Paul Thieme

Paul Thieme (German: [paʊl ˈtiːmə]; 18 March 1905 – 24 April 2001) was a German indologist and scholar of Vedic Sanskrit. In 1988 he was awarded the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy.

Quotes

• “All the Dravidian languages known to us fairly bristle with loans from Sanskrit and the Aryan vernaculars. Dravidian literature in South India came into existence under the impulse and influence of Sanskrit literature and speech. Wherever there is a correspondence in the vocabularies of Sanskrit and Dravidian, there is a presumption, to be removed only by specific argument, that Sanskrit has been the lender, Dravidian the borrower.” ....“If a word can be explained easily from material extant in Sanskrit itself, there is little chance for such a hypothesis”.
  • Paul Thieme commenting about the “zeal for hunting up Dravidian loans in Sanskrit” and rejecting the tendency to force Dravidian or Austric etymologies onto Indoaryan words. Quoted from Talageri, S. (2000). The Rigveda: A historical analysis. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan.

• “The discovery of ‘Aryan’ looking names of (Mitanni) princes on cuneiform documents in Akkadian from the second half of the second millennium BC (chiefly tablets from Bogazkoy and El-Amarna), several doubtlessly Aryan words in Kikkuli’s treatise in Hittite on horse training (numerals: aika- ‘one’, tera- ‘three’, panza- ‘five’, satta – ‘seven’, na(ya) – ‘nine’; appellatives: varttana – ‘circuit’, course (in which horses move when being trained),’ aliya – ‘horse’), and, finally, a series of names of Aryan divinities on a Mitanni-Hatti and a Hatti-Mitanni treaty (14th century BC), poses a number of problems that have been reportedly discussed since the beginning of the century.”
  • P. Thieme in his article “the ‘Aryan’ gods of the Mitanni treaties” in 1960 in Journal of the American Oriental Society 80(4): 301-317:

• The fact that proto-Aryan *ai and *au are replaced in Indo-Aryan by e and o, while in Iranian they are preserved as ai and au and that ai and au regularly appear on the Anatolian documents (eg. Kikkuli‘s aika), is unfortunately inconclusive. It is quite possible that at the time of our oldest records (the hymns of the Rigveda) the actual pronunciation of the sounds developed for *ai and *au spoken and written by the tradition as e and o, was still ai and au. The e and o can be a secondarily introduced change under the influence of the spoken language or the scholastic recitation.
  • Paul Thieme, 1960, quoted in : Varas and Dragonslayers: Rethinking the Indo-Iranian Expansion

Quotes about Paul Thieme

• In the 1930s, numerous Indologists sought to anchor Nazi racial theory in ancient "Aryan" history and literature, including Erich Frauwallner, Hermann Güntert, Hermann Lommel, Paul Thieme, and Ludwig Alsdorf.
  • Suzanne L. Marchand - German Orientalism in the Age of Empire_ Religion, Race, and Scholarship (Publications of the German Historical Institute)-Cambridge University Press (2010), page 489.

• “An example of this more sophisticated orientalism is the work of Paul Thieme”... esp. his “analysis of the Sanskrit word ārya, where at the end he adverts to the main point of his research: to go beyond India in order to catch the ‘distant echo of Indo-germanic customs’.”
  • S. Pollock 1993:91 , quoted in Elst, Koenraad (2018). Still no trace of an Aryan invasion: A collection on Indo-European origins.