Dravidian Cryptography:Aasanga

[Dominique.Thillaud]

At 6:39 +0200 3/09/97, DKumar6248 at aol.com wrote:
>
>	I thought I would take a leaf from my work book, and
>write a note about another rishi Aasanga, who was the son of Playoga. This
>rishi, according to the information about him, got into a predicament: the
>gods cursed him to become a woman. He appealed to another rishi Medhatithi
>about this condition, and Medatithi helped him get his male sex back. Aasanga
>was pleased to no end. He gave great gifts to his benefactor, and addressed
>to him some verses of praise which are in the Rig-veda to this day. It is
>thought that this legend conceals that the author of these verses attributed
>to Aasanga was also a woman, or at the least, a eunuch, and not a man at all.
>In Dravidian Kannada, the word: hengasu, precisely denotes: female (DED.
>#4395), and the name Aasanga, (the bearer of which was cursed by the gods to
>become a woman), is an inverted and substituted form of this Kannada word:
>hengasu. Again, by realizing the existence and operation of the linguistic
>phenomenon of inversion and substitution, we have realized that the legend
>concerning Aasanga is not an idle one. I do not think we can dispute the fact
>that Indology is getting to be more interesting. Best regards.

	Till now, I refrain to comment the 'Dravidian cryptography',
because I don't know any word of Dravidian. But this mail is very
astounding!

	1) We know very few about Aasanga who appears just in few slokas of
RV VIII, 1. The Hymn and the comment of Sayana give just the impression he
was impotent and that prayers of his wife restore his virility. But the
story is actually unknown and the romance of Mr Kumar is purely
speculative, just sustained by an isolated passage of the Zaankhaayana
Zrauta Suutra (XVI.11.17) where zaazvatii is taken for a woman's name.
Aasanga is not the better example of a woman!
	2) Aasanga and hengasu are very hard to connect, even with a
permutation: what about the 'h' and the vowels ?
	3) The joke of connecting words with few common phonems is too easy
to be a proof. Choose any languages at random, statistics will show you
thousand examples of such links. Just two: the Greek 'gunaa' (related to
vedic 'gnaa') is 'woman', the popular French 'gonzesse' is 'woman': much
better concordance with hengasu than Aasanga!

	I don't intend to begin a debate (I'm not a specialist of
Dravidian), that was just my opinion.
	Regards,
Dominique

PS 1: Renfrew's theories are perhaps true, perhaps not. Mallory has other
theories.
PS 2: Not buried, a skelet can't be conserved for a long time. No skelets
were found in destroyed Minoan and Mycenian palaces.

Dominique THILLAUD
Universite' de Nice Sophia-Antipolis, France