I cannot speak Gujarati but I can use Google translate. All previous words are obtained in this way. I already wrote about Serbian word MED (honey) which is identical in many languages. I also wrote about many words still identical between Serbian and Sanskrit. All these things can be easily verified by everyone.

But, it seems you have some problem. For some reason you do not like my comments, you do not want not only to read them, you are asking BO owners to block them. My comments are about the fact that Aryans were ancient Serbs and there are many supporting evidence, especially genetics, language and toponyms. Couple days ago I quoted several dozens of Serbian toponyms recorded in old British Empire maps of Hindustan. Anyone may or may not agree with this but it seems you have a real problem with this and simply you cannot hide your frustration.

Santosh, I have no problems if you bash Sanskrit at all. Once I myself trashed Sanskrit literature and said that Urdu literature was superior, irking even the anti-Hindutva liberal guru Slapstik.

I agree that those semantics probably came later. A particularly famous example somewhat in this direction is the opening shloka of raghuvaMsha, where pArvatI-parameshvarau are called “vAg-arthav-iva-sampRktau”, roughly “as inseparable as word (vAk) and meaning (arthaH)”. vAk is feminine, arthaH masculine. This may be a bit less banal than it sounds, since this involves a belief that a meaning/thought cannot exist with a word to express it. At some point I was happy with this because it agreed with the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis I had heard of long back in my youth, but later I read Pinker that it was all bullshit. In any case, it is probably a sort of tAntric idea about the shiva-shakti duality (of a kind also present in Tibetan Buddhism with genders reversed), uncannily reminiscent of the first shloka of saundarya-laharI, but that may be taking us too far and let me not bore further.

froginthewell,

I find that there was a small error in my earlier post: the weak-stem form of Sanskrit ‘creeper’ word is latA, not lata. So I have gotten rid of that.

Then, I think I can understand what you say in the second paragraph (or not ultimately lol). I was able to find out that vRkSalatA as a compound word does not exist in Monier Williams dictionary and Apte dictionary so my considering that as if it existed was probably incorrect. I now understand that you might have brought vRkSaH and latA together just for the purpose of illustration of a traditional explanation of the masculine gender of vRkSaH. In my view though, that kind of an explanation seems quite like an afterthought on the part of the Sanskrit folks and it is likely that they simply inherited that word from language stages earlier than Sanskrit, with the masculine gender that it has. Slapstik is requested to correct any mistakes of understanding here.

(Another thing: I also want to say a bit of sorry for Sanskrit bashing and want to correct it with a bit of Dravidian bashing (but am not really sorry for the bashing of anything be it Sanskrit or Dravidian lol; it’s not like I’m doing any ultra-controversial thing either; just quipping about some weird features of languages). Can we talk about the absolute barbarity of Proto-Dravidian speakers who treated female humans and non-humans the same as against male humans in verbal conjugation by having the same suffixes for female humans and non-humans? (This continues to this day with slight modifications and without, in many Dravidian languages lol — Telugu included — but it is thankfully not present in South Dravidian-I languages like Tamil, Kannada, Tulu, etc. which at some point separated female humans and non-humans from each other in language by introducing a new set of suffixes to use for female humans resulting in three sets of suffixes- one for male humans, one for female humans and one for non-humans, in this subgroup.) Thankfully in some languages like Telugu and hopefully in many other Dravidian languages retaining this Proto-Dravidian feature, the barbarity is, at least now and not any later, only in the language and not in the minds of the people.)

In which case, my writing yaMtra was only accidentally correct 🙂

I was not thinking of vRkShalatA as a single word (I was sloppy); just pointing to the semantic interpretation some give, namely that the latA is supported by the vRkShaH, making vRkShaH the “bhartA” (aside: when the nice smiling Samskrita Bharati guy introduces “eShA mama bhAryA”, I am tempted to ask back “uta bhartrI” :P). But the connotation isn’t there in all usages; while a God can be a “kalpa-taruH” or “kalpa-vRkShaH”, a Goddess is a “kalpa-latikA”, doesn’t mean the latter is supported by the former at all.

Don’t know the (pre-)Indo-European thing, hopefully Slapstik-gAru will help us out.

Yes froginthewell, it is majorly problematic from the point of view of the orthography of Telugu which typically represents all nasals in nasal-consonant clusters with the anusvara, so yantraM is not true to Telugu orthography but phonetically is very correct of course. Sanskrit might be allowing both types of representations (or not, in which case consonant-cluster-ligature-based writing seems to be the correct one that should be used; like yantra and not yaMtra for Sanskrit).

Your explanations are interesting regarding the incidence of grammatical gender for things in all these Indo-European, apparently Semitic, etc. languages lol. Maybe this is a good hypothesis that explains the origin of this phenomenon in Pre-Indo-European? Is this a thing already in Indo-European linguistics? I still cannot believe anyone can do that (attaching gender to things that is) as a Telugu person, so that’s why my implicit and perhaps biased assumption that some kind of aliens might have introduced this abomination to Pre-Proto-Indo-Europeans who later on transmitted the practice to continue into Proto-Indo-European and early Indo-European languages (lol).

I did not understand the vRkSalatA compound example you have given. I’m not very familiar with Sanskrit grammar, that’s why. I see that the stem vRkSa- only takes masculine terminations, the stem lata- only takes feminine terminations, but when vRkSa- becomes the first part of the compound, it loses gender and the gender of the compound depends on the terminations of the second part, so I expect vRkSalatA to have feminine gender since the second stem lata- took a feminine termination. Is the actual word of any other gender? I’m also not sure if my impression of Sanskrit compounding is correct or not.

Thanks a lot for the explanations.

It seems to me both “nt” and “Mt” are fine here. I don’t know about “yantrA” either; haven’t looked at those sorts of rules, but as I said I do see a problem with yantrI being the feminine of yantA, so controller as opposed to something which is controlled.

Regarding “some words for clear non-human things which are stupidly grammatically masculine in Sanskrit”, I think Sanskrit is making a sort of “conscious choice”, and it isn’t just for non-human things. While most Sanskrit words for wife are feminine, there is the masculine dArAH (usually used as plural), and the neutral kalatraM. Sometimes people do bring in “semantic interpretations” to such assignments: a tiger in hitopadesha would refer to his wife as “dArAH” because tigresses have masculine qualities, and then there is that “sexist” vRkSha-latA combo.

Oh wow froginthewell, I always make mistakes when transliterating phonetic -nt- sequences lol. Too deeply internalised in me that phonetic cluster so I always have difficulty having to consciously think of it in terms of the language orthography and transliterate correctly. So all my yantr- things should actually be yaMtr- like in your comment.

The feminine Telugu nativisation created for this ‘machine’ source word of Sanskrit can be directly yaMtra if a Sanskrit original grammatical feminine noun exists like yaMtrA (or is it yantrA in Sanskrit?) with the shortening of the final vowel. But spoken Telugu can create a yaMtrurAlu as you suggested as a parallel of yaMtruDu but both these are very difficult things to do in the minds of Telugu people. [yaMtragatte is also an option as it is like maMtragatte (maMtragatte is an actual word in at least my Telugu lexicon and means ‘a woman who does magic (black probably, as it is generally used in negative sense, in the sense of a witch perhaps)’- parallel of maMtragADu, ‘magician (male) (both white and black)’; another word for ‘witch’ is mAMtrikurAlu)) but it does not create a meaning of ‘a machine who is a woman’ but ‘a woman who deals with machines’.]

Actually, both yaMtruDu and yaMtrurAlu are difficult to create in the minds of Telugu people (as I mentioned earlier too) who face a bit of difficulty getting their minds around the concept that a non-human thing like a ‘machine’ can even take the masculine suffix at all. The yaMtruDu construction was once and only once heard in the Telugu country- in that song from the Robot movie. Modern Spoken Telugu sometimes does perhaps wrap its head around the concept and succeeds to some extent in making a masculine out of a non-human: we see examples like pilligADu, ‘cat-guy’ which to me seems like ‘a cat who is a guy’ in some strange way though there is the other, probably more likely possibility of ‘a guy who is like a cat’/’a guy who handles cats’; this second option then would be along the lines of the quite productive maMcivADu, ‘good guy’, maMcidi, ‘good girl’/’good thing’, ceDDavADu, ‘bad guy’, ceDDadi, ‘bad girl’/’bad thing’ type constructions, which may after all apply to the pilligADu-type usages too and I might be very wrong. In any case, imagining something which is so ridiculously clearly a thing as a male human and to attach masculine suffixes to that is quite difficult for Telugu minds. It all becomes even more clear when you realise that some words for clear non-human things which are stupidly grammatically masculine in Sanskrit are nativised as their proper neuter gendered words in Telugu lol (Example: vRkSa, ‘tree’ is grammatically masculine in Sanskrit (OMG!) while it is vRkSaM in Telugu as it should be, not any abomination like vRkSuDu lol (unless there is some character in the Sanskrit literature or something named pAtavRkSaH, ‘guy who owns a fallen tree (or some Sanskrit samAsa type that works)’ in which case Telugu nativises him as pAtavRkSuDu (but don’t forget that this pAtavRkSa guy is a human male!)).

By the way, I found out that Sanskrit stem yantra- is also a clear neuter. So at least in isolation, that word does not have masculine and feminine forms in Sanskrit also (Sanskrit should thank God for that!). Perhaps when Sanskrit compounds are made, masculine and feminine terminations are made but which feminine termination the good Sanskrit ‘xyz-machine-girl’ word takes, whether it is -yantrA or -yantrI, I don’t know; am requesting the good Slapstik to help us out.

Thanks Santosh. As I told our blog owners . . . you are wickedly smart.

IjipTu yantr-A-lu. Very nice. Pyrimids are similar to the Mount Meru Sri Yantra used in Hindu Tantra. They, when combined with brain sound therapy, have been used for thousands of years for brain and nervous system therapy. This is the traditional understanding and science of [Yantra (machine) + mantra (sound) = Tantra (technology]. I would like to visit the pyramids and observe what happens to the brain and nervous system near them.

Tantra increases Chitta Shuddhi (mental health broadly defined), Buddhi (or intelligence broadly defined) and results in many Siddhis (abilities derived from greater more subtle intelligence and greater control over the brain and nervous system). When I was a kid academics use to regard this as fantasy.

But not any more. Now there is a growing understanding that cognitive abilities are strongly correlated with socio-economic outcomes; especially at the ends of the tails. Neuroscience is learning how to increase cognitive performance through techniques very similar to what was used by ancient civilizations for thousands of years before Christ.

If you get a chance, listen to the Elon Musk interview with my main man Joe Rogan. Elon Musk sounds a lot like Tirumular, Patanjali, or an ancient Sumerian sage, or an ancient Egyptian mage. Elon expresses ancient ideas using the simplest clearest language.

Lol I did not see this message of yours at all when I checked last time.

Telugu is probably easier to understand compared to Tamil for a typical Indo-Aryan speaker or a person familiar with Sanskrit because of the Sanskritised lexis. Tamil just superficially appears to be a “very” different language than Telugu. It is indeed a different language than Telugu and also quite distant to it phylogenetically but the similarities between them are quite high, especially in the domain of grammar. Tamil just has lower amounts of Sanskrit loanwords and the ones it has are thoroughly nativised as Tamil which is not the case with Telugu which does only the most minimum amount of nativisation necessary and tries to keep Sanskrit as Sanskrit-like as possible. So that makes them sound different.

Egyptian pyramids are non-human things and if we imagine them as some kind of machines like you do, then they take neuter endings and are called IjipTu yantra-mu-lu (-lu is the plural suffix) in olden Telugu and in Modern Telugu predominantly called IjipTu yantr-A-lu (due to the simplification of the -amu- into -A-). (But typically, the pyramids of Egypt are simply called IjipTu piramiDlu in Spoken Telugu (without even taking any neuter endings) but apparently ‘pyramids’ are translated in some circles as sUcyagrabhavanaM (I have never heard of this word before) and gOpuraM (this is the word for a structure in the south Indian temple architecture that we are all quite familiar with but it is not exactly a pyramid but a truncated pyramid on top of a cuboid).

And I don’t know the tantra-M (Modern Telugu form descending from olden Telugu tantra-mu) used by Egyptian people to make the pyramids lol.

Fascinating; this sort of “giving gender” is something I wasn’t conscious of, though in retrospect there was that enthiran movie of Rajnikanth that you point out. What is the feminine of yaMtruDu? yaMtrurAlu? I see yaMtrI wouldn’t be appropriate for semantic reasons because it would mean “controller”, being the feminine of “yaMtA”; but are there also syntactic reasons why it wouldn’t be appropriate?

[Edit: I can’t think of a Tamil feminine of Enthiran either, as guess don’t yield euphonic options.]