New light on tailapaayin

[Dominik Wujastyk]

Some of you may remember that in 1996 I was translating a list of birds in
the Kasyapasamhita, and came across "tailapaayin" which we decided must be
a cockroach.

I've just had the idea of checking for "cockroach" in the index of Dave's
classic work "Birds in Sanskrit Literature", and it turns out that there
are late MIA terms which seem certainly cognate with tailapaayin, and
which mean Spotted Munia (p.85), Oily Starlings and both Himalayan and
Finsch's Starlings (Hindi: telorii, teliyaa mainaa).

DW

--
Dr Dominik Wujastyk
Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow
Wellcome Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/histmed/