Vedic śīyate ‘falls’: an atmospheric verb among verbs of spontaneous events

Kulikov, Leonid
(2023) 56th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE56), Workshop “Linguistics of weather” — Location: National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece (29.August.2023)

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The Vedic present tense formation with the suffix -ya- and middle inflection, śīya-te (root śī), attested from the second most ancient Old Indo-Aryan text, Atharvaveda (c. 1000 BCE), onwards, exhibits a particular meaning ‘fall (congealing)’, said of precipitations, such as snow, hail, dew etc. This usage is documented for a few occurrences in Middle Vedic texts (Brāhmaṇas, approx. 800-500 BCE) of the type …himó yác ca śīyáte…;…nīhāró yác ca śīyáte…; …hrādúnīr yác ca śīyáte… (TaitBr 3.12.7.2-3) ‘…and all [that water] which falls [as] snow…; …and all [that] which falls [as] mist…; …and all [that] which falls [as] hail...’ (from sacrificial formulas recited by the priest) Furthermore, the same verb is attested with the subject of tears considered as rain: sò ’rodīd; […] yád áśrv áśīyata, tád ||1|| rajatám̐ híraṇyam abhavat (TaitSaṃh. 1.5.1.1-2) ‘He (sc. Agni) wept […]; the tear that fell became silver.’ The position of śīya-te among middle -ya-presents is quite peculiar. On the one hand, it shares some features with such root-accented -ya-presents as pádya-te, fitting into the semantic class of verbs of (spontaneous) motion and body posture. On the other hand, its variable accentuation (on the root or suffix) point to the tendency to group with the middle -ya-presents with fluctuating accentuation (ˊ-yá-presents). The type of accentuation serves as a salient formal feature of a semantically quite homogenous class of verbs referring to spontaneous events, typically resulting in decay and/or destruction (or, put more generally, to the processes of entropy increase; see Kulikov 1998 for a discussion of this class and its semantics). This latter analysis is supported by the use of śīya-te to refer to a variety of processes of decay and erosion, such as falling out of hair or teeth. The phonologically, morphologically and semantically homogenous group of middle ˊ-yá-presents, such as kṣī́yá-te ‘perish, disappear’ or mī́yá-te ‘perish’, could favour the assimilation of śīya-te to other members of this class (verbs of destruction or decay), thus eventually giving rise to fluctuating accentuation – in contrast to other (quasi-)synonymous verbs of motion/falling, such as pádya-te. This also implies that the atmospheric phenomena, such as, above all, precipitations falling down were conceptualized in the Vedic dictionary as coming about spontaneously, and (perhaps) even as contributing to the overall increase of entropy. References Kulikov, L. 1998. Passive, anticausative and classification of verbs: The case of Vedic. In: L. Kulikov & H. Vater (eds), Typology of verbal categories: Papers presented to Vladimir Nedjalkov on the occasion of his 70th birthday, 139-153. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
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Kulikov, L. (2023). Vedic śīyate ‘falls’: an atmospheric verb among verbs of spontaneous events. 56th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE56), Workshop “Linguistics of weather”, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/102335