Place names in India

"So many names that at a hasty glance appear utterly unmeaning can be traced back to original Sanskrit forms as to raise a presumption that the remainder, though more effectively disguised, will ultimately be found capable of similar treatment: a strong argument being thus afforded against those scholars who hold that the modern vernacular is impregnated with a very large non-Aryan element."

"The non-Indo-Aryan nature of the terms and names noted earlier also has to be juxtaposed with the fact that the place and river names in northern India are almost all Indo-Aryan. Place and river names are, to my mind, the singlemost important element in considering the existence of a substratum. Unlike people, tribes, material items, flora and fauna, they cannot relocate or be introduced by trade, etc. (although their names can be transferred by immigrants). Place names tend to be among the most conservative elements in a language. Moreover, it is a widely attested fact that intruders into a geographical region often adopt many of the names of rivers and places that are current among the peoples that preexisted them, even if they change the names of others (i.e. the Mississippi river compared to the Hudson, Missouri state compared to New England). With this in mind, it is significant that there are very few non-Indo-Aryan names (and almost none whose etymologies are completely uncontested) for rivers and places in the North of the Indian subcontinent, which is very unusual for migrants intruding into an alien language-speaking area. All the place names in the Rgveda, which are few in number, are Indo-Aryan, or at least sanskritized..."

"And curiously, an astonishing number of names of towns and villages in western Rajasthan (the heart of the Thar Desert) have names ending in the word ‘sar’, such as Lunkaransar, with ‘sar’ meaning ‘lake’ (from the Sanskrit word saras). I counted over fifty of them on an ordinary map, and there must be many more. Why should all those places be named after non-existent lakes? An unwary tourist reading a map of western Rajasthan might as well assume that the region is some kind of a Lake District!"

"Northern India is the only place where place-names and river-names are Indo-European right from the period of the Rigveda (a text which Max Müller refers to as “the first word spoken by the Aryan man”) with no traces of any alleged earlier non-Indo-European names."

"We already dealt with this possibility earlier: ‘This may be contrasted with the situation farther east in the Ganga plain, where we do find many Sanskrit-sounding names of rivers and regions which do not have a transparent Sanskrit etymology, for example, kauśikī or kośala, apparently linked to Tibeto-Burmese kosi, “water”, and the name of the river separating Kośala from Videha. In that case, we also see the ongoing sanskritization: kauśikī evolved from kosikī (attested in Pali), and kośala from kosala (idem), which Witzel (1999a: 382) considers as necessarily foreign loans because the sequence -os- is “not allowed in Sanskrit”. But while the phonetic assimilation is caught in the act here, we can see no semantic domestication through folk etymology at work. The name kośala doesn’t mean anything in Sanskrit, and that is a decisive difference with the western hydronyms gomatī, “the cow-rich one”, or asiknī, “the dark one”. While the occurrence of some folk-etymological adaptation among the Panjabi river names could in principle be conceded, it is highly unlikely to be the explanation of all thirty-five names. Until proof to the contrary, the evidence of the Northwest-Indian hydronyms favours the absence of a non-IE substratum, hence of the OIT.’ (Elst 2005:242)"

"The local river names and animal names in the Old Rigveda are purely Indo-Aryan names. This phenomenon is noted even by Witzel with surprise: “A better case for the early linguistic and ethnic history of India can be made by investigating the names of rivers. In Europe, river names were found to reflect the languages spoken before the influx of Indo-European speaking populations. They are thus older than c. 4500-2500 B.C. (depending on the date of the spread of Indo-European languages in various parts of Europe).” (WITZEL 1995a:104-105). But, in sharp contrast, “in northern India rivers in general have early Sanskrit names from the Vedic period, and names derived from the daughter languages of Sanskrit later on.[…] This is especially surprising in the area once occupied by the Indus Civilisation where one would have expected the survival of older names, as has been the case in Europe and the Near East. At the least, one would expect a palimpsest, as found in New England with the name of the state of Massachussetts next to the Charles river, formerly called the Massachussetts river, and such new adaptations as Stony Brook, Muddy Creek, Red River, etc., next to the adaptations of Indian names such as the Mississippi and the Missouri”. (WITZEL 1995a:105-107). Blažek (in his paper "Hydronymia Ṛgvedica") shows that out of 29 river-names, 22 have purely Indo-Aryan names, and the rest have suggested Indo-Aryan as well as suggested non-Indo-Aryan alternative etymologies."

"The non-Indo-Aryan nature of the terms and names noted earlier also has to be juxtaposed with the fact that the place-names and river names in northern India are almost all Indo-Aryan. These names are, to my mind, the single most important element in considering the existence of a non-Indo-Aryan substratum position. Unlike people, tribes, material items, flora, and fauna, they cannot relocate or be introduced by trade (although their names can be transferred by immigrants). In other words, it is difficult to exclude the possibility that the foreign personal and material names in the Rgveda were intrusive into a preexisting Indo-Aryan area as opposed to vice versa. This argument of lexical transiency can much less readily be used in the matter of foreign place-names. Place-names tend to be among the most conservative elements in a language. Moreover, it is a widely attested fact that intruders into a geographic region often adopt the names of rivers and places that are current among the peoples that preceded them. Even if some such names are changed by the immigrants, some of the previous names are invariably retained (e.g., the Mississippi river compared with the Hudson, Missouri state compared with New England)."

"With this in mind, it is significant that there are very few non-Indo-Aryan names for rivers and places in the North of the Indian subcontinent, which is very unusual for migrants intruding into an alien language-speaking area. Of course, it could be legitimately argued that this is due to the Aryans' Sanskritizing the names of places and rivers in the North- west (although this raises the issue of why the local flora and other names were was not likewise Sanskritized)."

"The lack of foreign place-names in the oldest Indo-Aryan texts, in contrast, is remarkable when compared with the durability of place designations else- where. The same applies to rivers."

"In view of the fact that Witzel has provided a list of thirty-seven different Vedic river names, these two or three possible exceptions do not make as strong a case as one might have hoped. All the rest can indeed be derived from Indo- European roots. Morever, other scholars have even assigned Indo-Aryan etymologies to two of these three possible exceptions."

"Many of die foreign terms for flora and fauna could simply indicate that these items have continually been imported into the subcontinent over the centuries, as continues to be the case today. The exception to this is place-names and river names, but the absence of foreign terms for the topography and hydronomy of the Northwest deprives us of significant evidence that has been used to establish substrata elsewhere."