1. Journal of Ancient History 2 (293)
  2. Sanskrit Borrowings from the Greek Language

Sanskrit Borrowings from the Greek Language

Vigasin Alexei A.

The article is devoted to lexical borrowings from Greek into Sanskrit in their historical and cultural aspects. The author tries to assess the chronology of such borrowings and their importance to determine the dates of the historical sources. The word denoting the Greeks in old Indian was borrowed during the Achaemenid Empire. The majority of the lexical borrowings in the military sphere date back to the Hellenistic period. Such borrowings have a counterpart in the image of the Greeks in Sanskrit literature as the militant barbarous tribes. The Greek names of the coins in Sanskrit or Prakrit texts and epigraphical records were popular in the first centuries A.D., but some of them went through the Iranian languages. The words borrowed from the Greek and connected with writing occurred rarely and mainly in the Buddhist texts from North-Western India. Some astronomical terms in Sanskrit treatises were taken from the Greek texts of the late Antiquity. But they rarely influenced vernaculars.

 

Keywords: Sanskrit etymology, Indo-Greek contacts, dating of historical sources.
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