Vedic evidence for the verbal-governing dā́ti-vāra- ‘type’

Abstract

For more than a century, a verbal-governing compound type has featured prominently in Indo-Europeanist discourse on compounding, a type exemplified by Vedic dā́ti-vāra- ‘granting wishes’, with a -ti-stem first member having a transitive relationship to the nominal second member. However, a critical reexamination of the Vedic evidence for this type reveals that almost none of the standard, regularly repeated examples actually mean what it is claimed they mean. The existence of this “type” is therefore seriously called into question and should not be reconstructed for Indo-European on the basis of the Vedic data.