Language barriers --- financial barriers

Thu Mar 19 08:47:17 UTC 2009

Certainly, I welcome prof. Kiparsky's suggestion.

It is what suggested by me there in hyderabad seminar. What I pointed is
that Prof. Kiparsky, prof. Houben, prof. Stall and very few others have
contributed very much grammatical tradition of panini, on the subject that
prof. Houben spoke there. But most of these researches are in english, which
is mostly onknown to most of the very good traditional Samskrita scholars
who fortunatley still are keeping alive the panini's tradition. simlar is
the case of other shastras still rigorously studied in India, Nyaya,
Vyakarana, Mimamsa, Vedanta, Sahitya. How many peple have studied
Prof. Gershheimer's
shaktivada translation in french? who has reveiwed it? what about Wada's
tranlsation of  siddhantalakshana? what about Ingalls' Vyaptipacaka? many
more cases are there.

Unless many of these people accept or atleast discuss what Prof. Kiparsky or
some other has said, how it can be a siddhanta? or what result it will
produce? since there are very few schloars in west who understand all
these intricate issues; may be 10-15. I may also be wrong, but considering
the recent paninian and Nyaya bibliography it seems to be true. People
should be allowed to know what you have written. *Hence the fact remains
that Prof. Kiparsky is still unknown to Paninians. and similarly if somebody
criticises Kiparsky in sanskrit thesis *(*It happened with a student who
worked under Prof. KV Ramakrishnamacharyulu on his Ph.D, and it happened
only because of Prof. KV Ramakrishnamacharyulu*) kiparsky does not come to
know it.

*This is the barrier*. Many of the recent samskrita works still not
catalogued in even Karl potter bibliography. what this means?. it may be a
fault of indian people not to have catalogued it. but then what Karl potter
bibliography is doing?  no samskrita papers published in the journals of
samskrita universities are  valued  catalogued there. This is the
communication gap.

Hence those writing in socalled international language i.e. English should
also publish in samskrita (not sanskrit) and technical language that
includes and that is original to paninian tradition, then the intended
result can be acheived. people should be made aware of these things. Many of
you may know oldtimer pandita manners very well while visiting india.

That was what planned and executed, once in 1983, by prof. Dayakrishna
when the russlian theory of preposition was traslated into sanskrit and sent
to many repute scholars including Prof. Badarinatha Shukla et all, well in
advance, and then make them discuss that thing. Outcome is published in
"Samvada" ICPR, 1991. That is how Dayakrishan became aware of the indian
naiyayika tradition and tried to do something for that.

Similarly people should practice writing in sanskrit. Sure I know that will
have their no impact on their career in US universities and elsewhere, but
then english writing will have no result though writer may become profesor.

I dont say it is solely the fault of people writing in english or language
itself, the sin is shared by Pandits also by not responding to these
writngs. but then there come all the barriers. we have a strike a balance to
overcome it. By writing in Samskrita one will only contribute more  to
language he studies, and nothing udesired thing will happen.

This is what I spoke in Hyderabad.

It is upto the scholars to workout.
veeranarayana

On Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 9:21 AM, Paul Kiparsky
<kiparsky at csli.stanford.edu>wrote:

> If you want your work to be accessible to linguistically disjoint
> audiences, why write it up in just one language?   In smaller European
> countries it is, or at any rate used to be, usual to publish one's work both
> in English (or German) in an international journal, and locally in the
> national language.  For English-speaking Indologists, the comparable
> practice would be to publish both an English version in an international
> journal or book, and a Hindi, Tamil, or Sanskrit version in India.  As Jan
> Houben reported here on March 3, summaries of the talks at the recent Third
> International Sanskrit Computational Linguistics Symposium were made
> available both in English and in Sanskrit.  The traditional philologists and
> pandits who attended the conference welcomed the Sanskrit version as a step
> to overcoming the language barrier and establishing mutual understanding
> with English-speaking Indologists and computational linguists.
>
> Paul Kiparsky
>
>
>
> On Mar 18, 2009, at 5:09 PM, Simon Brodbeck wrote:
>
> On Friday 6 March 2009, Jean-Luc Chevillard wrote: "The more languages one
>> knows, the better."
>>
>> Few would disagree. But that is from the perspective of the consumer or
>> recipient of texts. Active researchers are also producers of texts, and must
>> produce them in one language or another. From this perspective, one's work
>> will be inaccessible to those who lack facility with the language in which
>> it is presented; and the choice of language is therefore a choice of
>> audience.
>>
>> On the issue of financial barriers, it is an ongoing source of
>> embarrassment and bemusement to myself and many of my contemporaries that
>> the journals and publishers we have been led to believe are most highly
>> esteemed by our institutional elders (in whose hands our careers lie) tend
>> to be those which most of our desired audience cannot access. One cannot but
>> suppose that, as a result, most of the discourse that there is on
>> indological subjects occurs in contexts systematically ignorant of certain
>> recent discoveries in indology.
>>
>> The UK Arts and Humanities Research Council has been funding a higher and
>> higher fraction of British indological research in recent years. My
>> perception is that the AHRC are increasingly concerned to ensure that the
>> projects they fund have outputs accessible beyond the university sector.
>> Perhaps, then, pretty soon, projects whose principal written outputs are not
>> to be made freely available online will simply not be publicly funded.
>>
>> Simon Brodbeck
>> Cardiff University
>>
>

-- 
Veeranarayana N.K. Pandurangi
Head, Dept of Darshanas,
Yoganandacharya Bhavan,
Jagadguru Ramanandacharya Rajasthan Samskrita University, Madau, post
Bhankrota, Jaipur, 302026.