🚀 go-pugleaf

In a previous article, I quoted a passage from _Ka:'sika:_ that describes
the Vedic accent in terms of a difference in place of articulation of a
vowel.  Rich Alderson replies (much has been deleted):

>Of course, a 5th century commentary would be 1000 years after Panini, with the
>problems of transmission of texts and of concepts.

This is true, but the situation is even more complex.  Panini himself
does not deal with phonetics systematically; he assumes a great deal
of meterial covered in the _pra:ti'sa:kyas_, texts that are concerned
with the correct pronunciation of the Veda.  The authors of _Ka:'sika:_
were probably more influenced by this same tradition of phonetic
description than by the stress accent in their own dialects.

>I have read of at least one modern school of pandits who pronounce the *marked*
>syllables differently, relegating the _uda:tta_ to less prominence, based on a
>notion that what is mentioned is important and that since the _uda:tta_ is
>defined in terms of the surrounding syllables, *those* are the important ones.

A good example of the corruption of tradition: if they have to rely on
books to learn the Veda, then their status is questionable.  There is
a word for such a man in Sanskrit: _pustakapa.n.dita_, i.e., someone
who has to look everything up because he's too lazy or too incompetent to
work from memory.


Rahul Bonner