Language and Style of the Vedic Rsis

Elizarenkova, perhaps the greatest living scholar of the Rgveda and certainly its greatest linguist, explains here the relationships between a very complicated grammatical system and the peculiarities of style of the archaic religious poetry. The laudatory hymn is treated as an act of verbal communication between the poet Rsi and the deity, with the hymn itself transmitting certain information from man to god. From this viewpoint, the hymn is used as a means to maintain a circular exchange of gifts between the Rsis and their gods.
Many peculiarities of the functioning of the grammatical system of the Rgveda are interpreted in connection with the model of the universe of the Vedic Aryan. For example, the concept of time as a circular process bears closely on the use of the verbal grammatical categories of tense and mood; the personification of some abstract forces can explain some irregularities in the functioning of the nominal category of gender; and the idea of magical power attributed to the Sacred Speech in general, and to the name of a god in particular, underlies the magical grammar of this religious poetry. More

Tatyana J. Elizarenkova is senior research fellow at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences and member of the Academia Europaea.