Tag Archives: linguistics

Sneha, snowstorms, the sun and the moon in enigmatic ṛk-s

That the Indo-European homeland was a cold place with snow is evidenced by widespread survival of two hon-homologous words for snow. Recently, a discussion on one of these words, sparked by some linguist, landed on my timeline on Twitter. From … Continue reading

Posted in Heathen thought, History | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Some words on mathematical truth, scientific conviction and the sociology of science

Sometime in the bronze age more than one group of humans, including our own Aryan ancestors, discovered that the squares of the two legs of a right triangle sum up to the square of the hypotenuse. This is the famed … Continue reading

Posted in Heathen thought, Life, Scientific ramblings | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

A note on āmreḍita-s in the Ṛgveda and issues of word distribution

sa darśataśrīr atithir gṛhe-gṛhe vane-vane śiśriye takvavīr iva । janaṃ-janaṃ janyo nāti manyate viśa ā kṣeti viśyo viśaṃ-viśam ॥ RV 10.91.2 by Aruṇa Vaitahavya He, with visible auspiciousness, a guest in house after house, in forest after forest lurking like … Continue reading

Posted in Heathen thought, History | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The terror of the ergative and such thoughts

In our youth we were confronted with the prospect of learning two New Indo-Aryan languages, namely Hindi and Marathi. All around us were native speakers of the latter language. Several of them were multilingual and knew Hindi to different degrees … Continue reading

Posted in Heathen thought, History, Life | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment