Dear Colleagues:
When does the word "B/brahmin" ("priest, priestly class") with a final
"-in" begin to be used/appear? I have always assumed that it appeared
with the colonial encounter and thus it was a Anglocized (perhaps
Franco-cized?) way of representing the final short schwa sound of
"brahman". Does it have an older history in Arabic/Mughal writing? It
surely is not a final Sanskrit "-in" stem (I have never heard of a
Brahmii priest), but perhaps it has a regional/dialect use somewhere in
India...
Silly question but frustrating nonetheless when trying to unpack the
complex use of the term brahman and its various
meanings to students and
the fact that textbooks are not uniform in how they represent the term
and its derivatives (B/braahmaan.a [and more rarely Braahman. with final
retroflex "n," which is curious in and of itself], B/brahman, or, of
course our current Brahmin....[throw into the mix lower case, sometimes
italicized brahman from Upanishads and god Brahmaa and students think
you are just messing with them]).
Cheers
JW
Jarrod Whitaker, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, South Asian Religions
Zachary T. Smith Faculty Fellow
Graduate Program Director
Wake Forest University
Department of Religion
P.O. Box 7212
Winston-Salem, NC 27109
whitakjl@wfu.edup 336.758.4162
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