Cart and Hut: salám as ‘to live in the hut’ in the Satapathabrahmana

Abstract

salá- (n.) ‘living in a hut’, a derivative from sala- ‘hut, house, hall’ (AV+) occurs only twice in the Satapathabrahmana in a usage opposed to Enas- ‘cart’ which represents the nomadic way of life. salám as ‘to be in the hut’ and cakrám car ‘to travel with the wheel’ are the expressions for ‘to live sedentary’ and ‘to follow the nomadic life in carts and chariots’, respectively (VI 8, 1, 1). The other occurrence reports that the nomadic lifestyle reflects the custom in former days which people imitate in the ritual, and the settled one the later (I 1, 2, 5).The peculiar expressions cakrám car and salám as are important also from the linguistic viewpoint. K. HOFFMANN pointed out the construction idám bhu/as ‘to become/be ruling, controlling over something’ (Aufsätze II 557-559). The noun appearing with bhu and as (almost always in n. sg.) is a nominative according to him. But salám as points to another solution.cakrám car is obviously an expression with an Inhaltsakkusativ (an inner acc., in this case a cognate one), going back to the earlier period when the etymological relation of cakrá- ‘wheel’ (PIE. *kwé-kwl-o-) to the root car ‘to roll, move’ (<*kwel) was still alive. In the Brahmana a sentence with instrumental cakréna ‘by the wheel’ was necessarily added. This phrase cakrám car points to the possibility to interpret also salám as as a construction of as ‘to be’ with an Inhaltsakk. The idám as/bhu construction could be, in general, explained as such. Also the fact that there is no example found for the verb's accord with. predicative noun in number in this constrution (Goto, Gs. Schindler 137) supports this interpretation, for the verb is then a full verb ‘to be, to exist’ or ‘to appear’.