[INDOLOGY] regarding Malhotra's plaguerism

Mon Jul 20 19:36:19 UTC 2015

Dear George,

I remember discussing iti with you 30 or more years ago.  Under your
guidance I was reading Emeneau, Kuiper, Hans Hock, et al., back then,
regarding the 'genesis of a linguistic area' in South Asia.  As far as I
can remember, the discussion of the influence of the Dravidian quotative
construction on the early Indo-Aryan quotative construction was quite
clear.  In early Avestan the quotative particle uiti preceded the
quotation, whereas already in the RV iti mostly followed the quotation, as
in Dravidian.  I remember that in Hittite a quotative particle often [or
perhaps always?] preceded the quotation.  I can't remember the evidence
from Homeric Greek and I can't take the time right now to look it up.  Can
a list member tell us about this without much effort?  Perhaps Hans Hock?

In any case, many years later I have argued that iti in the RV had another,
non-quotative function.  It meant "yes" both in initial position and in
final position, as in RV 10.119.

I am happy to see that in their recently published RV translation Jamison
and Brereton have embraced my interpretation.

I hope that this is of use.

George Thompson

On Mon, Jul 20, 2015 at 3:10 PM, George Thompson <gthomgt at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Mon, Jul 20, 2015 at 1:27 PM, George Hart <glhart at berkeley.edu> wrote:
>
>> (This is rather far afield of Malhotra, who is not one of my favorite
>> people — he maligned me in his book “Breaking India,” little aware that I
>> was treasurer of a Hindu temple for 6 years and have supported Hindu
>> temples in the Bay Area for years. I and my students have been translating
>> Hindu classics with great reverence ever since I became a professor. I
>> think he called me an enemy of Hinduism or something like that. With
>> friends like Malhotra, does Hinduism need enemies?)
>>
>> The use of *iti* in Sanskrit is quite fascinating. As is well-known, a
>> parallel construction exists in the Dravidian languages — various forms of
>> eṉ (“say”) in Tamil and counterparts in other languages. What makes the
>> Dravidian usage interesting is that the word used like “iti” occurs in many
>> forms — adverb (eṉṟu), infinitive (eṉa), adjective (eṉṉum),
>> verbal/participial noun (eṉpatu), participial noun (eṉpavaṉ etc.), and
>> perhaps a few others that have not occurred to me. It would seem that the
>> use of direct speech followed by a quotative word (with nothing except
>> intonation, which cannot be indicated by writing, to mark the beginning of
>> the speech) was an areal feature of some or all non-IE South Asian
>> languages 3500 years ago. We don’t know whether Sanskrit borrowed the usage
>> from Dravidian or some other family that is extinct, but it is clear that
>> such syntactical features can enter one language from another when speakers
>> learn a new language and transfer those features into the new language.
>> Another example — deprecated, obviously — is the use of vā in spoken
>> Sanskrit for interrogative sentences (āgacchati vā bhavān — are you
>> coming?). This is a clear transference of Dravidian -ā, interrogative
>> marker (nīṅka varrīṅkaḷā). This usage also comes into English:
>> "comfortable-ā," “are you comfortable?”
>>
>> The syntactic parallels between Dravidian and Sanskrit are extensive and
>> include almost exact parallels to api and eva. It is much easier to
>> translate a Sanskrit stanza into Tamil than into English, even though Tamil
>> is not related to Sanskrit and English is. Many writers in Sanskrit have
>> been native Dravidian speakers.  To write good Sanskrit, such people need
>> to learn the morphology, but they already know much of the syntax. Nor do
>> they have much trouble with vocabulary. Even in Tamil, borrowings of
>> Sanskrit words are plentiful (though they are not used much in the formal
>> language).  It’s also worth pointing out that Sanskrit compounds ape almost
>> exactly the syntax of sentences in Dravidian. George Hart
>>
>>
>> On Jul 19, 2015, at 10:06 PM, Luis Gonzalez-Reimann <reimann at berkeley.edu>
>> wrote:
>>
>>  Dominik, the justification on those grounds would go something like this.
>>
>> Malhotra defends "tradition," which is embodied in Sanskrit texts.
>> Therefore, he is not bound by any modern academic conventions because he
>> follows the traditional system, the one expressed in Sanskrit. And if “Sanskrit
>> does not even have quotation marks in its character set,” why would he,
>> a defender of the "tradition," use them.
>>
>> The use of *iti* has already been mentioned, so the whole justification
>> is, of course, *null and void*, even from a 'traditional' point of view.
>>
>> Luis
>> _____
>>
>>
>> On 7/19/2015 9:26 AM, Dominik Wujastyk wrote:
>>
>>  I entirely fail to understand the defence of plagiarism on the grounds
>> that Sanskrit has no quotation marks.  Malhotra's books are written in
>> English.
>>
>>  Dominik Wujastyk
>>
>>  
>>
>>
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