fifty synonyms for ‘lotus’

[Mārcis Gasūns]

Hariom,

John Brough claims there are fifty synonyms for ‘lotus’, a favourite concept of Sanskrit poetry in both literal and metaphorical senses. Could not find as many. 

Lotus, s. पद्मं, कमलं, नलिनं, अरविंदं, उत्पलं,

कुवलयं, सरसिजं, अब्जं, अंभोजं, महोत्पलं,

शतपत्रं, सहस्रपत्रं, कुशेशयं, पंकेरुहं, पंकजं,

सरोरुहं, तामरसं, सारसं सरसीरुहं, पुष्करं,

अंभोरुहं, बिसप्रसूनं, राजीवं, अंबुजं; ‘white

l.’ पुंडरीकं, सितांभोजं; ‘red l.’ कोक-

-नदं, रक्तोत्पलं; ‘blue l.’ इंदीवरं, नीलो-

-त्पलं.

Any clue where such big lists of synonyms could be found?

M.

[Amba Kulkarni]

In Amarakosh we find the following:

For blue lotus: , नीलाम्बुजन्मन्, इन्दीवर

For red lotus: रक्तसरोरुह, रक्तोत्पल, कोकनद

For white lotus: पुण्डरीक, सिताम्भोज

And for lotus:

पद्म, नलिन, अरविन्द, महोत्पल, सहस्रपत्र, कमल, शतपत्र, कुशेशय, पङ्केरुह, तामरस, सारस, सरसीरुह, बिसप्रसून, राजीव, पुष्कर, अम्भोरुह, श्रीपर्ण

Other meanings are missing in the Amarakosha.

Maybe they might be there in the Vaijayantikosha.

Best,

Amba

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[Madhav Deshpande]

Dear Marcis,

     Instead of looking for a complete list, you can look at the structure of some of the words.  For example, you can take any word meaning water and add the element ज and you can get a word for lotus.  Some of the resulting combinations will be more common than others, and they may not all be listed comprehensively in a dictionary or Kosha format.  A similar thing happens for example with words for king.  All sorts of words which mean men, people, world, earth etc. combine with words like प, पति, पाल, ईश, ईश्वर etc, and as a result you can produce a vast number of words.  Such a word-factory aspect to word generation does not mean that all of these words are part of the very basic vocabulary, like the word राज, but all these possible combinations allow poets to pick appropriate combinations to fit the available metrical space and syllabic pattern, or create effects like alliteration, rhyming etc.  In that sense, one can possibly make a distinction between some sort of basic vocabulary and extended literary vocabulary.  We don't have access to the daily mother tongue usage of Sanskrit from ancient times, and hence it is somewhat of a guess as to which vocabulary is more basic.  I have been thinking about this for some time.  For instance, when Panini refers to verbs of going, he uses the expression गत्यर्थ.  We don't see him using expressions like यात्यर्थ or व्रजत्यर्थ or चलत्यर्थ.  Would that probably mean that the verb गच्छति is in some sense part of a more basic vocabulary for Panini?  I am wondering about this. Can the meaning entrees in the Dhatupatha be used to detect the basic vocabulary? Perhaps, other scholars on this list can provide their thinking.  With best wishes,

Madhav M. Deshpande

Professor Emeritus, Sanskrit and Linguistics

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA

Senior Fellow, Oxford Center for Hindu Studies

[Residence: Campbell, California, USA]

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[K S Kannan]

All dictionaries have to be ultimately cyclic.

Even in Panini, we have

ada bhakShaNe &

bhakSha adane.

Dhanan"jaya-Kosha gives formulae in the form of

jala + ja = lotus;

bhU + dhara/bhRt  = king/mountain

Etc.

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--

Dr. K.S.Kannan  D.Litt.

​Sant Rajinder Singh Ji Maharaj Chair Professor, IIT-Madras.

Senior Fellow, ICSSR, New Delhi.

Academic Director, Swadeshi Indology.

Member, Academic Council, Veda Vijnana Shodha Samsthana.

Nominated Member, IIAS, Shimla.

Former Professor, CAHC, Jain University, Bangalore.

Former Director, Karnataka Samskrit University, Bangalore.

Former Head, Dept. of Sanskrit, The National Colleges, Bangalore.

[Malhar Kulkarni]

Dear All, 

On Thu, Apr 23, 2020 at 10:24 AM Madhav Deshpande <mmd...@umich.edu> wrote:

Dear Marcis,

     Instead of looking for a complete list, you can look at the structure of some of the words.  For example, you can take any word meaning water and add the element ज and you can get a word for lotus.  Some of the resulting combinations will be more common than others, and they may not all be listed comprehensively in a dictionary or Kosha format.  A similar thing happens for example with words for king.  All sorts of words which mean men, people, world, earth etc. combine with words like प, पति, पाल, ईश, ईश्वर etc, and as a result you can produce a vast number of words.  Such a word-factory aspect to word generation does not mean that all of these words are part of the very basic vocabulary, like the word राज, but all these possible combinations allow poets to pick appropriate combinations to fit the available metrical space and syllabic pattern, or create effects like alliteration, rhyming etc.  In that sense, one can possibly make a distinction between some sort of basic vocabulary and extended literary vocabulary.  We don't have access to the daily mother tongue usage of Sanskrit from ancient times, and hence it is somewhat of a guess as to which vocabulary is more basic.  I have been thinking about this for some time.  For instance, when Panini refers to verbs of going, he uses the expression गत्यर्थ.  We don't see him using expressions like यात्यर्थ or व्रजत्यर्थ or चलत्यर्थ.  Would that probably mean that the verb गच्छति is in some sense part of a more basic vocabulary for Panini?  I am wondering about this. Can the meaning entrees in the Dhatupatha be used to detect the basic vocabulary? Perhaps, other scholars on this list can provide their thinking.  With best wishes,

Please find attached a paper of our team in this regard. This was published in the proceedings of the Global Wordnet Conference 2016. 

Sanskrit Wordnet has got a list of synonyms. Currently, the site that hosts it and other applications mentioned in the paper is down. 

 

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with regards, 

--

Malhar Kulkarni,
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences,
IIT Bombay, Powai, Mumbai-400076.
mal...@hss.iitb.ac.in

[Shreevatsa R]

(Replying to the original message -- sorry, I had typed most of this hours ago and got interrupted, but sending this reply anyway even though it's mostly answered already...)

Note that when Brough speaks of “some fifty expressions for ‘lotus’” (I assume this reference is to the discussion in pages 31–33 of the introduction in his Poems from the Sanskrit; here: https://archive.org/details/PoemsFromTheSanskritJohnBrough/page/n31/mode/2up), this includes expressions that one can obtain by taking, for example, any synonym for "water" or "mud" (e.g. vāri, ambu, jala, paṅka, ...), then (appropriately) suffixing anything indicating “born” or “grown” (e.g. -ja, -ruha, ...). This way one can probably obtain at least hundreds of synonyms -- and the notable thing (my garbled memory of a remark from some lecture by Shatavadhani Ganesh) is that any person reasonably well-read in Sanskrit literature can easily understand any such word even if encountering it for the first time, and it wouldn't feel out-of-place either.

But now I'm actually interested in the second-order remark that Brough makes on pages 32–33: in passing, he mentions that despite these general principles, there are some exceptions:

1. the word uda-ja “does not appear to mean” ‘lotus’ though it could be used for fish, say,

2. the word udaka-ja does not seem like it could be used (for a lotus anyway),

3. on the other hand, any combination of synonyms from "earth-supporter" could be used for a king or a mountain -- no exceptions there (probably).

These are obviously his subjective assessments (and stated as such), but as there are many in this group with sensitive ears for the language, I would be interested to hear from others whether they agree and whether these can be explained.

With regards,

--

[Roland Steiner]

> 1. the word *uda-ja* “does not appear to mean” ‘lotus’ though it could be
> used for fish

Compare Bhāgavatapurāṇa 10.14.33 where udaja undoubtedly means "lotus":

[...] aṅghry-udaja-madhv-amṛtāsavaṃ [...]


By the way:

> For blue lotus: , नीलाम्बुजन्मन्, इन्दीवर

A "blue lotus" does not occur in nature. Botanically speaking, it's a blue water-lily. See Jürgen Hanneder: "The Blue Lotus. Oriental Research between Philology, Botany and Poetics?" In: Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 152.2 (2002), pp. 295–308.

Download:
http://menadoc.bibliothek.uni-halle.de/dmg/periodical/titleinfo/150882

With best regards,
Roland Steiner
 

[K S Kannan]

In several of my talks, I have illustrated the enormity of the word-building potential in Sanskrit,

justifying William Jones' dictum "... more copious than Latin ...".

There nevertheless seems to be some truth in Brough's statement;
not all of the formulaically derivable words can be found
attested in a majority of the several well-known works in Sanskrit.

(Nor can one easily pass a decree that such-&-such a word is not at all attested,

for the simple reason that there are hundreds of texts as yet unexplored).

Today our confidence increases directly proportional to the number of texts made searchable.
Time was when index verbora used to get published for many key texts.
Wrt Sanskrit, it may often be more easy to say if some expression is attested,

rather than say confidently that it is unattested.

Usages in works of paNDita-kavi-s/citra-kAvya-s sometimes border on pathological constructions

(after the fashion of "pathological usages" coined in Linguistics for artificially posited expressions),

(and due also to an oftener dependence on ekAkShara-kosha-s etc.)
though the border-line is somewhat porous.

Lastly, the vocabulary and syntax of the Bhagavata-purana is a bit dubious,

and perhaps not a very good measure or representative of "normal usage" in Sanskrit,

given its abounding linguistic idiosyncrasies (well analysed by Charudeva Sastri),

even though the adage goes :  vidyAvatAM bhAgavate parIkShA.

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[Roland Steiner]

> There nevertheless seems to be some truth in Brough's statement

I do not want to question that at all. In his article "Lotusblumen" (in: Asiatica. Festschrift Friedrich Weller zum 65. Geburtstag. Ed. Johannes Schubert and Ulrich Schneider. Leipzig 1954, pp. 505–513) Wilhelm Rau examined the use of words for lotus and water lily in a number of kāvya works in which, according to his findings, a word udaja "lotus" apparently does not occur.

But Brough could have known that in the Bhāgavatapurāṇa the word udaja "lotus" is used once because this passage is already recorded in the large Petersburg dictionary by Böhtlingk and Roth (Vol. 1; 1852-1855):

https://www.sanskrit-lexicon.uni-koeln.de/scans/PWGScan/2013/web/webtc/servepdf.php?page=5-1170

However, he probably considered this passage to be irrelevant, because his statement is only aimed at kāvya works in the narrower sense.

Best,
Roland Steiner