A question on Vedic vANa - 1

[Vidyasankar Sundaresan]

Sudalaimuthu Palaniappan <Palaniappa at AOL.COM> wrote:

>In
>his Aryans in the Rigveda, Kuiper reiterates ......
......
The general tendency at all times
>was to 'sanskritize' words with the foreign phoneme b by changing it to v
>or
>bh
(p.33)

The phrase "at all times" in the above quote is still valid. A small aside
in this connection might be interesting. The Bengali tendency to convert v
to b in their speech is well known. However, among contemporary Bengali
authors, there is a tendency to revert to v from b (when they are not
writing in Bengali). In some instances, authors do such a thorough job of it
that they change b to v even in words that require the phoneme b. For
example, bAhya becomes vAhya, nirbIja becomes nirvIja etc, in Mukerji's
translation of Hariharananda Aranya's commentary to the Yogasutra Bhashya.
Sanskritization seems to be going awry!

Vidyasankar


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