the Iranian Avesta they have been degraded to secondary rank (Mithra), converted into demons (Indra) or renamed (Varuna =Ahura Mazda). The numerals are distinctively Indic not Iranian ; aika is identical with the Sanskrit eka while ' one ’ in Zend is aeva. So the s is preserved in Satta where it becomes h in Iranian (hapta) and the exact form is found, not indeed in Sanskrit, but in the Prakrits which were supposed to be post-Vedic. Even the personal names look Indic rather than Iranian. Thus Biridaswa has been plausibly compared with the Sanskrit Brhadasva (owning a great horse). If this be right the second element, asva, horse, is in contrast to the Iranian form aspa seen in Old Persian and Zend. ... Finally we know that there existed among the Mitanni at this time a class of warriors styled maryanni which has suggested comparison with the Sanskrit marya young men, heroes.
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Other evidence, from Mitanni and neo-Hittite sources, indicates that the names of Mitanni kings were traditionally Indo-Aryan, even though the Mitanni belonged to the Hurrian-speaking peoples. We therefore surmise that the Mitanni once lived close to an early Indo-Aryan group, that had perhaps taken a dominant position over the pre-Mitanni population, and then became quickly acculturated as Hurrian speakers.
The discovery of 'Aryan' looking names of (Mitanni) princes on cuneiform documents in Akkadian from the second half of the second millennium BC (chiefly tablets from Bogazkoy and El-Amarna), several doubtlessly Aryan words in Kikkuli's treatise in Hittite on horse training (numerals: aika- 'one', tera- 'three', panza- 'five', satta – 'seven', na(ya) – 'nine'; appellatives: varttana – 'circuit', course (in which horses move when being trained),' aliya – 'horse'), and, finally, a series of names of Aryan divinities on a Mitanni-Hatti and a Hatti-Mitanni treaty (14th century BC), poses a number of problems that have been reportedly discussed since the beginning of the century.
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Our dating of the Indo-Aryan element in the Mitanni texts is based purely and simply on written documents offering datable contexts. While we cannot with certainty push these dates prior to the fifteenth century BC. It should not be forgotten that the Indic elements seem to be little more than the residue of a dead language in Hurrian, and that the symbiosis that produced the Mitanni may have taken place centuries earlier.
The bifurcation of Indo-Iranian is well known to be evident not only in South Asia, where all three of Indic, Nuristani and Iranian sub-branches are found, but also in ancient eastern Anatolia, where either an Indie language or undifferentiated Indo-Aryan or Indo-Iranian is evident in early Mitannian vocabulary (e.g. aika-wartanna ‘one course’, where aika is cognate to Sanskrit eka ‘one’, an Indie word) while Old Persian and Avestan are Iranian...
In addition, in his The Sanskrit Language T. Burrow finds a few traces of the Sanskrit language among the documents of the Kassite dynasty of Babylon: “In a list of names of gods with Babylonian equivalents we find a sun-god Suriyas (rendered Samas) which must clearly be identified with Skt Surya. In addition, Maruttas the war-god (rendered En-Urta) has been compared with Skt Marut … Among the kings of this dynasty one has a name which can be interpreted as Aryan: Abhirattas: abhi-ratha – ‘facing chariots in battle’.”
MIA and NIA languages are not, strictly speaking, derived from the language of the Rigveda or from Classical Sanskrit […] these Aryans of the eastern tracts seem to be different from the Midland or Vedic Aryans in many respects―in religious observances, in many practices, in dialect […] these Aryans were distinct from those other Aryans of the West among whom the Vedic culture grew up, distinct in dialect, in religion and in practices...
The morphology of Vedic […] retains most faithfully the inflections of primitive Indo-European.
As for Burrow‘s thesis that some place names reflect the names of geographical features to the west, and thus preserve an ancestral home, they once again rather rely on an assumption of Arya migrations than prove it. [...] His cited equivalence of Sanskrit Saraswati and Avestan Haraxvaiti is a case in point. Burrow accepts that it is the latter term that is borrowed, undergoing the usual change of s- > h in the process, but suggests that Saraswati was a proto-Indoaryan term, originally applied to the present Haraxvaiti when the proto-Indoaryans still lived in northeastern Iran, then it was brought into India at the time of the migrations, while its original bearer had its name modified by the speakers of Avestan who assumed control of the areas vacated by proto-Indoaryans. It would be just as plausible to assume that Saraswati was a Sanskrit term indigenous to India and was later imported by the speakers of Avestan into Iran. The fact that the Zend Avesta is aware of areas outside the Iranian plateau while the Rigveda is ignorant of anything west of the Indus basin would certainly support such an assertion.
"So many names that at a hasty glance appear utterly unmeaning can be traced back to original Sanskrit forms as to raise a presumption that the remainder, though more effectively disguised, will ultimately be found capable of similar treatment: a strong argument being thus afforded against those scholars who hold that the modern vernacular is impregnated with a very large non-Aryan element" (Growse 1883, 353).
The fact that proto-Aryan *ai and *au are replaced in Indo-Aryan by e and o, while in Iranian they are preserved as ai and au and that ai and au regularly appear on the Anatolian documents (eg. Kikkuli‘s aika), is unfortunately inconclusive. It is quite possible that at the time of our oldest records (the hymns of the Rigveda) the actual pronunciation of the sounds developed for *ai and *au spoken and written by the tradition as e and o, was still ai and au. The e and o can be a secondarily introduced change under the influence of the spoken language or the scholastic recitation.
It seems to be a general rule that a people which invaded a foreign country, to some degree adopted the pronunciation of its new home, partly as a result of the influence of climate, and partly also on account of the intermixture with the old inhabitants. This has also generally been supposed to have been the case in India. Thus there has been a long discussion as to whether the Aryans have adopted the cerebral letters from the Dravidas or have developed them independently. Good reasons have been adduced for both suppositions, and the question has not as yet been decided. The Indo-European languages do not seem to have possessed those letters. They had a series of dentals which were not, however, pronounced as pure dentals by putting the tongue between the teeth, but probably as alveolars, the tongue being pressed against the root of the upper teeth [as, for instance, in pronouncing the English -t- and -d-]. It is a well known fact that these sounds have in India partly become dentals and partly cerebrals. The cerebrals are in most cases derived from compound letters where the old dentals were preceded by an -l-. Similar changes also occur in other Indo-European languages, and it is therefore quite possible that the Indo-Aryan cerebrals have been developed quite independently. The cerebral letters, however, form an essential feature of the Dravidian phonology , and it therefore seems probable that Dravidian influence has been at work and at least given strength to a tendency which can, it is true , have taken its origin among the Aryans themselves.
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