[INDOLOGY] dhīmahi

[Madhav Deshpande]

Thanks everyone for these comments and accessing some old messages. Best
wishes,

Madhav M. Deshpande
Professor Emeritus, Sanskrit and Linguistics
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA
Senior Fellow, Oxford Center for Hindu Studies
Adjunct Professor, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore, India

[Residence: Campbell, California, USA]


On Mon, Jul 19, 2021 at 11:01 AM Harry Spier <vasishtha.spier at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi Madhav,
> 1) The search function for the list appears to only work for the most
> recent few months.
>
> 2) I asked this question to the list in 1999 and it also came up in some
> other discussions about Gayatri mantras later on (2019 )
> The replies I got onlist and offlist were:
> a) As for Whitney, I am not sure when such a shift in the understanding
> of dhīmahi begins.  I have a suspicion that even in the old famous
> Gāyatrī:  bhargo devasya dhīmahi, dhiyo yo naḥ pracodayāt, the poet is
> playing with the relationship between the verb dhīmahi and the subsequent
> foot: dhiyo yo naḥ pracodayāt, and hence the understanding of dhīmahi as
> alternatively being derived from dhī may be quite old.  I was struck more
> by the almost sustained shift to the use of dative with dhīmahi and
> vidmahe, and have been thinking about what might have prompted this shift,
> in spite of the fact that much of the later formulaic use is in imitation
> of the old famous Gāyatrī mantra that uses the accusative.
>
> b) Hoffman treats this particular form in his AufsAtze sur Indoiranistic,
> bd 2,
> 1976, pp.483-485
>
> c) As for dhImahi. It is indeed *optative,* not of dhI but of dhA, see
> again K.Hoffmann’s Aufsätze somewhere (via index). Again both Witzel-Gotō
> and Jamison-Brereton recent translations have it right: “we wish to place”
> (no ‘meditation' here, that is a later interpretation).
>
> d) dhīmahi was an aorist optative (or, less probable, injunctive) in the
> RV: 'may we obtain / make our own'. On the one hand, these forms become
> rarer and rarer already in Vedic texts, but may still have been understood
> by some (as we still understand forms such as 'maketh', but do not use
> them). On the other hand, dhīmahi cannot actually be a present form: it
> would have to be dhīmahe. As of now I do not know when and how the
> reinterpretation occurred first; the texts I've surveyed so far
> are generally silent on the individual words of the mantra. However, the
> parallelism with vidmahe in the modified Gāyatrīs may point to a more
> "cognitive" interpretation.
>
> e)  I've just checked Werba's Verba Indoarica for dhImahi (under dhA)
> page 298 and he has this as an aorist optative.
>
> Harry Spier
>
>
> On Mon, Jul 19, 2021 at 1:12 PM Madhav Deshpande via INDOLOGY <
> indology at list.indology.info> wrote:
>
>> Some time ago, we had a discussion on the syntax of dhīmahi. But when I
>> search the archives, nothing shows up. Can someone help me?
>>
>> Madhav M. Deshpande
>> Professor Emeritus, Sanskrit and Linguistics
>> University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA
>> Senior Fellow, Oxford Center for Hindu Studies
>> Adjunct Professor, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore,
>> India
>>
>> [Residence: Campbell, California, USA]
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> INDOLOGY mailing list
>> INDOLOGY at list.indology.info
>> https://list.indology.info/mailman/listinfo/indology
>>
>
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