Vedic plant-seed suffixes (-vila and -piJja)

[Guest guest]

Early Sources for South Asian Substrate Languages.

Mother Tongue (extra number), October 1999, pp.1-70,

http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~witzel/MT-Substrates.pdf

 

>From p. 11,

"tila 'sesame' AV (cf. tilvila 'fertile' RV, Kuiper 1955:157,

tilpiJja/tilpiJjI 'infertile sesame' AV)".

 

The suffixes, -vila and -piJja on plant-seed names are

interesting.

 

Tamil has "viLai-tal" 1. to be produced; 2. to be productive;

3. to result; 4. to mature, ripen, as grain; and, "viLai-ttal"

1. to raise, cause to grow; 2. to produce, bring into being; So,

a fertile plant-seed such as tila will be tila-viLai.

There are village names ending with -viLai in TN.

 

piJju/piJjai 1. young, tender fruit; 2. that which is young and tender

So, tila-piJja "young/tender (hence, infertile) sesame".

 

Tamil, not just MuNDa, too has prefixes.

The tamil terms, mun-oTTu 'prefix' and pin-oTTu 'suffix'

employ prefixes, 'mun2' and 'pin2'. peru 'big/great'

is often a prefix. I. Mahadevan pointed out the

female gender noun, perumakaL (cf. pramukha) in early brahmi in

Ceylon.

 

piJju also is used often as a prefix:

a) piJjuppiRai 'crescent of the moon'

b) pijncuveLLi 'quarter silver(=rupee/dollar)'

"piJjil viLai-tal" or "piJjil pazu-ttal"

1. to become prematurely mature or old; 2. to be precocious

 

BTW,

The recent published articles (2001, 2002) on ancient

Indian history by profs. M. Witzel and A. Parpola

makes exciting reading. The main focus is the Indus

valley around 2000 BCE, and the later Vedic texts'

relation to it. While they agree on many things,

Parpola differs from Witzel in some main aspects:

eg., Parpola takes the authors of BMAC culture

as Arya which in later stages have penetrated

the IVC whose high language was a form of Dravidian.

he gives many linguistic reasons, one example is

-kOTTai, -kOT found in place names of both

IVC and south India. Parpola now reconstructs that Rgvedic

Aryans entered India around c. 1400 BCE, and not in 1750 or so.

 

Regards,

N. Ganesan