Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [124]
There is no distinction between upper or lower case in Sanskrit, nor any semicolons. But the use of this Roman typographical convenience is simply to show explicitly what a student of Paninian grammar learns by example, namely that the letters here written in upper case are functioning as control characters. Any term consisting of one of the lower-case letters a followed by one of the control characters b denotes the sequence of phones starling with a and ending just before b. So, for example, ‘aC’ denotes the set of vowels, ‘haT’ the set of semi-vowels excluding 1. It can be seen then that the sutra being analysed is nothing less than a concise statement of the rule:
Terse, indeed, but it should be remembered that this level of concision is possible only because a number of controlling principles can be taken for granted—e.g. the interpretation implicit in the brackets: the first four phones map respectively on to the second four phones, but this occurs before any of the nine phones in the environment. Part of the task of the tradition of commentary which followed on from Panini was to make explicit the precise nature of the paribhāā (auxiliary principles) on which the correct interpretation of the sutras rests.
* Compare the 215,000 or so entries in the latest Chambers English Dictionary, and over 500,000 in the latest Oxford English Dictionary.
* This is the precise Sanskrit equivalent of the Greek barbaros, defined as someone who did not speak Sanskrit.
* Bizarrely this only happened after Muslim incursions, which had brought in the completely alien Persian as the new elite language.
* Indeed, there is a famous story of the embarrassment caused when a king called Satavahana turned out to know less Sanskrit than a lady: in a water fight, one of his queens begged him to stop pelting her with water (modakai, from mā udakai, ‘not with-waters’), but he responded by showering her with sweets (modakai, ‘with sweets’). He was so mortified when she pointed out his mistake that he took to his bed, and then embarked on a crash course in grammar (Somadeva, Kathā-sarit-sāgaram, l.vi.108-22).
* One gets some idea of how much, and how little, Pali differs from Sanskrit by comparing the Sanskrit equivalent for this phrase: sarvasatā mūlabhāā.
* He called it Fan, probably a Chinese reduction of the word Brahmana.
* The most widely used alphabet in this area of India is still known as deva-nāgarī, ‘the gods’ urban [script]’.
* These two terms came to mean ‘slave’ and ‘demon, robber, bandit’ respectively. Compare the development of the English word slave from Slav, and the apparently opposite route taken by Serb from Latin servus. The feminine of dāsa, dāsī, came to mean ‘whore’ (devadāsī, ‘a god’s slave-girl’, was a temple prostitute), and one of the most routine Sanskrit insults is dāsya putra, equivalent to ‘whoreson’ or ‘son of a bitch’.
* The purpose was to rescue Rama’s kidnapped wife Sita—rather similar to Homer’s motivation for the Trojan War, where a Greek fleet set out to rescue Menelaus’s wife Helen.
* In a total reversal, Hinduism was later to renounce even the possibility of foreign voyages. It was held to bring unassuageable impurity upon higher castes, e.g. in the late-thirteenth-century law digest by Hemādri (iii.2: 667).
* Devanagari, Gujarati, Panjabi, Bengali, Oriya in the north; Telugu, Kannada, Tamil, Malayalam and Sinhalese in the south. There is another related alphabet, used farther north for Tibetan.
† Burmese, Lao, Thai, Khmer (Cambodian) on the mainland; in the islands, Javanese, Balinese, Tagalog (in the Philippines), Batak (in Sumatra) and Bugis (in Sulawesi)
.
* The same word is now pronounced Phnom, as in Phnom Penh.
† Java, Sumatra and Malaya are derived from Yava-dvīpa, ‘barley island’; samudra, ‘sea’, and Malaya, actually from a Dravidian word, malai, ‘a hill’, in south India near Malabar. Cambodia (Kamboja) evokes Kambuja, a kingdom in the Khyber pass area; but had a competing etymology as Kambu-ja, i.e. born of Kambu Svāyambhūva, a hermit who