Kyoto-Harvard transliteration

[Jonathan Silk]

I am afraid that, being out of station (although, sadly, not at the moment
in the mountains), I have missed this discussion until now. I would like to
study it carefully, but just one remark a propos the following:

On 8/3/08, Gérard Huet <Gerard.Huet at inria.fr> wrote:
>
> Dear colleagues,
> ...




Actually, vaarttikas recommend the fair law: first should be come the notion
> worthy of most respect, like in maatapitarau.
> ...


Interestingly, I have survyed this (naturally, references not to hand, but
they will be found in a footnote in my recent paper in JIPh on Good and Evil
in Buddhism), and at least in the limited context of listing of the 5 sins
of immediate retribution, the first two of which are killing one's mother
and/or father, the ordering appears to be entirely free in both Pali and
Skt. It is possible that since the list of 5 appears generally, although not
always, to be in increasing order of seriousness, there was a conflict
between listing the mother first, as noted by Dr Huet, and listing her
second, since killing her is worse than killing a father. I discussed this
issue of relative seriousness in the paper, but not the grammatical issue of
ordering of compounds, other than the brief note.

Thanks to all for the interesting discussion!

jonathan


-- 
J. Silk
Instituut Kern / Universiteit Leiden
Postbus 9515
2300 RA Leiden
Netherlands