It is great that they are making this, hopefully more to celebrate our history, our hero Arjun, than for making money out of it. Thanks to them for calling it Arjun and not Arjuna. But they should be ashamed of calling our holy scripture Mahabharat which contains our holy Srimad Bhagwad Geeta as mythology (a collection of myths) saga. That is really derogatory. I sent them a message regarding this, hopefully they will correct the text and respect Sanatan Dharm Anuyayi (misnomer: Hindu).
i'm concerned hindi speakers will start talking about the bhagavad-geet soon!
hindi has inherited urdu (ie. vowel-poor arabic and persian) speech patterns, so that sanskrit and hindi written in the same devanagari are pronounced differently. in sanskrit, every letter by default has an 'a' sound, but it hindi it doesn't. this is why hindi speakers for instance say keral and karnatak, where it is written in sanskrit (correctly) as kerala and karnataka. darn, they may begin to say andhr pradesh and madhy pradesh as well, just like uttar (which would be uttara in sanskrit, just like dakshina).
there is no point getting upset, because hindi speakers are convinced that their clipped pronunciation is correct. they do say 'yog' for instance. also another error is the use of 'gy' for 'jn', as in gyan, which should really be jnana. not that others don't make errors, in malayalam we mess up the 'ts' as in 'vatsala' by saying 'ls' => valsala :-(
Rajeev I am not sure if its "inherited" from Urdu, because it seems common to all Sanskrit derived languages in India from Oriya (which never had much of a Muslim rule or Urdu influence) to Gujarati, somewhere along the line this feature was lost in an indigenous development.
Yes others too make "mistakes" (it is only a mistake in Sanskrit) but we do not insist that this is the right way to say stuff when speaking Sanskrit. Many Telugu speakers say:
But we realise that is not how they are pronounced in Sanskrit but I have met one Bengali insisting Ram, Bhim, Yog are the right Sanskrit pronounciations!!!
I think humanbeing is referring to anglisized version of our ancient names, under which Arjuna is changed to Arjunaa, rather than Arjuna as in ArjunÉ™ (where the last sound is pronounced like u as in 'under', a very short 'a'), I believe that is how the sanskrit letters are pronounced, when the last letter ends with a halant(forward slash under the letter). Sanskrit already has the facility of 'aa' sound seperately e.g Prithaa.
So i am not sure if south indians when they say kerala how much emphasis do they put on the last letter and is it because of Sanskrit influence or English?
"So i am not sure if south indians when they say kerala how much emphasis do they put on the last letter and is it because of Sanskrit influence or English?"
It is said as kEraLa in Telugu not kEraLA (which is what u talked about).
Not sure what you mean by second question, afaik it is native to the language not due to Sanskrit or English influence.
kp11 and harish, i think hindi speakers (i dont know about speakers of other languages) act as though every letter has an implied halant (but inconsistently). eg. just take the way "parameshwara" is written in devanagari. if it is read in sanskrit, it is read as though there is an implied short a, ie, pa ra me shwa ra. but in hindi, it would be read as pa r me shwa r (ie as though some of the letters have a halant, and some dont). this is the problem the southerners have with northerners' pronunciation of devanagari/sanskrit.
as for this thing that kp11 is talking about, a long 'a' ending, i dont think anybody in the south adds a long ending, unless it is when you are addressing somebody: eg. you would say parameshwarA, ie, hey, parameshwara! which is also correct in sanskrit.
there is also the tamil way of adding an "aa" as a question: they say "madrasaa" meaning "oh, madras, eh?"
all this has nothing to do with english influence.
also, harish, the "am" ending is also often correct sanskrit, ie. it is not himalaya, it is himalayam in some cases in sanskrit grammar (which i am not quite sure of). it is certainly never himalay, which would be the logical pronunciation in hindi since they apply an implied halant to everything, thus arriving at 'arjun' and 'yog' and 'keral'.
if this is not a hindi problem, but true for all northerners, then my explanation that is really an urdu problem (viz hindi is urdu written in devanagari) is incorrect. any other reasons?
kp11, when southerners talk about the 'a' ending, it is precisely the 'upside-down e' that you were talking about.
also notice that sanskrit is very precise about the 'r' sound, so 'arjuna' would never be written as a r ju na, but only as a (ju with mark on top to imply r) na.
in hindi it would be acceptable to write write this as a r ju na
Rajeev my hypothesis is that this cutting out of the last "a" in pronounciation was a natural development that came about in the various apabhramsas (or maybe Prakrits) of Bharatam and inherited by the descendants of these apabhramsas (Gujarati, Hindi, Oriya, Punjabi etc). Also don't know if u noticed in many of these langs certain words transform in a predictable way (putra = puttar in Panjabi, svapna = sapan).
I am not sure when this happened (more knowledgable people may pitch in) but it is definitely a later development because Sinhala which had a separate development from the mainland sanskrit derived languages retains the "a" (i.e they say "prema" not "prem").
Also since we r talking languages, i may as well ask u this, in Tamizh and Malayalam u guys have "ra" "Ra" "zha" "La" "la". Telugu has "ra" "La" "la". I was wondering if u know any words in Tamizh that maybe common with Malayalam that use the hard "Ra" along with their english meaning because I have been trying to hear it pronounced in an online dictionary but need a word that uses it. I am aware of aRam (justness/dharmam) in Tamizh but the word isn't there in the dictionary.
To me "zha" sometimes sounds as "da" and other times as "La". Perhaps this is the reason why nizhal = needa (shadow), chOzha = chOda (the dynasty), nAzh = naadu (day, though it also means country depending on the context), aazhvaar = aaLvaaru in Telugu.
Harish=> The second words above are probably poetic. The first words are gramatical.
-- the last "a" in pronounciation was a natural development that came about in the various apabhramsas --- This natural development is a sickular explanation. Hinduism has different ideas.
-- But we realise that is not how they are pronounced in Sanskrit but I have met one Bengali insisting Ram, Bhim, ---- There is no dispute that it is Rama. But there is plenty and plenty into it than pretending the debate to be over. This is too complicated.
You seem to be under the assumption that language is some static unchanging entity, every language including Sanskrit undergoes changes with time.
Dynamics through some common uses of time is a popular but modern phenomena - in my opinion.
The sanskrit is a rule based language, those rules are not function of time. . Unlike strictly domain of ideas, the rules of sanskrit are manifested with characteristics and perception. Ever wondered why the letters are called "Varna" ? With different varnas for vowels and stuff ? They are one level of subtelity. There are other level of subtelity. It is this aspect, I mentioned as complex.
Time is treated entirely differently in this context...The Kala affects some and then we bow to kala at times, language pervades all these. Time as a observer is developed a particular framework of description only...and yes that is a fundamental basis of the secularism.
I have heard, even Sanskrit PGs ( Well meaning people- my relatives) say that sanskrit has evolved. Personally I don't believe it. At certain level it is meaningless and futile to see the thing in this way...at certain level it is quite a gross generalization.
But I am not sure how important is to get such description right, vs saying Jai SriRama. Sri rama.
"I have heard, even Sanskrit PGs ( Well meaning people- my relatives) say that sanskrit has evolved. Personally I don't believe it."
Do you know Sanskrit?
If a language does not change with time, it is DEAD and the Sanskrit phobes say exactly the same thing as u.
Those who know pANini's Sanskrit will need quite an effort in understanding the Sanskrit in the Vedas.
Your irrelevant semantics about "time" and "secularism" apart, change in language is a fact of life, i will only give one example, in pANini's time there were "pa" and "pha" (pronounced as hard pa) but now pha has evolved into being pronounced as "fa".
Sorry to say but ur kind of thinking in part is what gives fuel to the anti Sanskrit revival nuts and the DMK types, now they can say "see we told u so, this is an unchanging dead language". Not to speak of other Hindus who make claims such as "Sanskrit the mother of all languages" without knowing any Sanskrit themselves, not much different from the DMK morons claims of Tamizh being the language from which every other known language came.
If a language does not change with time, it is DEAD and the Sanskrit phobes say exactly the same thing as u.
From where did you get this definition of life ? A grammer will be of limitted help in some matters here.
in pANini's time there were "pa" and "pha" (pronounced as hard pa) but now pha has evolved into being pronounced as "fa".
I fear, hear paNini is being projected to temporal domain for study, even before focus is drawn to a single thing he described. This has screwed it up the domain, and hence the conclusions .
Your irrelevant semantics about "time" and "secularism" apart,
Please see why it was relevant considering your definition of life - quoted above. I didn't mean to describe in a temporal domain. But even at constant time, the pha/fa issue is possibly different for two people, and is possible even in Russian. So is your argument definitive, or we need to find a way around instead of proclaiming death ?
here is one word that's in both tamil and malayalam with the R:
puRam, meaning outside
malayalam has a soft 'r' as well, and tamil has a very hard 'r'.
the word puRam appears also in the sangam era poetry collection, puRananooRu, ie 400 poems from 'outside'. puRam and its opposite, akam, inside, have some specific meanings in sangam poetry that i don't quite recall now.
incidentally nanooRu is also in both malayalam and tamil and has the R. nooRu is 100, and nal+nooRu -> nanooRu where nalU is 4
What happened to FREEDOM OF SPEECH in this country?? if a producer is making a movie using our scriptures as base and making a nice creative movie out of it, what;s the harm in that?? Y do we have to always oppress people's creativity n freedom to express their creativity in any way they want.. come on guys.. a debate coz of a name?? coz of scriptures?? be happy that people all around the world will get to know more about Mahabharat. They will get to know a bit more about our history..
18 comments:
It is great that they are making this, hopefully more to celebrate our history, our hero Arjun, than for making money out of it. Thanks to them for calling it Arjun and not Arjuna. But they should be ashamed of calling our holy scripture Mahabharat which contains our holy Srimad Bhagwad Geeta as mythology (a collection of myths) saga. That is really derogatory. I sent them a message regarding this, hopefully they will correct the text and respect Sanatan Dharm Anuyayi (misnomer: Hindu).
This is fantastic! The preview is incredible.
"Thanks to them for calling it Arjun and not Arjuna"
huh?
Arjuna is the original Sanskrit not Arjun.
yes, it *is* arjuna in sanskrit.
i'm concerned hindi speakers will start talking about the bhagavad-geet soon!
hindi has inherited urdu (ie. vowel-poor arabic and persian) speech patterns, so that sanskrit and hindi written in the same devanagari are pronounced differently. in sanskrit, every letter by default has an 'a' sound, but it hindi it doesn't. this is why hindi speakers for instance say keral and karnatak, where it is written in sanskrit (correctly) as kerala and karnataka. darn, they may begin to say andhr pradesh and madhy pradesh as well, just like uttar (which would be uttara in sanskrit, just like dakshina).
there is no point getting upset, because hindi speakers are convinced that their clipped pronunciation is correct. they do say 'yog' for instance. also another error is the use of 'gy' for 'jn', as in gyan, which should really be jnana. not that others don't make errors, in malayalam we mess up the 'ts' as in 'vatsala' by saying 'ls' => valsala :-(
Rajeev I am not sure if its "inherited" from Urdu, because it seems common to all Sanskrit derived languages in India from Oriya (which never had much of a Muslim rule or Urdu influence) to Gujarati, somewhere along the line this feature was lost in an indigenous development.
Yes others too make "mistakes" (it is only a mistake in Sanskrit) but we do not insist that this is the right way to say stuff when speaking Sanskrit. Many Telugu speakers say:
artham - ardham
satyam - sachyam
laksha - laccha
swami - saami
But we realise that is not how they are pronounced in Sanskrit but I have met one Bengali insisting Ram, Bhim, Yog are the right Sanskrit pronounciations!!!
I dont quite agree with both the versions.
I think humanbeing is referring to anglisized version of our ancient names, under which Arjuna is changed to Arjunaa, rather than Arjuna as in ArjunÉ™ (where the last sound is pronounced like u as in 'under', a very short 'a'), I believe that is how the sanskrit letters are pronounced, when the last letter ends with a halant(forward slash under the letter). Sanskrit already has the facility of 'aa' sound seperately e.g Prithaa.
So i am not sure if south indians when they say kerala how much emphasis do they put on the last letter and is it because of Sanskrit influence or English?
"So i am not sure if south indians when they say kerala how much emphasis do they put on the last letter and is it because of Sanskrit influence or English?"
It is said as kEraLa in Telugu not kEraLA (which is what u talked about).
Not sure what you mean by second question, afaik it is native to the language not due to Sanskrit or English influence.
kp11 and harish, i think hindi speakers (i dont know about speakers of other languages) act as though every letter has an implied halant (but inconsistently). eg. just take the way "parameshwara" is written in devanagari. if it is read in sanskrit, it is read as though there is an implied short a, ie, pa ra me shwa ra. but in hindi, it would be read as pa r me shwa r (ie as though some of the letters have a halant, and some dont). this is the problem the southerners have with northerners' pronunciation of devanagari/sanskrit.
as for this thing that kp11 is talking about, a long 'a' ending, i dont think anybody in the south adds a long ending, unless it is when you are addressing somebody: eg. you would say parameshwarA, ie, hey, parameshwara! which is also correct in sanskrit.
there is also the tamil way of adding an "aa" as a question: they say "madrasaa" meaning "oh, madras, eh?"
all this has nothing to do with english influence.
also, harish, the "am" ending is also often correct sanskrit, ie. it is not himalaya, it is himalayam in some cases in sanskrit grammar (which i am not quite sure of). it is certainly never himalay, which would be the logical pronunciation in hindi since they apply an implied halant to everything, thus arriving at 'arjun' and 'yog' and 'keral'.
if this is not a hindi problem, but true for all northerners, then my explanation that is really an urdu problem (viz hindi is urdu written in devanagari) is incorrect. any other reasons?
kp11, when southerners talk about the 'a' ending, it is precisely the 'upside-down e' that you were talking about.
also notice that sanskrit is very precise about the 'r' sound, so 'arjuna' would never be written as a r ju na, but only as a (ju with mark on top to imply r) na.
in hindi it would be acceptable to write write this as a r ju na
Rajeev my hypothesis is that this cutting out of the last "a" in pronounciation was a natural development that came about in the various apabhramsas (or maybe Prakrits) of Bharatam and inherited by the descendants of these apabhramsas (Gujarati, Hindi, Oriya, Punjabi etc). Also don't know if u noticed in many of these langs certain words transform in a predictable way (putra = puttar in Panjabi, svapna = sapan).
I am not sure when this happened (more knowledgable people may pitch in) but it is definitely a later development because Sinhala which had a separate development from the mainland sanskrit derived languages retains the "a" (i.e they say "prema" not "prem").
Also since we r talking languages, i may as well ask u this, in Tamizh and Malayalam u guys have "ra" "Ra" "zha" "La" "la". Telugu has "ra" "La" "la". I was wondering if u know any words in Tamizh that maybe common with Malayalam that use the hard "Ra" along with their english meaning because I have been trying to hear it pronounced in an online dictionary but need a word that uses it. I am aware of aRam (justness/dharmam) in Tamizh but the word isn't there in the dictionary.
To me "zha" sometimes sounds as "da" and other times as "La". Perhaps this is the reason why nizhal = needa (shadow), chOzha = chOda (the dynasty), nAzh = naadu (day, though it also means country depending on the context), aazhvaar = aaLvaaru in Telugu.
putra = puttar in Panjabi, svapna = sapan).
Harish=> The second words above are probably poetic. The first words are gramatical.
--
the last "a" in pronounciation was a natural development that came about in the various apabhramsas
---
This natural development is a sickular explanation. Hinduism has different ideas.
--
But we realise that is not how they are pronounced in Sanskrit but I have met one Bengali insisting Ram, Bhim,
----
There is no dispute that it is Rama. But there is plenty and plenty into it than pretending the debate to be over. This is too complicated.
"The second words above are probably poetic. The first words are gramatical."
No in Panjabi Puttar is the right way to say it, it is used in speech as well as songs.
"This natural development is a sickular explanation. Hinduism has different ideas."
No, it is an explanation based upon common sense and using ur brain and perhaps u can share what those "ideas" u attribute to Hinduism are.
"There is no dispute that it is Rama. But there is plenty and plenty into it than pretending the debate to be over. This is too complicated."
Don't get this.
You seem to be under the assumption that language is some static unchanging entity, every language including Sanskrit undergoes changes with time.
You seem to be under the assumption that language is some static unchanging entity, every language including Sanskrit undergoes changes with time.
Dynamics through some common uses of time is a popular but modern phenomena - in my opinion.
The sanskrit is a rule based language, those rules are not function of time. . Unlike strictly domain of ideas, the rules of sanskrit are manifested with characteristics and perception. Ever wondered why the letters are called "Varna" ? With different varnas for vowels and stuff ? They are one level of subtelity. There are other level of subtelity. It is this aspect, I mentioned as complex.
Time is treated entirely differently in this context...The Kala affects some and then we bow to kala at times, language pervades all these. Time as a observer is developed a particular framework of description only...and yes that is a fundamental basis of the secularism.
I have heard, even Sanskrit PGs ( Well meaning people- my relatives) say that sanskrit has evolved. Personally I don't believe it. At certain level it is meaningless and futile to see the thing in this way...at certain level it is quite a gross generalization.
But I am not sure how important is to get such description right, vs saying Jai SriRama.
Sri rama.
"I have heard, even Sanskrit PGs ( Well meaning people- my relatives) say that sanskrit has evolved. Personally I don't believe it."
Do you know Sanskrit?
If a language does not change with time, it is DEAD and the Sanskrit phobes say exactly the same thing as u.
Those who know pANini's Sanskrit will need quite an effort in understanding the Sanskrit in the Vedas.
Your irrelevant semantics about "time" and "secularism" apart, change in language is a fact of life, i will only give one example, in pANini's time there were "pa" and "pha" (pronounced as hard pa) but now pha has evolved into being pronounced as "fa".
Sorry to say but ur kind of thinking in part is what gives fuel to the anti Sanskrit revival nuts and the DMK types, now they can say "see we told u so, this is an unchanging dead language". Not to speak of other Hindus who make claims such as "Sanskrit the mother of all languages" without knowing any Sanskrit themselves, not much different from the DMK morons claims of Tamizh being the language from which every other known language came.
If a language does not change with time, it is DEAD and the Sanskrit phobes say exactly the same thing as u.
From where did you get this definition of life ? A grammer will be of limitted help in some matters here.
in pANini's time there were "pa" and "pha" (pronounced as hard pa) but now pha has evolved into being pronounced as "fa".
I fear, hear paNini is being projected to temporal domain for study, even before focus is drawn to a single thing he described. This has screwed it up the domain, and hence the conclusions .
Your irrelevant semantics about "time" and "secularism" apart,
Please see why it was relevant considering your definition of life - quoted above. I didn't mean to describe in a temporal domain. But even at constant time, the pha/fa issue is possibly different for two people, and is possible even in Russian. So is your argument definitive, or we need to find a way around instead of proclaiming death ?
Regards
harish, sorry for taking a while to respond.
here is one word that's in both tamil and malayalam with the R:
puRam, meaning outside
malayalam has a soft 'r' as well, and tamil has a very hard 'r'.
the word puRam appears also in the sangam era poetry collection, puRananooRu, ie 400 poems from 'outside'. puRam and its opposite, akam, inside, have some specific meanings in sangam poetry that i don't quite recall now.
incidentally nanooRu is also in both malayalam and tamil and has the R. nooRu is 100, and nal+nooRu -> nanooRu where nalU is 4
What happened to FREEDOM OF SPEECH in this country?? if a producer is making a movie using our scriptures as base and making a nice creative movie out of it, what;s the harm in that?? Y do we have to always oppress people's creativity n freedom to express their creativity in any way they want.. come on guys.. a debate coz of a name?? coz of scriptures?? be happy that people all around the world will get to know more about Mahabharat. They will get to know a bit more about our history..
c ya evryone,
Free thinker...
Post a Comment