A question on Vedic vANa - 1

Mon Aug 23 00:12:21 UTC 1999

The trends in Bengali actually parallel in contemporary Hindi as well.
However, it must be pointed out that the confusion between 'v' and 'b' is
not recent or 'Sanskritic'.
Even in Vedic times, a Lakshana Grantha of the Atharvaveda
(Dantyoshthavidhi) had to be written to clarify which mantras have a 'v' and
which have a 'b'. The reason is obvious--close similarity of these sounds
and the mode of pronouncing them. As such, the related sounds 'pha' and
'bha' also occur relatively rarely in the Vedas and even to this day, there
is considerable mix up between 'b', 'bha', 'pha' in Hindi and other North
Indian Languages.

Vishal

----Original Message Follows----
From: Vidyasankar Sundaresan <vsundaresan at HOTMAIL.COM>
Subject: Re: A question on Vedic vANa - 1
Date: Sun, 22 Aug 1999 13:18:29 PDT

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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