Posts tagged "language":

Machine translation of Sanskrit

In 2022, Google finally added Sanskrit to its machine translation program: “Sanskrit is the number one, most requested language at Google Translate, and we are finally adding it”

However, copying and moving devanagari script around is not always simple.

Here I tried to copy the following from a textual PDF (a sloka in the Bhagavad Gita) :

and got this:

नयादत्तक कस्यशचत्पयाप श न चवैव सभकवृतश शवभभव।

अजयानकनयाववृतश जयानश तकन मभह्यननत जनतवव।। 5.15।।

which is rather different - letters have been skipped and replaced willy-nilly.

A translation of the original given in the PDF is : The Omniscient neither accepts anybody's sin nor even virtue. Knowledge remains covered by ignorance; thereby the creatures become deluded.

Google struggles to make sense of the garbled text thus:

There is nothing wrong with the judge and nothing else. Ajay's daughter is covered with Jayansha's technique. 5.15.

(Horrible, but convincing on the face of it).

I was more or less able to overcome the problem by transliterating the actual letters back into Devanagari, as in: नादत्ते कस्यचित्पपम् नचैव सुकूतम् विभु which Google rendered as The Lord does not take away anyone's sin or goodness This seems to be a viable translation candidate - it would be necessary to compare a few translations to see how it is usually rendered.

Machsoum

I brought the Palestinian workers from the "machsoum" (army checkpost) in the morning at 6:15 as Tuesdays is the day I volunteer for that. They go back in the mid-afternoon but one of them, Issa, stayed behind to do a bit of side-work, gardening for my daughter, and I took him back at 6:15 in the evening, exactly 12 hours later. And that on a day that the temperature got up to 36°.

Actually community gardening was my job for a few year's, when I was Issa's age. In the summer I would start at dawn, take a long break from around 11:00 and then work again in the late afternoon. Issa said he also took a break today, so it's not as if he was working for 12 hours.

On the car journey back, I listened to an episode of Anita Anand and William Dalrympl's excellent "Empire" podcast. This one was about the Vikings. It opened with an unusual discovery, a bauble found at a Viking site in Derbyshire, UK that originated in India. Also present at the site were victims of human sacrifice, who were probably slaves. It turns out that the Vikings, besides their more well-known exploits, were involved with trade along the silk road and also traded in slaves throughout all the countries they visited.

The origin of the English word "slave" is "Slav". The Vikings were using the system of European rivers to make it as far south as Byzantium and maybe further. When it was not possible to travel consistently by river, they would haul their boats, or maybe slaves would haul their boats, from river to river.

The Anglo Saxons too kept slaves, so the Vikings weren't special in that.

One of the few surviving accounts of the customs of the Vikings comes from an Arab source - he witnessed their social life and ceremonies, and wrote about them.

Everyday, I learn something new.

Pronunciation

I grew up in the UK and the US, but have spent most of my adult life in Israel/Palestine. I have done some studying in all three places. However, the majority of my learning has always been from reading.

As a result, I can usually spell even difficult words from memory but my pronunciation is decidedly rather hit-and-miss. This is the newly discovered advantage, and embarrassment, of listening to audio books by expert speakers: Everyday I discover another word that I've been saying wrongly.

The latest is "hegemony". As with many words, it is pronounced one way in the UK, another way in the US, and I've been pronouncing it yet a third way, probably based on hearing it spoken in Hebrew (where the word has been introduced - possibly directly from the Greek ἡγεμονία - as הֶגְמוֹנְיָה (heg-mon-ya - with a hard g)

The question is whether it is already too late in the game to break lifetime habits of saying certain words to myself in my head?

Photo: While waiting at the airport for D's return flight, I tried taking some photos, but only the mistakes were interesting.

Adventures in Wikipedia

Kennings are poetic compound-words used in old English and Icelandic literature. Thus, a word for the sea (appearing in The Anglo-Saxon poem, The Wanderer) is "whale road". Compound words are a feature of most Indo-European languages. "Himalaya" means literally "abode of snow". The various kinds of compounds (samasa) were carefully catalogued in Sanskrit, from Tatpurusha to Bahuvrihi. When Homer speaks of "the wine dark sea" (οἶνοψ πόντος) this too is a compound or epithet, rather than a metaphor, as the word "sea" does not appear in the original. The words literally mean wine + faced.

Wikipedia has an interesting article on this particular epithet. Apparently the Greeks had a hard time finding words for dark blue, though it may have been that the wine of Homer's era had a bluer colour than today's.

Other ancient peoples may have had similar difficulty with the colour. In Sanskrit, the word krishna can mean either black or dark blue. This is probably why the god Krishna, a dark-skinned Dravidian deity, is often painted with blue skin. The Hebrew word for blue, kahol has the same origin as kohl, the dark eyeliner that is used across Africa and West and Southern Asia, by both men and women. Muhammad used and recommended it, like fierce Pashtun tribesmen today. Kohl can be made from plant or mineral sources, but all of these are black, rather than blue.

The words that are used for kohl in Pakistan and northern India, like kajol, seem to derive from the same Semitic root. As does the English word alcohol which comes to us through Arabic, though it originally meant powder of the mineral antimony.

Another Sanskrit word for blue, "nila", may be cognate with the name the Greeks and Romans gave the Nile river in Egypt. A samasa epithet for the god Siva is "Nilakantha" (Blue Throat) because his neck turned blue when he quaffed the halahala poison. Or maybe just too much alcohol.

Links blog

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✭How did the ‘great god’ get a ‘blue neck’? a bilingual clue to the Indus Script https://www.harappa.com/sites/default/files/pdf/Nilakantha-IM.pdf #india

✭ICC rules it can investigate alleged war crimes in Palestine despite Israeli objections | International criminal court | The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/law/2021/feb/05/icc-rules-it-can-investigate-war-crimes-in-pal… The international criminal court has announced that it has jurisdiction in Palestine, clearing its chief prosecutor to investigate alleged atrocities despite fierce Israeli objections. #palestine

✭Greta Thunberg effigies burned in Delhi after tweets on farmers' protests | India | The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/feb/04/greta-thunberg-effigies-burned-in-delhi-afte… "Media access to the protest sites has been largely cut off. A journalist was arrested for entering one of the sites over the weekend, and nine Indian journalists are facing charges including sedition and conspiracy over social media posts relating to the protests." #india

Creating a buzz: Turkish beekeepers risk life and limb to make mad honey

"History is littered with stories of the psychoactive properties of deli bal, still produced today in the Kaçkar mountains"

Source: Creating a buzz: Turkish beekeepers risk life and limb to make mad honey | World news

The Guardian

Of course, the Sanskrit word for honey, madhu, like mead (the ancient drink made with honey) and mad (which is Sanskrit for hilarity, rapture) all come from the same Indo-European root.

Affectation

Twice in 24 hours, I’ve come across news articles that muddle the use of the words effect and affect; today it was CNN: ‘Some protesters say this is their last chance to affect change before 2047, when the “one country, two systems” model that Hong Kong is governed by expires.’

Sometimes I think we should just relax the rules of English spelling; other times I think that insisting on rules helps us to think more precisely. What’s certain is that we unconsciously give less credence to writers with poor or unorthodox spelling.

Afternote (from xkcd):