Sunday, December 18, 2005

Rah Rah : Stark Raving Mad

"Doubting is good" From God's Debris.

and Doubting is Gaurav,

hence Gaurav is good.

This was to complete my century.

Where is the applause ???



Thus spake doubtinggaurav at 6:50 am

11 comments:

doubtinggaurav said...

Jaffna,

Thanks :-), I have already read it.
Rajeev Srinivasan is a blog I frequent.
Sometimes he can be a monomanian, but by and large I get his point.

Regards

 11:05 am
doubtinggaurav said...

Jaffna,

Typos and poor grammar are my life's curse :-).

I will try to spell check, I am lazy , but I will, promise.

Poor grammar is a more serious problem, I am not a very fluent english speaker, most of my ideas are translated from my native tongue (i.e Hindi), hence all this carnage of grammar.

And I always take in this right spirit, problem is , I am taking this in right spirit since last 15 years ;-) (My mother was english teacher)

Regards

PS. On the second thought I can claim I am doing a Prakritisation of blogging :-D.

 12:42 pm
froginthewell said...

First, claps on your century.

Jaffna, I have some doubt ( gaurav - I hope you won't mind a temporary hijacking of your discussion - delete this if you wish ) on your theory regarding prAkRtaM and san.skRtaM. Because words in san.skRtam are too long, and this is reflected in Indian languages too; which make me suspect if it is natural. And secondly that masterpiece of incredible genius - aShTAdhyAyi - if things have to be so terrifically systematic in the language can it have evolved naturally ( may be vEdic grammar is not like that, which might be a counterargument to what I am saying )?

South Indian languages typically get around this problem by either either using equivalent words or ( as they do to long tamizh words ) by using use a considerably corrupted form that has hardly more than two syllables. ( note that other languages like english and german have most of their words having only two syllables; probably this is why some people say Indian languages are "inefficient" ). Which is also why hindi doesn't use too many san.skRtaM based words, particularly the long ones.

So I thought it had to be that san.skRtaM was the result of trying to scientifically organize the spoken language, while buddhism, jainism etc., to reach to the masses, used the common languages ( as they used tamizh in the south etc. ). What do you think?

 11:42 pm
doubtinggaurav said...

Frog,

Not in the least,

I am always planning to learn a third language, alas my noble intentions are undone by my reluctance to confront entropy ;-)

Regards

 11:47 pm
froginthewell said...

Thanks for the info, Jaffna. I still have questions, if you don't mind. If pAli was polished in Sri Lankan monasteries then is the pAli in dhammapAda and other early buddhist texts a more primitive version? I think your point of sanskrit being older may also supported by the fact that if prAkRt were to be earlier then the other Indo-European languages should be closer to prAkRt than san.skRt? As for mahAbhArata, did people other than grammarians ever observed that kind of strict pANinIya perfection *ever*? I have heard that kAlidAsa etc. never did, but don't know about arthashAstra etc.

 6:47 pm
Anonymous said...

Frog,

>>As for mahAbhArata, did people other than grammarians ever observed that kind of strict pANinIya perfection *ever*? I have heard that kAlidAsa etc. never did, but don't know about arthashAstra etc.
Grammarians will be...well, grammarians. You can find grammatical imperfection in Bhartruhari's shatakas . The question is not so much the adherence to grammar but what his work conveys. And I'm sure you'll agree, it conveys A LOT.

Forgive me, I was just rambling.

Best,
Sandeep
www.sandeepweb.com

 7:19 pm
froginthewell said...

Sandeep,

I did not mean to demean those works. My point was only that mahAbhArata doesn't necessarily belong to an era where the language had evolved post-pANini to have errors, and it could be that vyAsa ( = by definition the set of people who wrote mahAbhArata ) did not care for too much grammatical precision.

Indeed, mahAbhArata conveys a lot, bhartRhari's expressions ( atleast in original sanskrit ) are powerful, amaru's writings are poignant etc. ( though my personal opinion is that kAlidAsa is a substandard poet ).

 11:23 pm
froginthewell said...

Thanks, Jaffna. If you don't mind, I still have a few questions regarding the evolution of pAli being in Sri Lanka.

Aren't ashOka's inscriptions ( he too says dhamma etc.? ) in pAli - being before 1st century BCE? Or is Sri Lankan Pali a more evolved version? Is jain pAli different? And is it different from the language of the around 600 B. C. inscriptions in Srilanka?

Probably another reason why buddhists used sanskrit was that some of them were converted brahmins who were already scholarls in sanskrit? Several, if not most/almost all sanskrit scholars would have mugged huge parts of ( the buddhist ) amarasiMha's amarakOsha.

It would be nice if you could point out some of the buddhistic sanskrit works; because the small excerpts translated from buddhist scriptures that I have seen, seem much more natural in general than sanskrit literature ( w.r.t. whatever little I have seen ).

Thanks again. Regards, froginthewell.

 7:10 pm
froginthewell said...

Thanks Jaffna. Regarding Sri Lanka's inscriptions, however, this and this seem to give an earlier date of 600-500 BC as the period of Sri Lanka's first inscriptions ( thus quite earlier than any post Harappan Indian inscription ). So possibly brahmi is from Sri Lanka?

 6:29 pm
froginthewell said...

Thanks. By the way I wasn't saying that he was alleging the brahmi was invented there, I was suspecting so because of the pottery. But given your statements on the issue, it seems a much more complex issue. Anyway thanks a lot.

 11:19 pm
Anonymous said...

Wonderful and informative web site. I used information from that site its great. Xenical oristat

 9:58 pm

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)