tohna river

Klaus Karttunen Klaus.Karttunen at HELSINKI.FI
Fri Sep 3 11:21:23 UTC 1999


V. Iyer wrote:
>  Sri. R. Raghava Aiyangar in a 1908 tamil article
>in the research jl., centamiz (founded by Ramnad Sethupathis)
>quotes many poems that write tozunai for yamuna. RR says
>that Ptolemy uses tOhna. Due to tamil alphabets, it could
>mean dohna as well.

You should have mentioned that the reference came from Tamil source, so I
could have checked also names with D- (but the h is still a problem).
Perhaps the river-name meant by RA is what was given as Doanas by McCrindle
(founded on the old edition by Nobbe) in Ptolemy 7, 2, 7 and again 7, 2,
11. The critical edition by Renou (1925) gives Daonas as the best variant.
But this river is situated in Southeast Asia and has been usually
identified as the Mekong (Tomaschek 1905, Gerini 1909, Volz 1911, Berthelot
1930, Schulz 1951), occasionally (but, I think, unconvincingly) as the
Brahmaputra (McCrindle 1885, Herrmann 1938).

>Does Diamounas have any variants? Like Doulounas, Diolunas, etc.,?

Foreign names were often difficult and suffered much in hands of the
scribes, but for some reason Diamounas is transmitted with practically no
variants (Diamnas in Latin translation).

The Yamuna is also mentioned by Arrian, Indica 4, 3 as Iobares (usually
corrected to Iomanes) and by Pliny as Iomanes.  It is interesting to note
that Iomanes seems to go back (through the contemporary histories of
Alexander) to Sanskrit YamunA, while Ptolemy's Diamounas probably
corresponds to Prakrit JamunA.

Regards

Klaus


Klaus Karttunen
Institute for Asian and African Studies
Box 59, 00014 Helsinki, Finland
tel. +358-9-191-22224, fax. +358-9-191-22094





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