Kadamba
George Hart
glhart at BERKELEY.EDU
Wed Aug 20 20:33:46 UTC 2008
Thank you, Dominik -- this is just the sort of thing that makes this
list invaluable. George
On Aug 20, 2008, at 12:51 PM, Dominik Wujastyk wrote:
> Actually, there's quite a bit of help around. The publications out
> of the group at the AVS Kottakkal, including Indira Balachandran, V.
> V. Sivarajan and others, are excellent, have pictures, are
> multilingual, and are historically well-informed. In the
> introduction to my Roots of Ayurveda book - sorry for mentioning my
> own work - I discuss these issues of plant identification, and give
> a condensed reading list of the works I have in my library and that
> I have found extremely helpful. Since Roots came out, the website http://botanicus.org
> has arisen that offers simply amazing historical resources, and
> links to nomenclature databases. One can download the whole of
> Hortus Malabaricus. It's staggering!
>
> There will always remain some difficult cases, and your "snap"
> example is wonderful, and just the sort of historical data that
> needs to be brought to the surface. There's always more research to
> be done. But there is a mass of valuable publications out there
> already that answer very many questions. Just Kirtikar and Basu is
> already a great starting point.
>
> Our colleague Roelf Barkhuis has told me that his company will be
> publishing something substantial in exactly this area in the not too
> distant future.
>
> Best,
> Dominik
>
> --
> University College London
>
>
>
> On Wed, 20 Aug 2008, George Hart wrote:
>
>> Many years ago, Daniel Ingalls remarked that he wished to publish a
>> book of plants with their Sanskrit names, giving pictures and the
>> like. I realize we have various databases and books that catalog
>> the plants of South Asia, but to my knowledge we still have nothing
>> that is meant for the scholar of premodern South Asia that gives
>> the names of the plants in classical languages (Sanskrit, Tamil,
>> Prakrit) with pictures and citations and identifies the plants. In
>> translating from Tamil, I find many many plant names (and some
>> fauna also) whose identification is problematic, and the discussion
>> here on kadamba shows the same is true in Sanskrit. I find myself
>> going on the internet and trying to discover what each plant could
>> be and what it looks like -- using the Tamil Lexicon for the Latin
>> names. I remember one occurrence in the NaRRiNai that describes a
>> plant (I've forgotten which one and don't have time to look it up),
>> saying it makes a sound like fingers snapping. One modern
>> commentator had a completely different interpretation, and I
>> followed him in translating it -- which led a Tamil journal to
>> criticize my translation. When I researched it on the internet I
>> found that indeed the seed pod explodes -- which means that fingers
>> snapping is the correct translation. A comprehensive book -- or
>> better on-line database -- allowing one to look up Sanskrit/Tamil/
>> Prakrit names (and names in other South Asian languages) would be
>> invaluable. If someone is looking for a challenging and
>> fascinating project, this would be a good one.
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