Dear David,
If what you are suggesting is that because Rāma is supposed to have lived in Tretā, that implies that the language can be older, the argument doesn't work. The yuga system only appears in India around the beginning of the common era. In addition, the placement of Rāma in Tretā appears only once in Vālmīki, and that is in the second part of the Uttarakāṇda, which is late. The Uttara, of course, is the one just published. Later versions of the Rāmāyaṇa -as well as some Purāṇas- reinforce that placement, but it is all a later development, after the Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa.
Unless I misunderstood you.
Luis
_____
On 11/19/2016 8:55 PM, David and Nancy Reigle wrote:
Colorado, U.S.A.David ReigleBest regards,Dear Dipak,What about the standard Indian tradition that Rāma lived in the Tretā age? In that case, no ārṣaprayoga would be required to explain the archaic language.
On Sat, Nov 19, 2016 at 9:22 PM, Dipak Bhattacharya <dipak.d2004@gmail.com> wrote:
Why not a pure solecism as Indian authorities think? These are known in Indian tradition as ¡rÀaprayoga, irregular use by the seers?
Best
DB
On Sun, Nov 20, 2016 at 6:02 AM, Harry Spier <hspier.muktabodha@gmail.com> wrote:
Note also what Oberlies, "A Grammar of Epic Sanskrit" says about "irregularities" in epic sanskrit in his introduction.."The language of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana may certainly be called Sanskrit when compared with contemporary Middle Indo-Aryan but it is a Sanskrit which continually deviates from the norms codified by Panini. This is not because such 'aberrant' forms were pre-Paninian. For the Epics (and in fact only the Mahabharata) know only a handful - moreover rather doubtful - Vedisms. ......Almost always it is metrical exigencies which forced the poets to use a form not sanctioned by traditional grammar....the "irregularities' are very often found at a metrically relevena position of the stanza: "Metre surpasses grammar".
Thanks,Harry Spier
On Sat, Nov 19, 2016 at 7:13 PM, Jan E.M. Houben <jemhouben@gmail.com> wrote:
Dear David,"agamas has here retained its augment": you apparently postulate a development in the language here, but one which does not match the available evidence.See mainly Karl Hoffmann Der Injunktiv im Veda 1967, but also, offering alternative analyses of partly the same phrases, Jan Gonda Aspectual function of the Rgvedic present and aorist.Another point is that in order to translate the Ramayana a choice has to be made which edition to take as starting point: even for mere practical reasons the Baroda critical edition is the obvious candidate to be selected.It was the editorial choice of the editors G.H. Bhatt et al. of this critical edition to give preference systematically to the recension where most grammatical and metrical "irregularities" are found, i.e., the Southern recension.The idea is that the manuscripts of the Northern recension underwent "polishing" in a much higher degree.Under this "polishing-theory" one should then expect that specific "irregularities" in the text are identical and found in a large number of manuscripts that supposedly represent the older, pre-polishing stage, but this is precisely what is not the case:see Leendert van Daalen's 1980 study Valmiki's Sanskrit: at present his study, not without problems of its own, could be redone with more advanced statistical means and a fresh study of the evidence. On the basis of a study of books II-IV van Daalen concludes that the Poet Valmiki wrote mostly "correct" classical Sanskrit -- this does not necessarily always correspond to "Paninian" sanskrit, and the poor definition of van Daalen's "irregularities" is one of the weaknesses in his study, which could however be "repaired" to some extent by referring to other forms of acceptable yet not strictly Paninian sanskrit (cf. Narayana Bhatta's Apaniniyapramanata and www.academia.edu/28515426). E.W. Hopkins 1901 was even more sceptical, or, for those accepting his line of argument (cf. Madeleine Biardeau's arguments *against* critical editions for the epics), more realistic, than van Daalen: "There can be no plausible original reconstructed and practically there was from the time of, let us say, the first repetition of the text no original Ramayana" (quoted in van Daalen's study, p. 6).Jan Houben
Jan E.M. HOUBEN
Directeur d’Études
Sources et histoire de la tradition sanskrite
École Pratique des Hautes Études
Sciences historiques et philologiques
54, rue Saint-Jacques
CS 20525 – 75005 Paris
johannes.houben@ephe.sorbonne.
fr https://ephe-sorbonne.academia
.edu/JanEMHouben
On 19 November 2016 at 19:55, David and Nancy Reigle <dnreigle@gmail.com> wrote:
Dear Bob and all,
Ever since I was introduced to what tradition regards as the first śloka ever written, Vālmīki’s first śloka now preserved at Rāmāyaṇa 1.2.14, I have had a question about it. Probably you or others have long ago answered it. Sorry for my ignorance of the relevant material on this verse.
mā niṣāda pratiṣṭhāṃ tvam agamaḥ śāśvatīḥ samāḥ |
yat krauñca-mithunād ekam avadhīḥ kāma-mohitam || 1.2.14 ||
“Since, Niṣāda, you killed one of this pair of krauñcas, distracted at the height of passion, you shall not live for very long.” (trans. Robert P. Goldman, 1984)
What first struck me is that both of the verbs in this verse, agamas and avadhīs, are aorists. Moreover, agamas has here retained its augment, although used with mā. My understanding is that, since aorists largely fell out of use after the Vedic period, they are not at all common in the Rāmāyaṇa. So here is my question. Assuming that this is in fact Vālmīki’s first śloka, would this point to an original Rāmāyaṇa that is considerably older than the Rāmāyaṇa we now have? Could the Rāmāyaṇa as now extant have been reworked, updated in language so to speak, from an earlier original? For example, F. E. Pargiter in his detailed study, The Purāna Text of the Dynasties of the Kali Age (1913), found considerable evidence that in the oldest purāṇas (Vāyu, Brahmāṇḍa, Matsya) the verses had been Sanskritized from an earlier literary Prakrit, and that these Sanskrit verses had in turn been condensed and rewritten directly in Sanskrit in some other purāṇas (Viṣṇu, Bhāgavata).
Best regards,
David Reigle
Colorado, U.S.A.
On Tue, Nov 15, 2016 at 1:50 PM, Robert Goldman <rpg@berkeley.edu> wrote:
Dear Colleagues,
On behalf of all the scholars who have been involved with the decades-long project to translate and annotate the critical edition of the Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa, Dr. Sally Sutherland Goldman and I are happy to announce the publication of the seventh and final volume of the work.
The Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki: An Epic of Ancient India, Volume VII: Uttarakāṇḍa
Introduction, Translation, and Annotation by Robert P. Goldman & Sally J. Sutherland GoldmanHardcover | December 2016 | $175.00 | £129.95 | ISBN: 9780691168845
1544 pp. | 6 x 9 | 1 color illus. 1 line illus. 5 tables.
Dr. R. P. Goldman
Catherine and William L. Magistretti Distinguished Professor in South and Southeast Asian Studies
Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies MC # 2540
The University of California at Berkeley
Berkeley, CA 94720-2540
Tel: 510-642-4089
Fax: 510-642-2409
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