frequencies

[Jonathan Silk]

Just a quick note (in addition to correcting the misprint pointed out by
Jan--yes, of course, linguist!): Whether or not one wants to include the
lexicon of Buddhist texts as "Sanskrit"--and there was long ago more than
one discussion about this, about whether we also want to speak of Jaina
Sanskrit, architectural Sanskrit and so on--the language of these texts is
not in any sense "derived from Pali". While the two are related, to be sure,
and some portion of Buddhist(ic) Sanskrit vocabulary may have been borrowed
or adapted from Middle Indic (--that is, *some* Buddhist[ic] Skt is
'Sanskritized Prakrit'), I am not aware of any case in which it can be shown
that the Middle Indic in question is Pali (but I have not looked into
this--has anyone?).

This is slightly off the topic, but the point is that if one wants to decide
to exclude particularly Buddhist lexica from a lexicon of Skt, the grounds
for this cannot be that the words are not Skt.

On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 2:39 PM, Alexandra Vandergeer
<geeraae at geol.uoa.gr>wrote:

> Naturally, but the same is valid for present-day English. Frequency lists
> are based on a wide spectrum, including newspapers, books, literature,
> spoken language, but not necessarily poems. In the case of Skt, I'd expect
> epics, philosophical texts in the broadest sense, shastras, [Buddhist
> texts not, likely derived from Pali] to give a reasonable sample of the
> Sanskrit language as is.
>
> And I agree with Jonathan that the lexicon suggested by Himal is likely a
> 'useful' vocabulary to read avarage Skt texts. Anyway, thanks Himal for
> the suggestion.
>
> Alexandra van der Geer
> Athens
>
> > I am not sure whether the question is even meaningful for classical
> > Sanskrit. Frequency where? In Epic literature? In philosophical
> > literature? In dharmasaastra or Buddhist texts? Each genre has its own
> > special vocabulary, and its own frequencies.
> > Best wishes
> > EF
>



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