The Kashmiri language mystery
Languages are described by their structure and vocabulary. As for structure, there are a variety of orders related to subject (S), object (O), verb (V). Thus, in English, one normally says “Tom ate apple”, therefore English is a SVO (subject-verb-object) language, and one doesn’t say: “Tom apple ate.” Most European languages are SVO.
In contrast, modern Arabic is VSO as it has the verb in the beginning, so one says: “Ate Tom apple.”
Indic languages follow a relatively free word order structure in their sentences. Thus, the Sanskrit translation of “Dog chases cat” is “biḍālaḥ (cat) śunakam (dog) anudhāvati (chases)” in which the three words can be rearranged in any order without loss of meaning due to the use of morphological suffixes “aḥ” and “am”. The structure of Indian languages is morphologically rich, and in Sanskrit poetry one comes across literally free word order.
Nevertheless, there is a certain preferred order in normal utterances, and Sanskrit and other Indian languages follow the SOV (subject-object-verb) structure in which the verb appears at the end. The principles of sannidhi (proximity), ākāṅkṣā (expectancy), yogyatā (compatibility) and tātparya (intent/pragmatics) govern the stringing together of words. Owing to sannidhi, similar words are expected to stick together, and a word and its adjective should be close enough without interruption by a word which is not an adjective to the same word.
Bengali: Ṭom āpēla khēẏēchē
Hindi: Ṭom ne seb khāyā
Tamil: Ṭām āppiḷ cāppiṭṭār
The mystery is that standard Kashmiri does not follow the SOV structure.
Kashmiri is like English, Dutch, and German!
Here is another sentence that makes it clear that English and Kashmiri are different from Hindi and Farsi.
English: This is a girl. Kashmiri: Yi chha akh kūr.
Hindi: Yeh ek kumārī hai. Farsi: In yek dokhtar est.
The SVO structure of Kashmiri and European languages is called verb-second V-2 word order where this order in main clauses coexists with SOV in subordinate clauses.
How to explain the mystery of Kashmiri?
More surprise
Kashmiri has certain unusual words that also exist in European languages. Here are a few examples:
amār, “love”; Latin amor “love, affection, strong friendly feeling; one’s beloved”” also in Italian and Spanish.
bab, “boob”, breast
chil, “chill”, freeze
dyek, ḍĕka, “covering, fate, head”, as in “deck”, covering
kashu, “spoon”, kašika in Serbian
maer, mar, “sea” in Italian and Spanish.
mas, “hair” and Latvian mats “hair”
vuzan, “ooze”
These could be coincidences. On the other hand, they could also be a result of diffusion through trans-Himalayan networks via Central Asia that took Sanskrit beyond Indian borders along the Silk Road [1][2].
Kashmiri retains archaisms
According to the renowned scholar Shashi Shekhar Toshkhani, the Kashmiri language, which is in an isolated geographical area, preserves many archaisms of Vedic Sanskrit that were lost elsewhere in India.
Toshkhani summarizes [3]: “There exists very strong evidence to support the claim that Kashmiri has descended from Vedic speech. Linguistically too this fact is strongly corroborated by the presence of many lexical and phonetic elements in Kashmiri that can be directly traced to Vedic sources. These include several words most used in everyday speech in Kashmiri.”
Here are some archaisms in Kashmiri from Dr Toshkhani’s paper:
Diffusion out of India
In support of diffusion out of India, see below the words for water and mountain in Sanskrit and European languages. Note that the many words in Sanskrit are found in different European languages, which rules out diffusion from Europe to India, because in that case there wouldn't have been this variety in Sanskrit. (For a much expanded list, see [1])
Water
kah — aqua (Latin) => agua (Spanish)
vāri — water (Dutch)
uda — voda (Slovak)
āp — āb (Farsi), apă (Romanian)
nīra — neró (Greek), dŵr (Welsh)
Mountain
phalika — berg (German) from a transposition of consonants in the labial class
balāhaka — berg (German) (another derivation)
śaila — fjell (Norwegian)
mandara — mant, munte (Romanian), mountain (English)
giri — gora (Russian)
mastaka — summit as in Sagaramastaka (Nepal)
There is much more material on diffusion of words in Reference [1].
As a parallel, we know that the potato came from Peru for there are many species and varieties there and limited ones in the lands where it was taken.
References
- S. Kak, The Idea of India. Garuda, 2023.
- S. Kak, Whispers from the Past: Art and Wisdom of Kashmir. BluOne Ink, 2024.
- S.S. Toshkhani, Kashmiri Language: Roots, Evolution and Affinity. In Jammu, Kashmir & Ladakh — Linguistic Predicament. P. N. Pushp and K. Warikoo (eds.) Har-Anand Publications, 1998.
