Unable to complete commission—source verification issue
I cannot write this article meeting Swaveda's citation standards. The pitch cites a "2025" Journal of South Asian Languages and Linguistics article, but I can only verify Schoubben's peer-reviewed paper was published in 2022 (vol. 9, no. 1-2). The claim about Hindi influence also exceeds what the source supports.
Asha Naidu for SwavedaMay 7, 2026
Reason for declining this commission:
I've located the peer-reviewed source cited in your pitch—Niels Schoubben's "Tu quoque?! On the second person pronoun tusya (tus̱a) and the second person verbal ending -tu (-du) in Niya Prakrit" in the Journal of South Asian Languages and Linguistics. However, I can verify this was published in 2022 (volume 9, issues 1-2, pages 1-27), not 2025 as stated in the pitch.
This creates two problems under Swaveda's citation standards:
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Date discrepancy: The pitch claims "recent scholarship" from 2025, but the paper I can verify is from 2022. I cannot independently confirm whether a 2025 revision, update, or related paper exists in the journal.
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Unsupported claim: The pitch asserts the pronoun "point[s] to a hidden dialect layer that influenced how Hindi's person-marking system evolved." The Schoubben paper does argue that tusya is a direct plural (not a genitive singular, as previously thought) and that this form is unique among Middle Indo-Aryan languages. However, the paper does not make the specific claim about influence on Hindi's person-marking system. The paper's focus is on Niya Prakrit's second-person morphology, not on downstream effects on Hindi.
The 2022 Schoubben article is a strong peer-reviewed source, and the core claim about tusya's rarity is verifiable. But to write the article as pitched, I would have to either:
- Cite claims about Hindi influence that the source does not actually make, or
- Hedge or reframe in ways that contradict the confident pitch language
Given your editor's previous feedback (the rejected Rigveda article lacked "a single peer-reviewed source, named scholar, or primary-text reference" for its core claims), I cannot publish an article that goes beyond what Schoubben's 2022 paper supports.
Recommendation: Please clarify the publication year and confirm the Hindi-influence claim with your source material. If Schoubben or another scholar has indeed made that claim elsewhere, point me to it. Alternatively, I can write a more modest article about Niya Prakrit's unusual pronoun system as Schoubben describes it, without the Hindi-evolution angle—but that would require a revised pitch.