dec 6th
from the forceful pen of narayanan komerath, who tells it like it is, with no sugar coating.
calling witzel a horse's ass is not particularly unkind.
btw, i have to confess that i wasn't involved in this particular struggle, as i was busy with some other stuff.
a lot of people apparently put in a lot of hard work for this cause, though, and i take my hat off to them.
alas, the CA board hasn't dropped the 'aryan' nonsense.
also, not to nitpick, but i wish the hindi folks representing the vedic foundation would stop trying to shove their urdu pronunciation down everyone's throats: arjun, krishn, chandragupt. these harsh consonant endings are arabic-persian-urdu, whereas sanskrit by default treats every syllable as having an 'a' ending, thus it *is* actually arjuna, krishna, chandragupta, et al.
hindi and sanskrit, two languages divided by a single alphabet :-)
http://tinyurl.com/ata4w
Scholarship of Equine Posteriors– Har(vard)appa Style
Narayanan Komerath
"Textbooks should instill a sense of pride in every child in his or
her heritage" California State Board of Education Guidelines
http://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/cr/cf/documents/socialcontent.pdf
News flash: Indian-American parents have been working with
California School authorities and textbook publishers for some years
to improve what their kids are being taught about their heritage. In
early November, they had just completed a set of small corrections to
middle-school textbooks, when the whole process was derailed by a
dung-throwing mob attack by so-called "Prominent Academics" The duly-
appointed committee, guided by the "CRP" Professor- Emeritus Bajpai,
were tossed out and superseded by a secretly-appointed "Super-CRP"
consisting of persons of blatant bias and hatred against the
community.
.....
13 comments:
Colour Blindness to Red-Green Allows Sensitivity to Khaki:
It would havebeen great if it had read "Red-White-Green", where white would represent the Christists!
san,
we know that you believe in white-worshipping and the aryan invasion myth, but you could do us all a favor and stop posting off-topic messages every time the topic of aryan invasion myth comes up. Your aim is to deflect attention and exonerate Witzel & Co.
I second that, dear anon. God bless you.
Here is a movie clip of the first Nuclear Blast conducted overground by the US on July 16, 1945.
Watch Robert Oppenheimer, the German-Jewish father of the atomic bomb quote from the Bhagavad Gita.
"Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of worlds..."
link
The jarring end in hindi is certainly unacceptable to some(esp. expert) hindi users. But movies with urdu dialogues are passed as "hindi" movies.... which leads to a case of mistaken identity for most. Moreover, talking about these finer points become a little comical when we have to write them out using English letters/words. But I agree that Hindi(just like english, and many other languages) is not a language which can be rated highly just on its own merit. I have seen people fight over whether it should be written as even sanskrit or sanskrut. Brahman (supreme being) caused confusion with varna brahman so some English author started writing it as Brahmin (to be pronounced something like braahman). But you will see that people all over pronounce it as brahmin (rhyming with tin). The degradation using english script is more than evident.
In general, I agree with Rajeeva. I am also sure he (or his parents) didn't mean to get his name mispronounced in the West but that is a problem with writing the sanskrit/sanskrut names using english alphabets. Seriously, these small points are immaterial when it comes to the valid topics he raises every day. Please don't take the comments earlier otherwise. God bless you.
Well if you find hindi harsh
What about languages south of vindhya (including marathi also) which have uber harsh sound of "zh"
As in "Tamizh".
And at risk of offending people here. I find Urdu beautiful language, I think Persian and Indian languages have beauty of their own, which I do not find in english (but them I am not well conversed in it).
Actually Hindi can be termed as crisp, that however is my opinion.
As far Sankrit is concenred isn't the sounds are "ah" as in "Ramah"
Just asking ??
doubtinggaurav, I think what Rajeev is saying is to use Sanskritized Hindi as opposed to Urdized Hindi. I am sure 'Krishn' was Krishna, before the Muslim invasion.
I went to the Haryana Govt. website, and read about Kurukshetra. There they refer to Bhishma as 'Bhisham'. Ridiculous. Just plain murder of a beautiful Sanskrit word in my opinion.
Sorry san. I didnt read your above post. I only read posts on technology, atlanticism, central asia, iran, aryan invasion etc. I dont come down to the level of mere mortals, discussing religion etc.
doubtinggauravaa, :^)
i think the 'zh' sound is quite melliflous, as in the french 'mange'. but your mileage obviously varies. as does my mileage with persian, which i find dysphonic. i find chinese especially dysphonic, arabic and hebrew a little less so, german also so, french and japanese rather pleasant.
my contention is that though devanagari is used to write both hindi and sanskrit, it is not used the same way in both.
if you see a proper sanskrit publisher like Gita Books, they are extremely precise in the way they write devanagari, so that there is no ambiguity. every syllable is an 'a' syllable (not an 'ah' syllable: these are denoted by the ":" character). if there is a need for a consonant ending, that is *always* indicated by a 'halanta', ie a rightward and downward stroke below the character. as is generally true of sanskrit, this means there is no ambiguity in the way sanskrit is to be pronounced.
hindi is far more permissive with devanagari, so there is ambiguity. for instance, consider the word 'parameswar' as written in hindi in devanagari: it will be written as
"pa" "ra" "me" "swa" "ra" but there will be no halant for the last "ra". so how do you differentiate between that last "ra" and all the other syllables that are pronounced with an "a"? i suspect even the first "ra" is pronounced "r", then why not pronounce the "pa" as "p" and "swa" as "sw"? this is what i mean by ambiguity or inconsistency in hindi use of devanagari.
the issue here is that urdu is derived from vowel-poor arabic and persian. therefore the tendency of urdu-influenced people to have consonant endings, which sound harsh to those used to vowel endings.
thanks to the person who wrote about the confusion between (para)-brahman, brahma and braahmana. in malayalam we say brahmam, brahmaavu, and braahmanan, so there is no ambiguity.
rajeeva(n) -- in malayalam we add an extra n to many sanskrit names. this is an extraneous regional twist. but the 'm' endings for many others is quite correct in sanskrit or samskrutam: eg. himalayam, thoyam, karanam,
san,
your off-topic messages are nothing but abuse of Rajeev's goodwill. If you want to set up your own blog, please do so. We come here to see Rajeev's perspective, not your spam posts (all off-topic posts are spam posts).
If you weigh in with your additional points on topic, that is to be appreciated. Your off-topic posts destroy Rajeev's blog as they add noise. You should either wait for a suitable topic or send in your stuff to Rajeev and he will choose to post or not.
I have observed that you deliberately post off-topic stuff to drown out discussions you do not agree with. You should tell us how you decided that the direction of migration was from Black Sea region to India and not the other way round.
Most Sanskrit scholars have a very nice and rhythmatic way of pronouncing the 'a' ending words. I have learnt a good deal of Sanskrit and my mothertounge is Marathi, still, I tend to pronounce the 'a' endings much like Urdu, rather than sanskrit. If I try to pronounce the Sanskrit way, it often sounds artificial.
Rajeev is absolutely right about the "melliflous" 'zh'.
A Hindu Keralite wrote in a Tamizh weekly,that many in Thamizh Nadu,sadly, have lost the ability to pronounce Thamizh 'zh' and I could not agree with him more.
Swami Dayananda,once said, he has successfully taught some of his 'white'students to pronounce it!
Typo correction-"mellifluous".
Anonymous who has zeroed in on San is absolutely right.
After reading Rajeev's writings about "car culture" and the unethical track record of GM and others,pollution,oil crunch etc, I am not able to feel euphoric about Chennai becoming a detroit....sorry, can't run with the hare and hunt with the hound!
More cars mean more plundering of natural resources for raw materials...tunnel visioned short sightedness robs us of the ability to see the broader picture.
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