Journeys into Vedic Thought
Long-form, researched essays on the deities, language, ritual and history of the Rig Veda. All free to read.
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Four Verbs in the Past Tense: The Rigveda's Only First-Person Report of Immortality
Somewhere around 1200 BCE a poet wrote down four verbs and claimed, in the past tense, that he and his companions had already become deathless. Nobody has ever agreed on what he meant. The argument runs from Sayana in the fourteenth century to a Dutch Indologist in 1994, and it turns on a single grammatical form.
Sanskrit and the Birth of Linguistics: How Vedic Scholarship Founded the Scientific Study of Language
Pāṇini's Aṣṭādhyāyī (c. 5th century BCE) is a complete generative grammar of Sanskrit, 2400 years before Chomsky. It was developed, with Yāska's Nirukta and the Prātiśākhyas, to preserve the Rig Veda. How Vedic scholarship invented linguistics — and how that science reached the modern West.
Vedic Sanskrit Accent: Udatta, Anudatta, Svarita — The Tonal System That Preserved the Veda
Vedic Sanskrit, unlike classical Sanskrit, has a pitch accent. The three-tone system of udātta, anudātta and svarita is the key to the metrical and lexical precision of the Rig Veda, and the reason oral recitation has preserved the text so faithfully.