Middle Indian languages
| Middle Indo-Aryan | |
|---|---|
| Geographic distribution |
Northern India |
| Linguistic classification |
Indo-European
|
| Glottolog | midd1350 |
The Middle Indo-Aryan languages (or Middle Indic languages, sometimes conflated with the Prakrits, which are a stage of Middle Indic) are a historical group of languages of the Indo-Aryan family. They are the descendants of Old Indo-Aryan (attested in Vedic Sanskrit) and the predecessors of the modern Indo-Aryan languages, such as Hindustani (Hindi-Urdu), Odia, Bengali and Punjabi.
The Middle Indo-Aryan (MIA) stage in the evolution of Indo-Aryan languages is thought to have spanned more than a millennium between 600 BCE and 1000 CE, and is often divided into three major subdivisions.
The Indo-Aryan languages are commonly assigned to three major groups - Old Indo-Aryan languages, Middle Indo-Aryan languages and Early Modern and Modern Indo-Aryan languages. The classification reflects stages in linguistic development, rather than being strictly chronological.
The Middle Indo-Aryan languages are younger than the Old Indo-Aryan languages but were contemporaneous with the use of Classical Sanskrit, an Old Indo-Aryan language used for literary purposes.
According to Thomas Oberlies, a number of morphophonological and lexical features of Middle Indo-Aryan languages show that they are not direct continuations of Vedic Sanskrit. Instead they descend from other dialects similar to, but in some ways more archaic than Vedic Sanskrit.
A Middle Indo-Aryan innovation are the serial verb constructions that have evolved into complex predicates in modern north Indian languages such as Hindi and Bengali. For example, भाग जा (bhāg jā) 'go run' means run away, पका ले (pakā le) 'take cook' means to cook for oneself, and पका दे (pakā de) 'give cook' means to cook for someone. The second verb restricts the meaning of the main verb or adds a shade of meaning to it. Subsequently, the second verb was grammaticalised further into what is known as a light verb, mainly used to convey lexical aspect distinctions for the main verb. The innovation is based on Sanskrit atmanepadi (fruit of the action accrues to the doer) and parasmaipadi verbs (fruit of the action accrues to some other than the doer). For example, पका दे (pakā de) 'give cook' has the result of the action (cooked food) going to someone else, and पका ले (pakā le) 'take cook' to the one who is doing the cooking.
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