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The oral style of the Rgveda
Archaeologists have long claimed the Indus Valley as one of the four literate centers of the early ancient world, complete with long texts written on perishable materials. We demonstrate the impossibility of the lost-manuscript thesis and show that Indus symbols were not even evolving in linguistic directions after at least 600 years of use. Suggestions as to how Indus symbols were used are noted in nonlinguistic symbol systems in the Near East that served key religious, political and social functions without encoding speech or serving as formal memory aids. Evidence is reviewed that the Harappans' lack of a true script may have been tied to the role played by their symbols in controlling large multilinguistic populations; parallels are drawn to the later resistance of Brahmin elites to the literate encoding of Vedic sources and to similar phenomena in esoteric traditions outside South Asia. Discussion is provided on some of the political and academic forces that helped sustain the Indus-script myth for over 130 years and on ways in which our findings transform current views of the Indus Valley and of literacy in the ancient world in general.
The recent publication of a collection of the major articles of A. Hillebrandt (1853-1927) offers an opportunity to review, two or three generations later, his pioneering work in early Indian ritual and myth and in ancient Indian statecraft, whose main work, the Artha??stra, he discovered and discussed in 1908. We can now easily assess his carefully worded positions on topics of ritual and myth, written before the twenties, when a regrettable separation between anthropology and Vedic studies developed. Though he was strongly influenced by the then-predominant paradigm of nature mythology (as indeed still too many are by the respective scholarly fashions of our day), his work remains remarkably fresh and should be restudied before it slips from the mind of contemporary scholars or, worse, is summarily assigned to the "dark ages" of the nineteenth century.
This paper defines a formal relation among sentences, by virtue of which one sentence structure may be called a transform of another sentence structure (e.g. the active and the passive, or in a different way question and answer). The relation is based on comparing the individual co-occurrences of morphemes. By investigating the individual co-occurrences (§ 1.2; § 2) we can characterize the distribution of certain classes which may not be definable in ordinary linguistic terms (e.g. pronouns, § 2.6). More important, we can then proceed to define transformation (§ 1.3), based on two structures having the same set of individual co-occurrences. This relation yields unique analyses of certain structures and distinctions which could not be analyzed in ordinary linguistic terms (§ 3). It replaces a large part of the complexities of constituent analysis and sentence structure, at the cost of adding a level to grammatical analysis. It also has various analytic and practical applications (§ 5.7), and can enter into a more algebraic analysis of language structure (§ 5.2, 4, 6) than is natural for the usual classificatory linguistics. A list of English transformations is given in § 4. The main argument can be followed in § 1.11 (Co-Occurrence Defined), § 1.2 (Constructional Status), § 1.3 (Transformation Defined), § 2.9 (Summary of Constructions), § 3.9 (Summary of Sentence Sequences), § 5 (The Place of Transformations in Linguistic Structure).1
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