[INDOLOGY] Query

[Ashok Aklujkar]

Dear Patrick,

Historically, long compounds seem to have begun with dvandvas. The relationship of the constituents is uniform and easiest to understand in a dvandva. There is no syntactic complexity. Essentially all one does is to list. In the Artha-śāstra, too, almost all long compounds are dvandvas. In verse texts like the Yājñavalkya Smṛti the only additional constraint is to rearrange the items in such a way as to fit the expected sequence of heavy and light syllables. In the śloka or anuṣṭubh metre such rearranging is not very difficult to achieve. 

Best.

ashok




> On Nov 13, 2015, at 5:36 PM, Patrick Olivelle <jpo at uts.cc.utexas.edu> wrote:
> 
> Dear Ashok:
> 
> Not all, but most of them are Dvandvas. Does it make a difference?
> 
> Patrick
> 
> 
> 
> On Nov 13, 2015, at 6:55 PM, Ashok Aklujkar <ashok.aklujkar at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> Patrick,
>> 
>> Do most of these lines contain dvandva compounds?
>> 
>> ashok
>> 
>> 
>>> On Nov 13, 2015, at 1:02 PM, Patrick Olivelle <jpo at uts.cc.utexas.edu> wrote:
>>> 
>>> In the Yājñavalkya Smṛti I find what I think is an unusual phenomenon—a very large number of verses where a compound breaches the pāda boundaries, and quite a large number of verses where one compound spans an entire line (two pādas). I find 9.5% (192 total) of half-verses in YDh following this pattern.
>>> 
>>> Do you know of any studies done about this phenomenon in other parallel texts in verse? I would like to know whether this is peculiar to Yājñavalkya or a broader phenomenon. I have not found this common in other Dharmaśāstras.
>