Debabrata Chakrabarti says, "In fact, each and every place name was anglicized by the the British. For some years now the government is replacing the exact transliteration of place names."

That place names and other Indian words were anglicized by the British is no doubt true, for every language is likely to modify foreign words when it takes it into itself. But it does not follow that in every case they (1) took it into English directly from an Indo-Aryan or Dravidian language rather than from some other, such as Portuguese, Persian, or Arabic, which might already have made its own changes. Nor (2) does it mean that the British or speakers of other languages from outside the Subcontinent came in contact directly with the word as it might be in Sanskrit or some other highly standardized or regulated form of speech. The spelling might represent more closely than some might assume the actual spoken form for a place or concept as they encountered it in speech. Moreover, the forms being insisted upon by the GOI or others may possibly in some cases be recent _changes_ by way of hypercorrection. Individual cases have to be investigated.

Allen

On Saturday, February 22, 2014 11:09 PM, Dr. Debabrata Chakrabarti <dchakra@hotmail.de> wrote:

Dear Sir,

What I assume from the word ''Brahmin' is that it is purely an anglicized form of 'Brahman'. Whether it was Francocized is difficult to determine. 'Bragmen' may arise for listening to North Indian pronunciation/dialects, which emphasizes 'h' , and ‘in’ might arise for pronouncing cerebral ‘n’.

In fact, each and every place name was anglicized by the British. For some years now the government is replacing the exact transliteration of place names. Thus ‘Burdwan’ has become ‘Bardhaman’, etc. – all names ending in ‘pur’ were pronounced ‘pore’ by the British.

Regards

Debabrata Chakrabarti

“This body is like a musical instrument; what you hear depends upon how you play it.” – Anandamayi Ma

“Inside every human being there exists a special heaven, whole and unbroken.” - Paracelsus

Date: Sat, 22 Feb 2014 17:36:37 -0800
From: alanus1216@yahoo.com
To: whitakjl@wfu.edu; indology@list.indology.info
Subject: Re: [INDOLOGY] Brahmin?

No one seems to have addressed Jarrod's query whether the *in comes from Persian or Arabic. Can anyone address what the possible words for brahmana are in these?

Also, Hobson-Jobson s.v. Brahmin cites early Portuguese examples with *en: in the lural Brahmenes (Camoes, 1572) and in the singular Bragmen (Acosta, 1578). See the online H-J at http://tinyurl.com/mmodvxs

Allen

On Thursday, February 20, 2014 3:09 PM, Jarrod Whitaker <whitakjl@wfu.edu> wrote:

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.edu
p 336.758.4162

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