[INDOLOGY] Brahmin?

[Jarrod Whitaker]

Dear Colleagues:
When does the word "B/brahmin" ("priest, priestly class") with a final 
"-in" begin to be used/appear? I have always assumed that it appeared 
with the colonial encounter and thus it was a Anglocized (perhaps 
Franco-cized?) way of representing the final short schwa sound of 
"brahman". Does it have an older history in Arabic/Mughal writing? It 
surely is not a final Sanskrit "-in" stem (I have never heard of a 
Brahmii priest), but perhaps it has a regional/dialect use somewhere in 
India...

Silly question but frustrating nonetheless when trying to unpack the 
complex use of the term brahman and its various meanings to students and 
the fact that textbooks are not uniform in how they represent the term 
and its derivatives (B/braahmaan.a [and more rarely Braahman. with final 
retroflex "n," which is curious in and of itself], B/brahman, or, of 
course our current Brahmin....[throw into the mix lower case, sometimes 
italicized brahman from Upanishads and god Brahmaa and students think 
you are just messing with them]).

Cheers
JW

Jarrod Whitaker, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, South Asian Religions
Zachary T. Smith Faculty Fellow
Graduate Program Director

Wake Forest University
Department of Religion
P.O. Box 7212
Winston-Salem, NC  27109
whitakjl at wfu.edu
p 336.758.4162