(no subject)
Wednesday, November 22nd, 2006 09:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lethargic_manToday's entry in Balashon, besides being interesting—explaining why turkey is called Indian chicken in most European languages (and Turkey in English) despite being from the New World—provides a couple of interesting insights that I should really have been able to figure out myself, had I but put my mind to it: why the Hebrew name for India, הודו Hodu*, lacks the n, and why there's a province of Pakistan called Sindh†.
A thought I've just had: this shows the name Hodu must have entered the language at an extremely early, pre-Biblical, possibly even pre-Hebrew stage, for the nd to undergo this transformation along with other nds and nts in the language; otherwise it would have remained as a foreign sound in the language, like, frex, the nd in the name Alexander.
Which means that India must also have been known to the Israelites by name getting on for four thousand years ago, too. (Though no further back, as that would antedate the Aryans (Persians) arriving in Persia to bring the form of the name with the h.)
* As in ויהי בימי אחשורוש, הוא אחשורוש המלך מהדו ועד כוש "It happened in the days of Aḥashverosh, who ruled from Hodu [India] to Cush [Ethiopia]" in the Book of Esther.
† As in Sir Charles Napier's famous laconic despatch "Peccavi—I have Sindh." Sindh is also the S in the acronym of the provinces of India that seceded to become Pakistan: Punjab, Afghan Province (nowadays Northwest Frontier Province), Kashmir, Sindh and Baluchistan.
Respectively:
For the same reason that Native Americans are known as Indians: because Christopher Columbus spent his life convinced he'd reached the Indies (due to mistakenly believing the world to be 20% smaller than it is).
Because Hebrew abhors the combination nt (and d is merely a vocalised t), the n normally vanishing—compare Arabic bint (girl) with Hebrew בת bat (the נ reemerges in the plural, בנות banot), or Aramaic אנת ant (you) with Hebrew אתא ata. (Cf. Stephen Pinker's argument in Word and Rules that all irregulars in language are remnants of once-regular construction that have gone out of the language.)
And thirdly, because the sound that manifests s in Sanskrit becomes h in Persian; compare also Indian asura (demon) with the name of the Zoroastrian god Ahura Mazda. (The fact the word denoted a god in one language and a demon in another is due to the ascendancy in the two regions of different religions.) (Asura is also cognate to the Norse word for god, as in Æsir and Asgard.)
There, now that makes this sufficiently different from the original article I feel justified in posting it myself now. :o)
A thought I've just had: this shows the name Hodu must have entered the language at an extremely early, pre-Biblical, possibly even pre-Hebrew stage, for the nd to undergo this transformation along with other nds and nts in the language; otherwise it would have remained as a foreign sound in the language, like, frex, the nd in the name Alexander.
Which means that India must also have been known to the Israelites by name getting on for four thousand years ago, too. (Though no further back, as that would antedate the Aryans (Persians) arriving in Persia to bring the form of the name with the h.)
* As in ויהי בימי אחשורוש, הוא אחשורוש המלך מהדו ועד כוש "It happened in the days of Aḥashverosh, who ruled from Hodu [India] to Cush [Ethiopia]" in the Book of Esther.
† As in Sir Charles Napier's famous laconic despatch "Peccavi—I have Sindh." Sindh is also the S in the acronym of the provinces of India that seceded to become Pakistan: Punjab, Afghan Province (nowadays Northwest Frontier Province), Kashmir, Sindh and Baluchistan.
Respectively:
For the same reason that Native Americans are known as Indians: because Christopher Columbus spent his life convinced he'd reached the Indies (due to mistakenly believing the world to be 20% smaller than it is).
Because Hebrew abhors the combination nt (and d is merely a vocalised t), the n normally vanishing—compare Arabic bint (girl) with Hebrew בת bat (the נ reemerges in the plural, בנות banot), or Aramaic אנת ant (you) with Hebrew אתא ata. (Cf. Stephen Pinker's argument in Word and Rules that all irregulars in language are remnants of once-regular construction that have gone out of the language.)
And thirdly, because the sound that manifests s in Sanskrit becomes h in Persian; compare also Indian asura (demon) with the name of the Zoroastrian god Ahura Mazda. (The fact the word denoted a god in one language and a demon in another is due to the ascendancy in the two regions of different religions.) (Asura is also cognate to the Norse word for god, as in Æsir and Asgard.)
There, now that makes this sufficiently different from the original article I feel justified in posting it myself now. :o)
hodu
Date: 2006-11-23 10:38 am (UTC)But I think you mixed up the last point. You wrote
"the sound that manifests h in Sanskrit becomes s in Persian" - that should probably be the other way around.
-Dave
http://balashon.blogspot.com
Re: hodu
Date: 2006-11-23 10:47 am (UTC)Re: hodu
Date: 2006-11-23 01:14 pm (UTC)Re: hodu
Date: 2006-11-23 01:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-11-23 06:49 pm (UTC)I also thought that Pakistan meant "pure land"; the Muslim equivalent of kosher lemahadrin is pak halal, I believe. But it's quite cool that it's an acronym as well.
no subject
Date: 2006-11-23 07:14 pm (UTC)Yep. :o)
Ahura Mazda is related to Æsir, that's far too cool!
He's sort of a second cousin of theirs...
I learned this from Wikipedia, after wondering whether there was a cognate closer to home, and drawing a blank on all three of my dictionaries. "Asgard" I am assuming means what it looks like it ought to mean, viz. "God-earth", on the analogy of "Midgard" = "Middle-earth". (ObMiddleEarthTrivia: "Middle-earth itself survived in song even after people had forgotten what it means: 'O cocks are crowing a merry midd-larf, / A wat the wilde foule boded day.' [Child 77A (http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/eng/child/ch077.htm), 1776]"—Tom Shippey, The Road To Middle-Earth ch.6.)
I also thought that Pakistan meant "pure land";
It does; the name was obviously invented by someone who likes wordplay as much as we do. :o)