brahman

[Terrence Brannon]

On p.22 of Tyberg, there is no difference in what is written for the
neuter and masculine forms of brahman.

Also, on p.26, sentence number 10 says 'The brAhman cooks' as if there
is such a thing as 'brAhman'

Now, the word for priest is braman -
http://acharya.iitm.ac.in/cgi-bin/dictionary/search.cgi?word=brahma&exact=yes

And I wonder if that is want really belongs in this sentence.

[Adolf VishNu Shaastrii]

On p.22 of Tyberg, there is no difference in what is written for the
neuter and masculine forms of brahman.

Correct because they are root forms, however, they are declined differently according to gender.

Also, on p.26, sentence number 10 says 'The brAhman cooks' as if there
is such a thing as 'brAhman'

Review your vocabulary on p. 19! There is a world of difference among ब्राह्मणः, ब्रह्म and ब्रह्मा ।

[Terrence Brannon]

1 - brAhmaNa = priest
Brāhmaṇa (Devanagari: ब्राह्मण) denotes the poet/scholar/teacher,
priest
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahmin
http://acharya.iitm.ac.in/cgi-bin/dictionary/search.cgi?word=brAhmaNa&exact=yes

NOTE: On p.19 Tyberg defines 'brAhmaNa' as 'brAhman' --- but there is
no such word in the Sanskrit dictionary per this search -
http://acharya.iitm.ac.in/cgi-bin/dictionary/search.cgi?word=brAhman&exact=yes
and the closest real word is 'brahman' not 'brAhman' but a priest is
not synonomous with changless divine amorphous universal substance

2 - brahma = priest ...
http://acharya.iitm.ac.in/cgi-bin/dictionary/search.cgi?word=brahma&exact=yes

2 - brahman = universal substance
Brahman (bráhman-, nominative bráhma ब्रह्म) is a concept of Hinduism.
Brahman is the unchanging, infinite, immanent, and transcendent
reality which is the Divine Ground of all matter, energy, time, space,
being, and everything beyond in this Universe. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahman

NOTE: On p.21 Tyberg says that final 'n' is dropped, but in actuality,
a final 'na' is dropped. In all rules on that page, you cannot take
her literally. You do not drop the consonant, you drop the consonant
and the 'a' which follows it. If you took the rule literally, you
would only drop न् and not न

4 - brahmA = Hindu Creator God - Tyberg "Language of the Gods"

Brahman (bráhman-, nominative bráhma ब्रह्म) is a concept of Hinduism.
Brahman is the unchanging, infinite, immanent, and transcendent
reality which is the Divine Ground of all matter, energy, time, space,
being, and everything beyond in this Universe.


On Sep 30, 6:09 pm, "Adolf VishNu Shaastrii" <wolfga...@bellsouth.net>
wrote:

> Now, the word for priest is braman -http://acharya.iitm.ac.in/cgi-bin/dictionary/search.cgi?word=brahma&e...

[Adolf VishNu Shaastrii]

NOTE: On p.19 Tyberg defines 'brAhmaNa' as 'brAhman' --- but there is no such word in the Sanskrit dictionary per this search - http://acharya.iitm.ac.in/cgi-bin/dictionary/search.cgi?word=brAhman&exact=yes
and the closest real word is 'brahman' not 'brAhman' but a priest is not synonomous with changless divine amorphous universal substance

Incorrect! an intrinsic 'a' follows all Sanskrit consonants not followed by a halanta. Sanskrit is very precise about long vowels, short vowels, halanta इत्यादि । Meanings can vary greatly due to what may appear as minor vocalic modifications. E.g. the words for a king vis-à-vis a woman's menstrual excretion have almost the same form for the uninitiated in Sanskrit. To the king, however, it DOES make a difference. Be mindful, also, that Sanskrit does not easily lend itself for traditional dictionary listings due to its root structure. Cf. Chinese too! Sometimes you will swear that a word is "NOT IN THE DICTIONARY but you are looking in the wrong location! Also what is perhaps the most comprehensive dictionary is that of Böhtlingk and Roth but it is inaccessible to most Western scholars because it is compiled in German yet it is the largest Sanskrit dictionary ever compiled. Sadly most Westerners are deficient in any language but English notwithstanding the Western 'empire'.

I hope that what I have tried to explain helps you; otherwise you have a deep misunderstanding of the first few pages of the textbook. If that is the case then I'll recommend MacDonell's Sanskrit Grammar as an ancillary text for you. Failing that reference I'll recommend Whitney's grammar and then that of the Indian Sanskrit scholar Kale.

You seem to have a deep misunderstanding of this simple (सरल) Sanskrit introduction; I find this surprising since I've used this same text at Emory University, Atlanta, GA since 1973 and have never encountered anyone with such comprehension problems!

[Terrence Brannon]

On Oct 1, 7:26 pm, "Adolf VishNu Shaastrii" <wolfga...@bellsouth.net>
wrote:
> NOTE: On p.19 Tyberg defines 'brAhmaNa'  as 'brAhman' --- but there is no such word in the Sanskrit dictionary per this search -http://acharya.iitm.ac.in/cgi-bin/dictionary/search.cgi?word=brAhman&...

> and the closest real word is 'brahman' not 'brAhman' but a priest is not synonomous with changless divine amorphous universal substance
>
> Incorrect! an intrinsic 'a' follows all Sanskrit consonants not followed by a halanta.

Right, but think for a second. Clear your mind and simply think. Just
answer my following question without any context. Can you, or can you
not, come up with devanAgarI for this: 'brahman'

Now, let me answer for you. The answer is yes, and here it is:
ब्रह्मन्

Now, with that being the case, it is entirely possible and feasible
that such a word could be in the dictionary. And if it is not, then we
have a dilemma of some sort. One conclusion to this dilemma is
inconsistent romanization. Another is spelling issues. Another is an
oversight. Another is 'deep misunderstanding' as you put it.

So, what you said regarding implicit 'a', I know this about Sanskrit
proper. Now, what I know about romanization of Sanskrit is being
contradicted. If you look at page 6, rules 2 and 3 discuss 'k' versus
'ka' and gives the corresponding devanAgarI. Now if you look on p.21,
the nominative modifications discuss and then explicitly list the
consonants followed by halanta. But again, as I stated in my first
response, you simply cannot take her literally. Nor can you use the
conventions she established on p.6. it is not न् that is dropped. It
is न .

> I hope that what I have tried to explain helps you; otherwise you have a deep misunderstanding of the first few pages of the textbook.

'deep misunderstanding' is not the only possible conclusion. How could
what you said have been know new to me when what I said right here
implies that I know that:

"""
NOTE: On p.21 Tyberg says that final 'n' is dropped, but in actuality,
a final 'na' is dropped. In all rules on that page, you cannot take
her literally. You do not drop the consonant, you drop the consonant
and the 'a' which follows it. If you took the rule literally, you
would only drop न् and not न
"""

Seeing the above, there is no way that I would not know that
consonants have an implicit 'a' unless notated otherwise. But because
I wrote that note, I clearly was upset at her contradiction in
romaniziation.

But basically what is happening is something of culture shock combined
with culture mixing. First, being American, I've been exposed to many
inaccurate or mis-leading romanizations, both written and spoken.
Added to that, some of my colleagues speak Hindi and not sanskrit. So
they read devanAgarI just fine, but they often tell me things based on
Hindi grammar and not Sanskrit and then I fail to translate. And with
this issue of largely similar words, that is just what happened. I
asked my colleague about the difference

> You seem to have a deep misunderstanding of this simple (सरल) Sanskrit introduction;

I'm not sure what you base this on. But it is a qualitative statement,
not a quantitative one. Certainly your feedback on the homework has
been largely positive. For one, I was rather taken aback about your
expectations of me regarding figuring out what Tyberg meant in her
footnote on p.25. Instead of admitting that there were numerous errors
there, you seemed interested in putting the burden of comprehension on
me. And tried to make it look like I had some basic misunderstandings
of consonants and should have been able to figure out what she meant.
What was typeset there was a horrible horrible mess, rife with 6
errors in approximately 15 words - nearly half!

Now, what other data supports your conclusion that I have 'deep
misunderstanding of this simple (सरल) Sanskrit introduction'?

> I find this surprising since I've used this same text at Emory University, Atlanta, GA since 1973 and
> have never encountered anyone with such comprehension problems!

That's an impressive history. What types of students were these?
Undergrad/grad? Linguistics majors, East Indian Studies majors? And
how many students have you taught via the internet?

>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: sanskri...@googlegroups.com [mailto:sanskri...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Terrence Brannon
> Sent: Wednesday, October 01, 2008 10:44
> To: sanskrit-study
> Subject: Re: brahman (should not take nominative rules literally?)
>
> 1 - brAhmaNa = priest
> Brāhmaṇa (Devanagari: ब्राह्मण) denotes the poet/scholar/teacher,

> priesthttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahminhttp://acharya.iitm.ac.in/cgi-bin/dictionary/search.cgi?word=brAhmaNa...

>
> NOTE: On p.19 Tyberg defines 'brAhmaNa'  as 'brAhman' --- but there is

> no such word in the Sanskrit dictionary per this search -http://acharya.iitm.ac.in/cgi-bin/dictionary/search.cgi?word=brAhman&...

> and the closest real word is 'brahman' not 'brAhman' but a priest is
> not synonomous with changless divine amorphous universal substance
>

> 2 - brahma = priest ...http://acharya.iitm.ac.in/cgi-bin/dictionary/search.cgi?word=brahma&e...

>
> 2 - brahman = universal substance
> Brahman (bráhman-, nominative bráhma ब्रह्म) is a concept of Hinduism.
> Brahman is the unchanging, infinite, immanent, and transcendent
> reality which is the Divine Ground of all matter, energy, time, space,

> being, and everything beyond in this Universe.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahman

[Terrence Brannon]

On Oct 1, 7:26 pm, "Adolf VishNu Shaastrii" <wolfga...@bellsouth.net>
wrote:

>

> I hope that what I have tried to explain helps you; otherwise you have a deep misunderstanding of the first few pages of the textbook.
> If that is the case then I'll recommend MacDonell's Sanskrit Grammar as an ancillary text for you.

Failing that reference I'll recommend Whitney's grammar and then that
of the Indian Sanskrit scholar Kale.

I found MacDonell's text online:
http://books.google.com/books?id=rL106CVPlV4C&printsec=frontcover&dq=Sanskrit&ei=YtfkSNiPH46OzQS588mFAQ&sig=ACfU3U00Iy5y9z5aEx9TxPjwvlwysxEKgA#PPA10,M1

It is completely opaque. I think we are coming from completely
different ends of the spectrum. MacDonell's book is impenetrable
unless you have a solid understanding of language from a linguist's
perspective. I cant imagine the other two books being any more easy.

I did find a good intro book. "Introduction to Sanskrit" by Thomas
Egenes
http://books.google.com/books?id=422ZqWrh4SkC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Sanskrit+egenes&ei=ldrkSJXQOZX8ygSvqoCLAQ&sig=ACfU3U0Q2Le4YP2WKz6ogOsSMycdo4XkdQ

[Adolf VishNu Shaastrii]

Can you, or can you not, come up with devanAgarI for this: 'brahman'

Now, let me answer for you. The answer is yes, and here it is:
ब्रह्मन्

Incorrect! The word is ब्राह्मणः - To be sure there is confusion is all these transliteration schemes. To further complicate matters all three of these words come from the same root but that is far beyond the scope of this course.

By the way you will also see 'brahmin' for 'brahman'.

NOTE: On p.21 Tyberg says that final 'n' is dropped, but in actuality,
a final 'na' is dropped. In all rules on that page, you cannot take
her literally. You do not drop the consonant, you drop the consonant
and the 'a' which follows it.

Incorrect! The words ENDING in a consonant also have halanta.

putting the burden of comprehension on
me. And tried to make it look like I had some basic misunderstandings
of consonants and should have been able to figure out what she meant.

Correct, the 'burden' of comprehension is on you. I cannot study for you. My students for the last 35 years know the sequence of sounds so typos are not a problem. In fact one weakness of Sanskrit publications is the 'typo' issue. We simply know what it is supposed to be and you should have comprehended that based upon page 1 the footnote on page 25 has typos. This is far too picky and you are missing the forest because of the trees.

Let's end this discussion and move on. We are achieving 'rien' with such 'Kleinigkeiten'.

That's an impressive history. What types of students were these?
Undergrad/grad? Linguistics majors, East Indian Studies majors? And
how many students have you taught via the internet?

I've had mostly undergrad pre-med majors as I was. I and my students have been almost in toto in biology, chemistry or math. I've never had a linguistics major and only a couple of South Asian Studies people. Re: the # of students via the internet: who knows? In just the last ten years they have worked with me from countries such as Japan, India, Turkey, Switzerland, Sri Lanka, all of Europe, Canada and South America.

My own career in cancer research is that of a medical research doctor; I've worked in related fields such as environmental and nutrition studies.

[Adolf VishNu Shaastrii]

Yes, Egenes' book is very good. Note that there are two volumes. I have
considered using it for this course but it goes in and out of print. You may
wish to purchase a copy of volume one if you think that it will help. He
does give some good grammar explanations and good examples too.

-----Original Message-----
From: sanskri...@googlegroups.com
[mailto:sanskri...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Terrence Brannon
Sent: Thursday, October 02, 2008 10:30
To: sanskrit-study
Subject: Re: brahman (should not take nominative rules literally?)

[Terrence Brannon]

On Oct 2, 7:13 pm, "Adolf VishNu Shaastrii" <wolfga...@bellsouth.net>
wrote:

> Can you, or can you not, come up with devanAgarI for  this: 'brahman'
>
> Now, let me answer for you. The answer is yes, and here it is:
> ब्रह्मन्
> Incorrect! The word is ब्राह्मणः -

What do you mean _the_ word? It certainly was not _the_ word in my
question.

> To be sure there is confusion is all these transliteration schemes.

Entirely agreed. There are scholarly transliteration schemes. There
are naive ones. And when you look at something like Wikipedia, you see
a haphazard spontanous mish-mash of them.

> To further complicate matters all three of these words come from the same root but that is far beyond the scope of this course.

yes, but that is what caused all the problems to begin with. I became
more fixated on the similarities and became very confused. Tyberg
defined brahmaNa as 'brAhman' and supposedly I'm supposed to know what
that one-word definition means and what language/transliteration
scheme it is defined in. And this hearkens back to the earlier issue
of confusion. When Tyberg wrote 'brAhmana' as the definition for
'brahmaNa', I had a slew of anglicized systems to try to figure out
what she was talking about. And the more similar words I saw, the more
confused I became.

>
> By the way you will also see 'brahmin' for 'brahman'.

yep. And who can say why? Not me.

>
> NOTE: On p.21 Tyberg says that final 'n' is dropped, but in actuality,
> a final 'na' is dropped. In all rules on that page, you cannot take
> her literally. You do not drop the consonant, you drop the consonant
> and the 'a' which follows it.
>
> Incorrect! The words ENDING in a consonant also have halanta.

so when she said final 'n' just what did she mean? final 'n' is
English. It is not devanAgarI. Final 'n' is ambiguous. Does she mean
that both 'n' and 'na' are dropped? if so, she did _not_ say that: she
said the final 'n' is dropped. To state one rule without giving a good
example of the rule and each sub-case is poor instruction. And this
book is guilty of that in more places than I have time to name.

>
> putting the burden of comprehension on
> me. And tried to make it look like I had some basic misunderstandings
> of consonants and should have been able to figure out what she meant.
>
> Correct, the 'burden' of comprehension is on you.

Fine, but the burden of coherent communication was on the book author
and she failed to do so, thereby suspending my obligations for
comprehension until she fulfills her part of the bargain.

> I cannot study for you. My students for the last 35 years know the sequence of sounds so typos are not a problem.

They _ARE_ a problem. When you see the same set of consonants repeated
twice, one possible inference is that she failed to put the cerebral
notation on one set of the syllables. Another completely plausible
possibility is that she cut and pasted something she only meant to be
there once. Now, you tell me why i was supposed to make one inference
and not the other: you CAN'T because they are equally plausible.

Instead of trying to say that I have a comprehension problem, you
should have done what I did and listed them out accurately.

> In fact one weakness of Sanskrit publications is the 'typo' issue. We simply know what it is supposed to be and you should have
> comprehended that based upon page 1 the
> footnote on page 25 has typos.

When something is nearly 50% WRONG the signal to noise ratio is
unacceptable. If I speak the most correct German to you while a train
is passing, you won't understand. Not because you dont understand
German but because there is too much noise for you to pick up the
signal. I see no need for exercises in telepathy or guessing games
when the author clearly is at fault.

If I wrote a sentence and took out every other word, would you
understand? I didn't sign up for a puzzle solving course.

> This is far too picky and you are missing the forest because of the trees.

That is your opinion. Mine is the opposite.

>
> Let's end this discussion and move on. We are achieving 'rien' with such 'Kleinigkeiten'.

You did not substantiate your assertion about my deep misunderstanding
in this course. I asked you about that in the previous email. How can
you insult me like that and then fail to produce evidence?

If you wanted to end this discussion, then you could've done so
without speaking your mind. But you decided to respond to me with your
opinion and I dont think this matter is settled.

If you want to settle this, then perhaps an objective 3rd party needs
to pass judgement.

[Terrence Brannon]

On Oct 2, 7:18 pm, "Adolf VishNu Shaastrii" <wolfga...@bellsouth.net>
wrote:

> Yes, Egenes' book is very good.

It is completely different from the other ones you suggested. You
remind of a particle physicist who decides to try and teach
kindergarten science.

> Note that there are two volumes. I have
> considered using it for this course but it goes in and out of print.

What do you think of Wikner's Sanskrit Introductory -
http://sanskritdocuments.org/learning_tutorial_wikner/

[Terrence Brannon]

On Oct 2, 7:13 pm, "Adolf VishNu Shaastrii" <wolfga...@bellsouth.net>
wrote:

> By the way you will also see 'brahmin' for 'brahman'.

This is amazing. She chooses to define ब्राह्मण in English as brAhman
instead of as priest. I have no idea why she would think that a book
on First Lessons in Sanskrit Grammar should use a nebulous term like
brAhman. Any native english speaker knows what a Hindu priest is. They
may or may not know what brahmin, or brahman is. And given the
potential for confusion among the various brahm* words (* meaning any
of a number of possible continuations), she should've steered clear of
it.

http://acharya.iitm.ac.in/cgi-bin/dictionary/search.cgi?word=brAhmaNa&exact=yes

[Adolf VishNu Shaastrii]

I'm familiar with Wikner's work. It is also useful.

-----Original Message-----
From: sanskri...@googlegroups.com
[mailto:sanskri...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Terrence Brannon
Sent: Friday, October 03, 2008 10:12
To: sanskrit-study
Subject: Re: brahman (should not take nominative rules literally?)

[Adolf VishNu Shaastrii]

Terrence, let's move on to Lesson 06b.
Say, what does उत्तमम् mean per my discussion?

-----Original Message-----
From: sanskri...@googlegroups.com [mailto:sanskri...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Terrence Brannon
Sent: Friday, October 03, 2008 10:10
To: sanskrit-study
Subject: Re: brahman (should not take nominative rules literally?)