(3) Kohistani and Shina are both well-established groupings of Indo-Aryan languages, but it is still disputed whether the two also belong in an intermediary grouping often referred to as "
Dardic" that would comprise most (but not all) of the Indo-Aryan languages spoken in the mountainous North of Pakistan as well as in adjoining areas in northeastern Afghanistan and in the disputed areas of Jammu & Kashmir (Bashir 2003, 822-825; Strand 2001, 258; Zoller 2005, 10-11).
Ext reme Orient 86, 1972); Alexandar Lenowich Grunberg, "Opytlingvisticeskoj karty _________, Nuristana," Strany i narody Vostoka, Vol.10 (1971), pp.288-290; Jazyki Vostochnogo Gindukuska, Jazyk kalti (Moscow: Nauha Publishing , Afghanistan Sprachsituation and House, 1980); Sprachenpolitile" Abandlungen and Berichte des Staaticher Museums fur Volkerkunde Dresden, Vol.47 (1992), pp.235-42; Ruth Laila Schmidt, "Report on a Survey of
Dardic Languages of Kashmir", Indian Linguistics, Vol.42, (1981), pp.17-21; George Buddruss, "Neue Schriftsprachen in Norden Pakistan" in A.
Furthermore, the population associated with the queendom, most probably
Dardic (or perhaps also Burusho) tribes, could once have spread much further to the east, and this could have caused the presumably wrong association with Greater Yangtong.
Numbering only a few thousands, they speak an Indo-Aryan language of the North-West-Indo-Aryan (
Dardic) (Bashir 2003) group called Kalashamon (Morgenstieme 1973; Bashir 1988; Trail & Cooper 1999; Heegard 2006; Di Cario 2009), and they are the last polytheists of the Hindu Kush (1).
The same low central vowel contrast is represented variously by a / a (for Hindi, Urdu, Magahi, Bhojpuri, Marathi, Kashmiri, several
Dardic languages, and of course Sanskrit, Pali, and Prakrit), a / [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (for Maithili, Panjabi, Nepali, Gujarati, Sindhi, Sinhala), and in the Eastern languages (where the second of these vowels--the so-called "inherent vowel"--takes on a back rounded quality) by a / [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] ~ [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] for Assamese, a / [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] for Oriya, but again by a / a for Bangla.
Keywords: Romani history, Nuristani,
Dardic, West Pahari, Indo-Aryan, linguistic borrowing.
However, conjunct formations are again found in
Dardic as in Gauro chigi gho 'to sneeze' with the verb deriving < OIA ghatate 'is busy with' (4407).
The confusion between druma and dharma has two possible explanations: we could hypothesize with Karashima that Dharmaraksa's Indic text - or his pronunciation of it - was subject to the usual metathesis of liquids characteristic of Gandhari and the later
Dardic languages, hence dharma > dhrama or drama (with concomitant confusion of u and a); or that druma was pronounced with an epenthetic -a- [daruma] in which the unaccented -u- was heard only weakly, thereby making its pronunciation nearly indistinguishable from that of dharma.
(12) According to some scholars they also belong to the same "
Dardic" sub-branch.
Assamese and Oriya are major casualties; the "
Dardic" languages are not worth an entry, despite their problematic status (they are mentioned only in the language-list under "Northwest Indo-Aryan"); "Hindi" is (apparently) the official Hindi of administrative usage--no hint is given of the great dialectal variation, in time and space, of the "language." Deshpande's article on Sanskrit is a masterpiece of concision--nothing (aside from a misprint or two--from which the Encyclopedia is remarkably free, as far as I can tell) is actually wrong--but I have to wonder if it makes sense to me only because I can fill in the blanks.
Buddruss with Muhammad Amin Zia; Radloff and Shakil (1998) and Radloff (1999) on Gilgit Shina; Liljegren (2008) on Palula; earlier detailed treatments of Kohistani Shina by Schmidt (2001, 2004, 2006); joint efforts by Schmidt and Kohistani (1995, 1998, 2001) and by Schmidt and Zarin (1981); and work on eastern Shina by Hook (1990, 1996, 1997), it is making Shina one of the better-studied of the
Dardic languages.
"In the religions of the Northwest known from Nuristani and
Dardic traditions the Indian Siva often derives his name from Mahadeva (Mahandeu, Mande etc.)." The author may be right that "it is quite possible that he is originally a local god later identified with Siva, a process common everywhere in India" (p.
With the exception in fact of the Burushaski language spoken in Hunza--a non-Indo-European tongue for which no plausible linguistic affiliation has yet been found (5)--the languages of the Hindu Kush belong to the so-called
Dardic and Kafiri (or Nuristani) language groups (Edelman 1983; Fussman 1972; Morgenstierne 1974; Strand 2001; Bashir 2003).
The OIA voiced aspirated consonants have been lost in the majority of
Dardic languages, as is quite clear from the vocabulary in Table 1.
These regions are even today inhabited by the Kohistani people, a group of
Dardic Indo-Aryans linguistically linked to Chitral and Gilgit.