Dear Roland,

Your observation that many of these masculine usages for padma come from Kashmir is interesting. I have no idea of how gender works in Kashmiri and particularly in old Kashmiri. Just looking at Hindi, the three gendered words of Sanskrit get redistributed to two genders. While Marathi has three genders like Sanskrit, the genders of words often change in Marathi. Words like svapna and vighna that are masculine in Sanskrit become neuter in Marathi. The Marathi users of Sanskrit will instinctively use these words in neuter, till they are corrected by a learned pandit. मेरी आत्मा of Hindi has always shocked me as a Marathi speaker.

Madhav

Madhav M. Deshpande

Professor Emeritus, Sanskrit and Linguistics

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA

Senior Fellow, Oxford Center for Hindu Studies

[Residence: Campbell, California, USA]

On Sun, Apr 5, 2020 at 7:24 AM Roland Steiner <steiner@staff.uni-marburg.de> wrote:

Dear Madhav,

> The norm in classical literature is to use *padma *in neuter gender, like
> other words for the lotus.

I am aware of this, but there is also evidence in non-epic and non-puranic works, for example

Kṣemendra's Darpadalana (7.30):

°śoṇaprabhārdrāv iva pādapadmau

Or, Somadeva's Kathāsaritsāgara (5.2.229):

ubhau kalaśapadmau ca śuśubhate sitāruṇau

Or, Mokṣopāya 5.65.29 (= "Yogavāsiṣṭha")

padmāv iva jaloddhṛtau

Perhaps it is no coincidence that these examples all come from texts that originated in Kashmir.

With best regards,
Roland