ivy's names

[S Krishna]

>On Thu, 18 Sep 1997, S Krishna wrote:

 2. It is interesting that Tamil and Malayalam call it maravalai and
 maravalli since Dr Raghuviras English-Hindi dictionary says that it is
called maravalli in Hindi also. These would then( reasonably in my
 opinion) point to some Sanskritic origin ( unless the valli has
 something to do with the wife of Murugan)
>

to which Vidyasankar wrote:
Or equally reasonably to a Dravidian origin for the Hindi word, without
bringing in murukan and vaLLi.
>


Now, Vidyasankar! I knew I was skating on thin ice when I said this:-)
I based my argument for SAnskritic origin( Hindi,Tamil and Malayalam
borrowed the word from Skt is what I had in mind) on the basis of the
fact that it is common in parts of North India to worship Siva with the
oleander flowers and also on the basis of the fact that there seem to be
so many names for the same plant in the Punjab-Kashmir region supplied
by dominique Thillaud( as an analogy, note that the Eskimo languages
have 30+ different ways of describing snow, but only one for tree while
the opposite is true of many Indian languages,which makes sense if you
take statistical incidence/occurence of a plant or snow in a given area
into account). The reason why I put in Murugan and VaLLi is because he
seems to have been the favorite God as far as flower worship business is
concerned and the ending has a certain resembalnce to vaLLi......

Again, no offence meant...and the sum total of our stuff leaves exactly
where we were in the first place:-(

Regards,
Krishna

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