[INDOLOGY] Iraka?

[Nityanand Misra]

On 7 February 2016 at 15:45, Martin Gansten <martin.gansten at pbhome.se>
wrote:

> In the astrological work *Tājikamuktāvali *by Tuka (1.41) there is a
> compound *khābdhīrakebhyaḥ *which, from the context, has to mean 'from
> forty and ten, [respectively]'. This is supported by the explicatory
> numerals inserted by several mss: *khābdhī 40 rakebhyaḥ 10*, etc; but I
> haven't found anything like *iraka/īraka* in any dictionary or list of *bhūtasaṃkhyā
> *numerals. (Some mss emend to *-īkhakebhyaḥ*, which doesn't really help.)
> If anyone has come across this way of expressing the value 10 elsewhere,
> I'd be grateful for a reference, and even more so for an explanation of the
> word.
>
>
Is the five-syllable word part of a verse, e.g. begins with the 13th
syllable of a śārdūlavikrīḍita? Wondering if there is a possibility of it
being *khābdhikhakebhyaḥ*, with the short vowel: Is the emendation
with *-i**khakebhyaḥ
*by any chance? If so then the reading *khābdh**ikhakebhyaḥ *makes perfect
sense as *ka* in Sanskrit means Brahman, standing for the number one. Then
*kha-ka* would mean zero-one or the number ten*. *

The forms *khābdh**īrakebhyaḥ / **khābdh**īkhakebhyaḥ *with the long
vowels still need an explanation. With *khābdh**īrakebhyaḥ, *one option is
to assume *ira/īra* as somehow standing for zero, but this is also
problematic as *īra *means the wind: *īrayati iti **īraḥ*.


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