A New Dictionary of the Rigveda

摘要

An updating of Grassmann's Worterbuch zum Rigveda has long been a major desideratumof Vedic studies. In an age of specialization it is hard for us to imagine that a mathematician("Grassmann's algebra") should have been the unique author of the sole specialized dic-tionary of one of the world's most challenging texts. Grassmann's dictionary has stood forover 130 years as an indispensable tool for all who are engaged in the serious study of theRigveda. Its value resides not merely in its enregistration of all the lexical items and (withthe exception of a few exceedingly common words) its exhaustive listing of their occurrencesin the Rigveda, but also in the fact that it frequently includes grammatical contexts (e.g., headnouns modified by adjectives; subjects, objects, and often other adjuncts going with verbs).Naturally, however, in its definitions and etymologies it reflects the state of knowledge ofIndology and Indo-European linguistics circa 1872. Both these areas of inquiry have beenadvanced significantly in the century and a third that has elapsed since then. The two volumesof Oldenberg's Rgveda. Textkritische and exegetische Noten appeared in 1909 and 1912.Already by 1923 Geldner had completed a draft of his Rigveda translation (published 1951),to this day the most reliable scholarly translation that we possess.' Renou's Etudes vediqueset panineennes appeared between 1955 and 1969 (with only a very incomplete treatment ofthe Indra hymns, owing to Renou's premature death). The second edition of Elizarenkova'scomplete translation of the Rigveda, little known in the West, was published in 1999 and isused and cited in the work under review. The first volumes of Wackernagel's AltindischeGrammatik appeared in 1896 and its final volume (with Albert Debrunner) in 1930, without,alas, a treatment of the verb. Mayrhofer's Kurzgefasstes etymologisches Worterbuch desAltindischen appeared between 1956 and 1976, followed by the Vedic section of his updatedEtymologisches Worterbuch des Altindoarischen between 1986 and 1996. In the meantime,scholars such as Thieme and Kuiper had begun their lifelong engagement with the Rigvediclexicon; and beginning with Narten's study of the sigmatic aorist (1964) and continuing tothe present day, a veritable flood of studies of numerous categories of the Rigvedic verbhave appeared (e.g., Hoffmann 1967, Jamison 1983, GotO 1987, Schaefer 1994, Kiimmel1996, 2000, Kulikov 2001, Heenen 2006) as well as of an important class of nominal com-pounds (Scarlata 1999). In the area of syntax, the rise of generative grammar in all its diverseforms has led to greater sophistication in our understanding and description of syntactic andsemantic phenomena. What better time, then, to renew Grassmann?