The development of Sanskrit velars into Gāndhārī

Abstract As a language of religious and administrative importance in the early centuries of the common era, Gāndhārī came to be a donor into its neighbouring languages, such as Tocharian and Chinese. Consequently, advances in Gāndhārī historical phonology can help us discover new loanwords, refine our understanding of the historical phonology of its neighbouring languages, and eventually improve our understanding of the relationship between the communities that spoke those languages. One unresolved problem in the study of Gāndhārī phonology is the development of Sanskrit unaspirated velar stops: the relative paucity of data and variation in spelling have left previous researchers hesitant regarding the developments of those stops and their phonetic realization. In the present article, we take a bird’s eye view and analyse the development of these velars across the whole edited corpus; our main contribution is the discovery of the phonetic environment conditioning the development of /k/ and /g/, thereby fully explaining the seemingly chaotic spelling observed in previous publications.