This is a mandākrānta verse from the introduction of Dhanapāla’s Tilakamañjarī, which I am reading with a few colleagues, in praise of King Bhōja of Dhārā: Blessed are those trees that drop heaps of flowers from their branches in worship upon those liṅgas, the stumps, which are bathed every morning by drops of water from…
Continue ReadingThe last post was about a particular kind of pattern-poem in which the same sequence of syllables could be traced out by two distinct movements through the verse: the standard one, which moves from left to right across the eight syllables of a line, then down to first syllable of the next line, and so…
Continue ReadingA section of the second chapter of Śrīvijaya’s Way of the Poet-King (Kavirājamārgaṁ) discusses citrakāvya, “pattern-poetry,” and in preparation for reading it, I have started to give myself a crash course in citrakāvya. The first topic is what is usually called gaticitra, wherein a poem is generated by particular movement (gati-) through a particular matrix of syllables. Typically the…
Continue ReadingI know from Jean-Luc Chevillard that a Tamil text on meter, called the Yāpparuṅkalakkārikai, has a commentary (virutti) by one Kuṇacākarar that mentions a “book on Kannada meter.” He referred me to Ulrike Niklas’ edition and translation of the Yāpparuṅkalakkārikai and its commentary (Pondicherry 1993). Kuṇacākarar there discusses the similarities between the work he is commenting on,…
Continue Readingकिं त्वनुष्ठाननित्यत्वं स्वातन्त्र्यमपकर्षति ।संकटा ह्याहिताग्नीनां प्रत्यवायैर्गृहस्थता ॥ But it’s the constant pull of obligationsthat carries off their freedom.For those who keep the sacred fireeven domestic life is fraughtwith the danger of failing in one’s duty. From the beginning of Bhavabhūti’s Rāma’s Last Act (Uttararāmacaritam), echoing an observation made in the course of the deontic logic…
Continue ReadingSince I recently learned that Google’s Cloud Vision API is capable of recognizing text in Sanskrit in the Dēvanāgarī script, I have been excited to see what the possibilities are. Earlier this month Arun posted a comparison of Google OCR and Sanskrit OCR for Sanskrit text, and it looks like Google OCR isn’t bad. I…
Continue ReadingMartin Straube’s excellent article (“Dharmakīrti als Dichter,” pp. 471–511 in Pāsādikadānaṃ: Festschrift für Bhikkhu Pāsādika, ed. Mitsuyo Demoto, Martin Straube, Michael Hahn, Jayandra Soni, and Roland Steiner) gathers the available evidence for Dharmakīrti’s literary, as opposed to strictly philosophical, output. It begins with a passage in Ānandavardhana’s Dhvanyālōka which, quite unusually for Sanskrit literary criticism,…
Continue ReadingToday’s prātaraśanaprayōgaḥ (that is, ‘breakfast experiment,’ a phrase that has apparently been trademarked by Mark Liberman at Language Log): how many verses in the Sattasaī, the famous anthology of Prakrit poetry, are put into the mouths of male speakers, and how many are put into the mouths of female speakers? Although some verses give us…
Continue ReadingI have been looking for a relatively easy way to create and visualize dependency parses for Sanskrit, and obviously the Annodoc setup (which uses the brat annotation system) is a great place to start. Annodoc is basically a Jekyll template that allows you to write parses as markdown files, using conventions like Universal Dependencies, which…
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