[INDOLOGY] Iraka?

Martin Gansten martin.gansten at pbhome.se
Mon Feb 8 07:28:49 UTC 2016


Thank you, Nityanand. Yes, the long ī is required by the metre (upajāti: 
/khābdhīrakebhyaḥ smarasiṃhaśāstrāt/). I hadn't considered /īra /'wind'. 
To represent 0, I suppose it would have to be equated somehow with 
'sky', which seems unlikely. But could 'wind' be equated with 
'direction' (of the compass)? It is in some languages, but I've never 
come across it in Sanskrit. If it were, it could mean 10. But perhaps 
that's wishful thinking.

Martin


Den 2016-02-08 kl. 05:19, skrev Nityanand Misra:
>
>
> On 7 February 2016 at 15:45, Martin Gansten <martin.gansten at pbhome.se 
> <mailto: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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