Dear Dominik,

Others may provide a more informed account — like you, this is not something I’ve given much thought to — but a quick look at the Digital Corpus of Sanskrit, while still only representing a limited albeit important range of Sanskrit literature, lists nearly 500 instances for kośa, starting with Ṛg Veda (41 occurrences), Atharvaveda (13 occurrences), Chāndogyopaniṣad (3 occurrences), Aṣṭādhyāyī (Aṣṭādhyāyī, 4, 3, 42.0 kośāḍ ḍhañ ||),  Buddhacarita (4 occurrences), Hitopadeśa (10x), not to mention Abhidharmakośa, Amarakośa, and so on, but only 4 instances of koṣa (Nighantuśeṣa 1x, Viṣṇupurāṇa 1x, and Āryāsaptaśatī 2x), the nod would seem to overwhelmingly favor kośa. The term can have a range of meanings aside from encyclopedic compendium or lexicon, so many of those instances may reflect a variety of different meanings.

best,

Dan

On May 11, 2020, at 5:54 PM, Nathan McGovern via INDOLOGY <indology@list.indology.info> wrote:

Dominik, this doesn't really answer your question, but in Thai (which admittedly does often spell Sanskrit words in non-standard ways, especially in pre-modern texts) the spelling โกษ (koṣa), is quite common, perhaps even preferred, especially in the title โกษาธิบดี (koṣādhipati), which was the official in change of the Phra Khlang, or treasury, in Ayutthaya.

Nathan McGovern

University of Wisconsin-Whitewater

On 5/11/2020 4:38 PM, Dominik Wujastyk via INDOLOGY wrote:

I always thought the first, with ś, was correct, and the second was just an orthographic error.  Then I saw "-koṣa" on the title page of Ingalls's Subhāṣitaratnakoṣa.  He must have thought about this.

So which is "right" and why?

Best,

Dominik

PS I haven't even done elementary due diligence on this question, beyond MW.

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