Kyoto-Harvard transliteration

[George Hart]

It is perhaps worth noting that the dominant castes (and arguably  
highest castes) in most of South India are technically "sudra."  In  
Sangam literature, the 4th Varna is not "sudra" but VeLLaaLar, the  
dominant land-owning group.  Through history, the VeLLaaLars and their  
equivalents in other areas (e.g. Reddys and Kammas in Andhra), all  
considered "Sudras" by the 3-4% Brahmin population, have been the  
major force behind the construction of temples and even the  
importation of Brahmins from the north.  Apparently, these  
"Sudras" (later sometimes called "Sat Sudras") were a dominant caste  
before Brahmins arrived in South India, and they maintained that  
position until the present.  It's also worth noting that the Varna  
system after Vedic times was tenuous and ill-defined at best; as far  
as I know, no outside observer ever saw 4 (or 5) Varnas -- they did  
however see caste (jaati / kuTi) differentiation.  George Hart

On Aug 3, 2008, at 2:00 PM, Sanjay Kumar wrote:

> According to Kaatyaayana and Patanjali as well later Sanskrit  
> grammarians such as Jayaaditya and KaiyaTa, the order of appearance  
> of the four varnas in copulative compound is not indicative of "the  
> notion worthy of most respect." It rather indicates the sequence as  
> mentioned in the Vedas (see KaiyaTa's commentary on the Vaartika  
> "varnaanaam aanupuurvyeNa" {Panini 2.2.34}). At least the (early)  
> grammatical tradition does not presuppose hierarchy in this context.
>
> Sanjay
>
> McGill University
>
>
> ________________________________
>
> From: Indology on behalf of Gérard Huet
> Sent: Sun 8/3/2008 2:18 PM
> To: INDOLOGY at liverpool.ac.uk
> Subject: Re: Kyoto-Harvard transliteration
>
>
>
> Dear colleagues,
>
> I was very interested to learn about Behaghel's law. I presume it is a
> general statement about the Indo-European family of
> languages, which may be more or less verified for the various
> languages. Concerning Sanskrit, thanks to Ashok for providing the
> reference, indeed justifying calling it this "Paa.nini-Behaghel" law.
> It is intriguing whether this "law" is merely a standardized
> rhetorical device, or whether it is related to some information
> theoretic notion such as Huffman coding (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huffman_coding
> ) since it is likely that shorter words are more frequent than longer
> ones.
> Some relation with sandhi-splitting ease could also exist (specially
> in light of Paa.nini 2.2.32 and 33).
>
> Of course the law concerns only copulative compounds (dvandva). The
> problem arises when listing several authors of a paper.
> The usual rule (of Western academics) is that authors are given in
> alphabetical order, only in case of balanced authorship.
> Otherwise the authors are put in decreasing order of their respective
> contribution, and this is a fairer law than any syntactic
> one.
>
> Actually, vaarttikas recommend the fair law: first should be come the
> notion worthy of most respect, like in maatapitarau.
> And of course braahma.nak.satriyavi.t"suudraa.h - brâhmans should
> always go first!
>
> I hope you do not have problems with my transliteration scheme. I call
> it VH encoding. Velthuis is of course the primary author.
> I merely restrict his code to lower case letters, using aa and not A
> etc. It would be unfair to call this the HV encoding because
> of some obscure IE law ...
>
> Cheers
> GH
>
> Le 3 août 08 à 16:01, Ashok Aklujkar a écrit :
>
>> Dear Michael,
>>
>> Thanks for the clarification. Enjoyed your wit. Glad to note that
>> honesty
>> continues to be important at my Alma Mater.
>>
>> In the spirit of your note and on the growing pattern illustrated by
>> "Newton-Bhaaskara," "Einstein-Bose" etc. (or their reversals), may I
>> suggest
>> thaat Behaghel's law should be referred to as "Paa.nini-Behaghel's
>> law"? See
>> Paa.nini 2.2.34 (alpaactaram). Even your "metrically shorter" is
>> anticipated
>> in a Vaarttika to this rule (laghv-ak.sara.m puurvam).
>>
>> Sorry for not following Kyoto-Harvard in the above, although I have
>> very
>> fond memories of both places.
>>
>> Best.
>>
>> ashok
>>