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 ReadingWhat was the intellectual formation of such a great textual scholar as A. N. Upadhye? B. K. Khadabadi says in his short monograph on Upadhye: From Dr. P. L. Vaidya he received a sense of the importance of, and an interest in, Prakrit literature and language, which had largely been created and developed by Jain…
Continue ReadingIn preparing to read Iḷaṅkō Aṭikaḷ’s Cilappatikāram next semester, I wanted to find an easy solution for typing Tamil on Ubuntu. By ‘easy,’ I mean that I did not want to have an entirely new keyboard configuration (I am only getting used to the Kannada configuration now…). It turns out that there weren’t keyboards that…
Continue ReadingContinuing with the text that I introduced earlier, here are verses 2 and 3. As with all of the verses of Dhanapāla’s hymn to Mahāvīra, they contain an apparent contradiction that is resolved by reading the Prakrit text differently. How is it that, despite having destroyed the four passions, you do not destroy the passions?…
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 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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