Does there exist a reliable, reasonably up-to-date historical-comparative grammar of Sanskrit written in English? Failing that, what are the standard works for historical Sanskrit phonology and morphology in other European languages?
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1Not quite what you need but worth mentioning: Manfred Mayrhofer, Die Fortsetzung der indogermanischen Laryngale im Indo-Iranischen (Wien, 2005).– Alex B.Aug 31, 2017 at 4:12
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1Meier-Bruegger (2010) mentions Kobayashi, Historical phonology of Old Indo -Aryan consonants, available online gengo.l.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~masatok/hpiac_2004.pdf No opinion though, since this is not my area of expertise.– Alex B.Aug 31, 2017 at 4:21
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@AlexB. It's not available online there anymore. (Although a recent Google search gave me the same link when I was looking for an answer to a specific question.)– imz -- Ivan ZakharyaschevJan 5, 2020 at 0:50
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2 Answers
Burrow’s The Sanskrit language (1955) is still very good (though pre-laryngealist). There is also an English translation of Mayrhofer’s Sanskrit-Grammatik, which is short but also very good.
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Thanks; apparently there is a third edition of Burrow which is updated to reflect laryngeal theory (though I haven't looked at it). But my impression is that there's nothing comparable to e.g. Weiss's Latin grammar in thoroughness or up-to-dateness -- would you say that's correct?– TKRAug 31, 2017 at 2:07
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1I am always skeptical of books that have been "updated" by someone other than the author. Burrow had strongly felt reasons for rejecting the laryngeal theory. These may or may not be valid, but they are fairly central to his thinking about old Indo-Aryan.– fdbAug 31, 2017 at 8:40
You guys never learn to use the Interet Archive. Re: Kobayashi: Go to https://archive.org/ and in the Wayback Machine frame enter http://www.gengo.l.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~masatok/hpiac_2004.pdf, then you receive the list of IA copies, https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.gengo.l.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~masatok/hpiac_2004.pdf. On the attempt to donwload, you'll see that the archive copy dated 2020 appears red, which means the original file was no longer available during the attempt to archive it, but if you target the 2016 copy(copies) on the timeline, you'll be moved to https://web.archive.org/web/20160815000000*/http://www.gengo.l.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~masatok/hpiac_2004.pdf, and you'll see this one is marked blue, which means it is ok. Go there (move your mouse to the blue dot located on August 3 and then click on the blue link with the archive hour in a small pop-up window), and you'll get it. Bingo! Re: Burrow: The third edition is available at https://archive.org/details/BurrowTheSanskritLanguage and also at https://www.academia.edu/38684965/The_Sanskrit_Language_Burrow. It was updated in 1973, seemingly by Burrow himself, and the 2001 Indian edition is but a reprint of it.
