ksamaam yaacaami

[thillaud at unice.fr]

        Oops! I'm really sorry! My aim was not the war, I wrote in french
because:
        1) I'm just a froggy (I like this small animal and that's not
injurious for me to be associated with) and, as you can see, I'm unabled to
write cursorily a correct english.
        2) I believed french (and german) would be accepted in indologist
milieu (Bergaigne and Renou wrote in french without scandal).
        3) Yes, I agree, english is irrevocably *the* international
communication standard, but I dislike *overall* standardization.
        4) I like my language.

        Yes. But I must admit that I had impolitely forgotten the non
french readers and I apologize to them.
        And when I talk about anglo-saxon imperialism, that's not a red
flag, that's just the reality. And that's a problem that the ASCII code
were unable to transcript languages accurately, just because, historically,
english people had no interest for an accurate transcription of their own
language. So, here so much mailings about writing sanskrit. Let be clear: I
mean there are no fair solutions with the 7-bits ASCII, just, perhaps,
quite good ones. For example:
        If we have to use an english alphabet, we can use the correlative
spelling principles: auxiliary characters for diacritics (as "h" in "sh",
"th", "gh") and context-dependant spelling. In sanskrit too, many sounds
are conditionned by environment and so some alterations are redundant. For
my personal use, I write:
        "s " for the visarga, "n" or "m" for the anusvaara,
        rta-, tisthati, ksatriya-, dhenusu, cakrena, hansi, yajna-, etc.
        "aa", "ii" for the long vowels (I reserve upercases for proper
nouns), "sh" for the palatal sibilant and "tz", "tzh", "nz", "sz" for the
genuine retroflexes.
        So I save a lot of time, I gain frequently a plainer analysis of
the words and there's no lack of information: if I need it, my computer can
easily restore the "true" form with a one-pass parsing.
        That was my modest contribution to the debate.

        Finally, as I am disappointed that my jokes are not world-wide
known, I give here a translation:
        << Moreover, imagination is boundless and all things are in all
places. I'll prove it with "Om":
        1) This two characters represent the conjunction of female (the
roundness of "O" is like an open vulva or a pregnant belly) and male (the
"m" is like two legs with a penis, that's too the first character of "man",
"masculin", "macho", etc.). Union of complementary opposites, they are a
picture of the totality.
        2) They are too a picture of the world: by vertical symmetry they
are "MO", the first two characters of italian "mondo" or of french "monde";
by halfplane rotation they are "WO", the first two characters of english
"world".
        3) If we split up "Aum", we find the picture of the horned victim
(obviously reversed because just sacrified), the cup for the blood and the
sacrificer himself (two legs and a knife). Therefore the syllable represent
the sacrifice who joins the divine world with the human one. >>
        Well, that's not a criticism of this revered spell, just some
suspicion against mystical interpretation of graphical characters: it's
really too easy!
        namaste!


--------------------------------------------------------------
Dominique Thillaud - Universite de Nice - Sophia Antipolis
email : thillaud at unice.fr