The gāthā is not a syllable-counting meter. It can vary from 30 to 56 syllables. But scribes still counted (and presumably charged) by the syllable. So one would like to have a good way of converting between a the number of verses in a text and the number of syllables represented by those verses. If…
Continue ReadingAs I am learning more about Tamil meter, I have been very interested in Kevin Ryan’s suggestion (Phonology 34.3 [2017]: 581–613) that the metrical units of Tamil verse consist of a strong position and a weak position which are subject to weight-mapping of different strictness. The Tamil metrical tradition doesn’t distinguish between a strong and…
Continue ReadingThe fifth combinatorial technique that Hēmacandra describes is called saṅkhyā, which simply means “number”: it gives the number of possible combinations of light and heavy syllables for a verse of k positions. This is the simplest of all of the techniques. For samavr̥tta meters, which have an equivalent number of positions in each line, the…
Continue ReadingWe’ve seen one example of “spreading out” metrical patterns according to a certain rule in order to determine the number of possible patterns that can be made with k syllablic positions. There is a different procedure for determining the number of patterns, among the total, that contain a given number of light or heavy syllables….
Continue ReadingWe have gone over the first two of six standard combinatorial techniques, prastāraḥ or “spreading out,” and naṣṭaḥ or “lost.” The third technique was developed to answer the following question. Suppose the sequence of light and heavy syllables in a given combination has been indicated (uddiṣṭaḥ). How can we find out the serial number of…
Continue ReadingWe saw that one way to determine all of the possible combinations of n items taken k at a time is to list them according to a certain procedure, called prastāraḥ or “spreading out.” This procedure assigns a serial number to each of the possible combinations. Now supposing you don’t want to do the entire…
Continue ReadingThere were “six combinatorial methods” (ṣaṭ pratyayāḥ, lit. ‘six notions’) that South Asian thinkers applied to metrical forms (as well as other combinatorial problems), and Hēmacandra’s discussion of them, in the seventh chapter of his Chandōnuśāsanam, was nicely explained by Ludwig Alsdorf (“Die Pratyayas: Ein Beitrag zur indischen Mathematik” in Zeitschrift für Indologie und Iranistik…
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 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,…
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