[INDOLOGY] Examples of very ambiguous devanagari Sanskrit sentences

Harry Spier hspier.muktabodha at gmail.com
Sun Feb 8 20:09:57 UTC 2015


Thanks for these replies.

What will help me the most is some very simple Sanskrit phrases that
show  completely different meanings by how you put breaks in the
transliteration.  I need to show examples of this to non-sanskritist,
non-devanagari knowing typesetters.

The best I could come up with is:

पुष्पमध्येति स्मरति च

which can be:

puṣpam adhyeti smarati ca He turns his mind towards the lotus and remembers
it.

or
puṣpa-madhyeti smarati ca = puṣpa-madhya iti smarati ca = He  remembers  [the
phrase] "the middle of the lotus"

More examples like this would be useful.

Thanks,
Harry Spier

On Sun, Feb 8, 2015 at 1:40 PM, Lubomir Ondracka <ondracka at ff.cuni.cz>
wrote:

> See Yigal Bronner's book on śleṣa (Extreme Poetry: The South Asian
> Movement of Simultaneous Narration, Columbia UP 2010). Nice example using
> two ways of splitting sandhi leading to very different meanings is on page
> 101. You will probably find more examples in this book.
>
> Lubomír Ondračka
>
>
>
> On Sun, 8 Feb 2015 12:15:17 -0500
> Harry Spier <hspier.muktabodha at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Dear list members,
> >
> > I need to show to some non-sanskritists that given a Sanskrit phrase in
> > devanagari, that how you put in the word breaks in the transliteration
> can
> > result in phrases with very different meanings.
> >
> > Can any of the list members give examples of short sentences in simple
> > sanskrit in devanagari that when the words are split  differently in the
> > transliteration give grammatically correct Sanskrit sentences but produce
> > Sanskrit phrases with  "radically" different meanings.
> >
> > For my purposes simple Sanskrit sentences are better than more
> complicated
> > Sanskrit from the literature.  And sentences that give very different
> > meanings depending on how the words are broken up are better than more
> > subtle differences.
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Harry Spier
>


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://list.indology.info/pipermail/indology/attachments/20150208/35f1ec6a/attachment.htm>


More information about the INDOLOGY mailing list