Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Bhartṛhari publications

The publication history of editions and translations of Bhartṛhari's Vākyapadīya and commentaries is complicated.  In Feb 2024, Christoph Vielle posted the following very useful collection of information about scanned volumes in this field.  Thank you, Christoph.

--


Ed. et transl. Subramania Iyer

Edition of Sanskrit text

Translations

+

Studies

 

Tuesday, September 12, 2023

Online issues of Indological journals

I repeatedly find my self searching for back issues of journals, and between searches I forget what I learned the first time.  Here are some notes to myself, to remind myself what can be found online.  I'm writing this in April 2018, so moving walls will have moved in future years.
  • Indo-Iranian Journal
  • Indologica Taurinensia
  • Journal asiatique (with gaps):
  • Journal of Indian and Buddhist Studies (Indogaku Bukkyogaku Kenkyu)
  • JIABS: Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 

  • Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal
  •  Journal of the Royal Asiatic of Bengal
  • Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bombay
  • Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society
    • 1824-1834 JSTOR (Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland)
    • 1834-1990 JSTOR (The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland
    • 1991-2013 JSTOR (Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society)
  • Journal of the Pali Text Society
  • Orientalia Suecana
  • Philosophy East and West 1951-2014
  • The Pandit many issues identified and linked at Shreevatsa's blog.
  • Transactions of the Philological Society  
    • many issues from 1854-1946 identified and linked by U. Penn.
  • Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde Süd- und Ostasiens
    • 1991-20?? JSTOR , five-year moving wall.
  • Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft
    • 1847-present (I believe) JSTOR; MLU (1847-2013, more coming).

Sunday, May 14, 2023

Sanskrit 2003

Sanskrit 2003

The Sanskrit 2003 font provides a rich set of conjunct consonants (sandhyakṣarāḥ) and looks really good, if you like classic Devanagari typefaces in the tradition of the Nirṇaya Sāgara Press. 

Sanskrit 2003 was created under the aegis of the Omkarananda Ashram, near Rishikesh.  The font is freely downloadable from the Omkarananda Ashram website, on this page:

Or directly by clicking this link:

Terms of Distribution

In 2017 I corresponded with the Omkarananda Ashram in order to clarify whether their font was covered by a free-use license.  Here is their reply:

Info (OAH) <info@omkarananda-ashram.org>
Sun, 12 Feb 2017, 05:12

Dear Dominik Wujastyk,

Thank you for your email.

We do not know about this licensing stuff, but the Sanskrit 2003 font is made available freely to anyone to use.

With kind regards,
Swami Satchidananda
Omkarananda Ashram Himalayas
Muni-ki-reti, Rishikesh, India

I tried to get more clarity and to get the Ashram to specify a modern license to formalise their statement but I received no further responses.  I have some sympathy with their unwillingness to get tangled up in licensing terms, however helpful that might be for others.

The Swamiji and the Ashram are being extremely generous in making this superb font available freely to all, and I personally thank them very much indeed.  In spite of the growing choice of Devanagari fonts, I usually come back to Sanskrit 2003.

Wednesday, March 22, 2023

P. C. Rāy and the History of Hindu Chemistry

The original books

The publication history of this two-volume work is slightly complicated.

  • 1902: volume 1 (London & Oxford)
  • 1903: volume 1, revised and enlarged (Calcutta)
  • 1907: volume 1, revised and enlarged (London)
  • undated: volume 1, second edition, revised and enlarged (Calcutta & London)

  • 1909: volume 2 (Calcutta & London)
  • 1925: volume 2, second edition, revised and enlarged (Calcutta)
    (includes a prefaced to the 2nd edition that is dated 1904)

The later rewriting

  • 1956: Ray, P. (ed.), History of Chemistry in Ancient and Medieval India, Incorporating the ‘History of Hindu Chemistry’ by Acharya Prafulla Chandra Rāy. Calcutta: Indian Chemical Society.
    This is not by P. C. Ray, but by P. Ray. 
    The difference between this 1956 "incorporation" and the original volumes is well described in the book review by
    Jean Filliozat (1956), “Review of P. Ray, History of Chemistry in Ancient and Medieval India, incorporating the History of Hindu Chemistry by Acharya Prafulla Chandra Ray,” ISIS. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/226955.
     
     

Sunday, November 06, 2022

Making an Index of Plant Names

I'm translating a Sanskrit text full of plant names.  In a previous project of this type, I created a simple bilingual index, Sanskrit-English and English-Sanskrit.  I did not include Latin binomials and, most regrettable, I didn't include any of the source-referencing and thought that went into my translation choices.  I had compiled all this material, but I didn't share it with the public.  With the current project, I want to use a database to collect the information about each plant cumulatively and in a single place, and I want to have a straightforward way of presenting this complex data in the book.

The answer is the LaTeX package Glossaries. Glossaries is one of those packages, like BibLaTeX, that is extremely powerful and flexible, and therefore complex to learn.  The reference manual of glossaries-extra is over a thousand pages long.

Objectives:

  • Simple input system in the body of the translation;
  • Alphabetical glossary by plant name, with page index, for the back of the book.  Like this: 

I have  achieved this with the following system.

BibTeX and bib2gls

The Glossaries-extra (GE) package includes a subsystem that reads a BibTeX file and turns it into glossary entries.   My bib file is called plants.bib, and it lives in the same directory as all my BibTeX files (../localtexmf/bibtex/bib)
The BibTeX entry looks like this:
 
 The entries are called, er, @entry; and each entry has three fields, the 
  1. label, which is the Sanskrit name of the plant (with diacritical marks);
  2. description, which contains the Latin binomial and anything else I want to say about the Sanskrit plant name.
  3. name, which is the English common name of the plant, that will appear in the translation.

Note that I'm using BibLateX citations in the description field, to cite the botanical literature that I want to refer to.  

What you write in the main text

In the text of my translation, I use the \gls{} command to cite the Sanskrit plant name, like this: 

 And so, he should burn \gls{dhava} and ...

 After running LaTeX foobar and bib2gls foobar, I get the output,

and at the back of the book, by using the command \printunsrtglossaries, I get 

TLDR: as I write, I just use the Sanskrit name of the plant, and the GE package replaces it with the English translation from my bib file and also constructs the alphabetical glossary entries at the back of the book.  

Close readers will have seen that the word "axlewood" in the translation is in a different colour: it's a clickable hot link to the right page of the index.  The index entries have clickable page-references back to the body of the text.  The glossary has clickable links to the bibliography.

The TeX macros that make this happen are in the package xelatex-glossaries.sty that you are most welcome to copy from GitHub.

Special thanks to Nicola L. C. Talbot, author of the remarkable Glossaries package.