From: N. Ganesan (naa.ganesan@gmail.com)
Date: Sun Jan 09 2011 - 07:11:48 CST
Sanskrit grammars written in European languages in the 19th century
use the term, *virāma *to denote a vowel-killer diacritic to produce
a "dead" consonant - that is the akshara from which the
inherent vowel, /a/ has been deleted.
PiGkalantai nikaNTu in Tamil is the oldest text known from India
to use *viraama* for the "dead" consonant.
The question is: is it the European Sanskritists (working presumably from
Tamil country) who use the term Viraama for vowel-killing diacritic
in Orthography? Or, do we find the term, Virama as a vowel-deleter, in late
centuries
of 2nd millennium Sanskrit grammar or other texts?
Thanks for any info,
N. Ganesan
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Bidyut Baran Chaudhuri <bbcisical@gmail.com>
Date: Sun, Jan 9, 2011 at 4:20 AM
Subject: Re: Origin of the Unicode term virāma to denote vowel-killer
Dear all
Let me inform that the meaning of "VirAma" as understood in Eastern India
like Bengal is pause or rest, while vowel killer is called "hasanta" very
similar to Hindi "Halant".The word "Hal-Varna" means consonant character.
"Hal" also means plow. The sign that is used in both Devanagari and Bangla
alphabet looks like plow used by the peasants in India (drawn by bullocks).
I too believe like Prof Dashpande that the term "VirAma" used to represent
vowel killer sign is pretty modern.
----Bidyut B Chaudhuri
On Sun, Jan 9, 2011 at 1:20 AM, N. Ganesan <naa.ganesan@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 7, 2011 at 10:33 AM, Shriramana Sharma <samjnaa@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > Given that despite being a student [some say scholar ;)] of Sanskrit I
> > am not aware of the native usage of the word virāma for the
> > vowel-killer in Indic scripts -- we only call it (somewhat stiltedly)
> > "ardhākṣaracihna" ("mark of the half-letter") -- I wonder where this
> > actually came to Unicode from. Is it from ISCII?
> >
> > I have been "educating" the non-Unicode-savvy Sanskrit scholars here
> > that the Sanskrit word virāma has been *adapted* by "the Unicode
> > people" to denote the ardhākṣaracihna...
> >
> > Then one day (today?) I find that Burnell himself has used it this way
> > in his 1878 Elements of S Indian Palaeography -- p 45:
> >
> > "... the expression of the absence of the inherent vowel (virāma) ...
> > The puḷḷi or dot above the consonant which serves the purpose of the
> > virāma ..."
> >
> > --
> > Shriramana Sharma.
> >
>
> Obviously, virama was only a phonetic concept in Sanskrit
> texts for a long time, only in the late 2nd millennium Sanskrit
> grammars talk of it as orthographic (influence from Dravidian?).
> It will be interesting to find out if Virama as Vowel killer
> was first used by a European (usually a missionary)
> or a native Indian pundit.
>
> This is what prof. Madhav Deshpande
> (U. of Michigan, Sanskrit and Linguistics) told me many years ago.
>
> ----------------------
>
> <<<
> The use of the virAma to refer to a written ligature marking subtraction
> of vowel 'a' from the consonant sign is very late, and not to be found in
> the texts of Sanskrit grammarians. In those works, the term virAma does
> exist, but it marks the end of an utterance cf. virAmo 'vasAnam (P. 1.4.
> 110), or a pause. Its immediate reference is phonetic (cessation of the
> phonetic process of utterance), and not orthographic.
> >>>
>
> and
>
> "The use of the virAma to refer to a written ligature marking subtraction
> of vowel 'a' from the consonant sign is very late, and not to be found in
> the texts of Sanskrit grammarians. In those works, the term virAma does
> exist, but it marks the end of an utterance cf. virAmo 'vasAnam (P. 1.4.
> 110), or a pause. Its immediate reference is phonetic (cessation of the
> phonetic process of utterance), and not orthographic.
>
> Madhav Deshpande
>
> ----------------------------------
>
> Back in early 1970s, an ethnic Tamil & prof. of
> Electrical & Computer engineering, V. Rajaraman
> and his student did a study to determine the underlying
> concept of the design of Brahmi scripts of India. Rajaraman, being
> a Tamil, knew the PuLLi concept well as the Virama is explicit
> in Tamil, but all other scripts have mostly hidden virama due
> to conjunct formation. Later, this paper on computer encoding (7-bit) gave
> birth to ISCII.
> In ISCII, the Virama is called by its Hindi name, "Vowel Omission Sign,
> Halant"
> See Section 4.6, pg. 12:
> " 4.6 Vowel Omission Sign: Halant #Â
>
> In Indian scripts consonants are assumed to have an implicit vowel + "a"
> within them unless an explicit Matra (vowel-sign) is attached. Thus a
> special sign Halant (#Â) is needed for indicating that the consonant does
> not have the implicit + vowel in it.
> In Northern languages, the Halant at the end of a word generally gets
> dropped, though the ending still gets pronounced without a vowel. Example:
> Ashok = +¶ÉÉäEÂò => +¶ÉÉäEò
> This doesn't happen in Southern languages and Sanskrit, where a Halant is
> always used to indicate a vowel-less ending. Example: param={É®ú¨ÉÂ
> (Sanskrit word). "
> http://varamozhi.sourceforge.net/iscii91.pdf
> (correction needed for Devanagari words for readability, I just cut & paste
> from pdf).
>
>
> > So it is indeed singular that even in Burnell one
> > finds the usage of the term virāma as the vowel-killer.
>
> Tamil texts 1000 years old call the PuLLi 'dot' (Vowel killer)
> as Viraama. As A. C. Burnell worked in Tamil country and
> South India, he would have heard Virama as vowel
> killer. Remember the first European grammar for Sanskrit was written
> with Grantha script examples. Hence, the use of
> Virama as vowel killer in Whitney (1889, 2nd Ed.) or probably before him.
>
> PiGkalantai nikaNTu (9th century) is the first
> Tamil text that defines Viraama as "dead"
> consonant with puLLi. See also clear statement on vowel killing:
> In the Tiruvaymozi ITu for the 7th decad
> "எழுத்து உரு அழியாதே கிடந்தாலும், புள்ளி குத்தினால்
> அத்தைக் கழித்து" - vowel deletion in using
> Virama/Pulli is mentioned in this quotation.
>
> So, for Virama used as a term for orthography,
> Pingalantai is the oldest text in India.
>
> N. Ganesan
>
>
>
-- ***************************************************** Prof. Bidyut B. Chaudhuri FNA, FNAE, FIAPR, FIEEE J. C. Bose Fellow and Head Computer Vision & Pattern Recognition Unit Indian Statistical Institute 203 B. T. Road Kolkata 700108 West Bengal, India Phone: (91) (33) 2575 2852 www.isical.ac.in/~bbc *****************************************************
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sun Jan 09 2011 - 07:19:06 CST