Non EuroEnglish, sed Indo-english

[Trimble]

At 05:48 PM 9/16/97 -0700, Vidyasankar Sundaresan wrote:
>> 2. More importantly, in Skt, why do we find the alphabet having the "l~"
>> vowel that comes after r~ i.e. the alphabet runs formally as : a A e ee
>> u U r~ r~~ and then "l~" i.e. I don't think it was ever used( or am I
>> wrong here?)Can anybody please tell me more about the history of this
>> vowel?
>
>It is used in the root klp, from which by come words like kalpa, kalpanA,
>kalpita, etc. I don't think it is used in any other word.
>
>Vidyasankar

".L" is the name of a goddess, the mother of the wishing-cow.  I think that
most other cases of the vowel result from a metastasis from .r to .l for
phonological reasons.  I always thought that the long version was a logical
"contrivance" to support Panini 1.2.27 where vowels are divided into short,
long, and superlong (pluta).  But I looked in Monier-Williams and found that
".Lii" is an epithet of Siva.  Does anyone know of its origin?

W. Trimble