Compound verbs are areal features of south Asia, the highlands of the Altai and the Kirghiz, China, Korea, Japan, Turkey, central Iran and major parts of east Asia. From the Indo-European angle, the languages of this macro area are not rich in inflections. The languages spoken originally in south Asia are Dravidian, Austroasiatic and Sino-Tibetan which are agglutinative in character. Indo-European was richer in aspect than in tense-system. Hence to give various minute aspectual shades of meanings morphological complex was used in Sanskrit and Latin. Agglutination or serialisation is the only process predominant in east and south-east Asia for the same aspectual and modal functions which are accomplished by Indo-European verbal affixes. When speakers of Indo-European came in contact with the speakers of Dravidian, Austroasiatic and Sino-Tibetan, the process of serialisation may have diffused into Sanskrit as a substratum. Compound verbs are not found in Ancient Greek, Latin, Ancient Iranian and Rgveda.
