Scribal abbreviation in Sanskrit manuscript

Here is an extract from folio 4r of MS Baroda 12489 (includes the Carakasaṃhitā), showing इति iti followed by a ह ha with a loop to the right of the glyph.  A bit like the loop on the syllable ॐ oṃ. This is probably an abbreviation for the phrase इति स्माह भगवानात्रेयः iti smāha bhagavān ātreyaḥ that occurs as the second phrase in most chapters.

Here is the phrase from the next chapter, f.5v of MS Baroda 12489.


Baroda 12489 dates from AD 1816/17.
 
Scribal abbreviations are not as common in Sanskrit manuscripts as they are in medieval European ones.

colophons, names of text portions in Sanskrit manuscripts

I believe that David Pingree introduced the term "post-colophon" into Indian manuscript studies when he wrote his catalogue of the Bodleian Chandra Shum Shere jyotiṣa collection.

Am I right that nobody outside Indological circles (and those influenced by indologists in the last few decades) uses the term "post-colophon"?

Here's a grid of usages:

Key: Pingree (various catalogues, starting 1984)
Tripathi: C. Tripathi, Cat. of Jaina MSS at Strasbourg
Wikipedia: see here and links.
X: no special term


Description      Pingree       Tripathi         Wikipedia (and non-indologists)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Final verse
of text                       X                     X              explicit

iti...samāptam        colophon      colophon       X (or colophon?)

saṃvat phrase       post-            Scribal           colophon
                               colophon       Remarks

after saṃvat
phrase                    X                  post-             X
                                                     colophon

 

Pratapaditya Pal uses "post-colophon" in his 1978 Arts of Nepal book
(http://tinyurl.com/37n8f2z), in the same sense as Pingree.  Perhaps
that's where David got it?

Copyright and Open Access

[Links updated 2018]

Never sign away the copyright of your own writings.  Instead, grant the publisher a license that gives them what they want, and assigns to you the rights that you want.  Here are such licenses, in several languages:

• https://web.archive.org/web/20170704083507/http://copyrighttoolbox.surf.nl/copyrighttoolbox/authors/licence/

For background on the Zwolle principles, see here:

• http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january07/crews/01crews.html
• http://copyright.surf.nl/copyright/zwolle_principles.php (fetched from the waybackmachine)

and see also the SURF initiative, on Copyright Management for Scholarship:

• http://copyright.surf.nl/copyright/ (fetched from the waybackmachine)

[Added 2018:]

• Author Rights & the SPARC Author Addendum

ibus bug fix

Typing Sanskrit in Ubuntu Linux is normally very convenient, using the built-in ibus and m17n systems.  You can write देवनागरी or romanisation (devanāgarī) with just a switch of the keyboard input method. (Thansiang's input method for romanisation input is effective and convenient, but has to be added manually because it isn't included in the main m17n distribution.)

However, with the update to Ubuntu 11.10 in October 2011, a bug was introduced that spoiled typing for several Asian languages, for users of the standard Ubuntu Unity and Gnome windows managers.  The symptom was that as you typed a space, the letters around the cursor jumped into the wrong order. 

The November solution by fujiwarat fixed things.  But it hasn't yet made its way into the standard Ubuntu updates.  At the time of writing, you have to update your ibus installation to version 1.4.0 manually. One way to do it is here, kindly provided by Alex Lee.

March 2012 Update (gnome-shell)

Brandon Schaefer has fixed this ibus/unity bug (thanks!), but the fix will only be released in Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Panglin.  Schaefer asks Oneiric users to wait a couple of months, since,

The changes would be to large and would require changes 

in both unityand nux. 

This is good for the future, but isn't great news for anyone who needs to type in an Asian language during the next two months.

And since ibus and the patch have moved along since the posting above, on 14 Jan, Alex Lee's instructions don't work any more.

The deb files that I made for myself in January, following Alex Lee's instructions are available here for a few months:

•  ibus1.4.0 for Oneiric 

Fetch the six files, put them in a directory, and run the following two commands in a terminal, in the directory containing the deb files:

• sudo apt-get remove ibus 
• sudo dpkg -i *.deb
• sudo apt-get install m17n

Log out and in for good measure, though it may not always be necessary.

Hope it works for you.  No guarantees, and no further help available from me, I'm afraid.   There has been a post suggesting that this does not work under unity (see here).  More testing required.  But it works fine for me under gnome-shell, and probably the other non-unity interfaces.

April 2012 update

All the above problems are solved in the 12.04 Precise Pangolin release of Ubuntu.  Just go with the defaults.

Furthermore, Pangolin's release now includes the input of Sanskrit roman transliteration as standard, using the IAST standard.  It's very nice.

Oneiric Ocelot upgrade woes

My main desktop machine got in a terrible mess during the Oneiric update.  Could have been my fault - I started the update and then left the machine for two days.  When I got back to it, it was frozen, and on hard reboot it wouldn't boot.  Finally, I got it back by booting from a USB stick and then using chroot to get a pseudo-login as root on the hard disk.

• http://karuppuswamy.com/wordpress/2010/06/02/how-to-chroot-to-ubuntu-using-live-cd-to-fix-grub-rescue-prompt/

Having a network connection, that enabled me to clean up the system with dpkg and apt-get, so I fetched all the latest versions of everything and updated and upgraded tidily.  But still couldn't get a boot because of an obscure network problem with connecting to the bus.  Finally solved by these (weirdly written) instructions:

• http://journalxtra.com/2011/10/upgrade-oneiric-ocelot/

Now up and running, amazingly.


--

and another thing...

The compiz grid feature developed a fault about putting a window on the top-right of the screen.  Solution is here: https://launchpad.net/~lbrulet-8/+archive/ppa

Ubuntu Evince menu fonts turn to garbage

Grr, recurrence of the old, old problem that the Evince menus turn to little squares like this:

Solution:

• http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=8216711&postcount=4, 
  that says:

sudo mv /etc/apparmor.d/usr.bin.evince ~/
sudo /etc/init.d/apparmor restart

Simplest Sanskrit XeLaTeX file

Input:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{polyglossia}
\setmainfont[Script=Devanagari]{Nakula}

\begin{document}
Your Devanāgarī looks like this:  आसीद्राजा नलो नाम and your romanized stuff looks like this: āsīd rājā nalo nāma.  
\end{document}

Output:

You can get the Nakula font (and its twin, Sahadeva) from John Smith's website, http://bombay.indology.info

Guṭkās

Sanskrit booklets, or guṭkās, contain several works collected between one set of covers.  They were presumably copied sequentially by their owners as a vade mecum of useful knowledge.

Biswas 0891 (available digitized, no. 090393 at http://www.jainlibrary.org/menus_cate.php) is a series of catalogues of MSS in Jaina libraries in Rajasthan.  Volume 2 (1954), 73 ff. has a section that describes 222 such booklets, and lists their contents in detail.  A study of these particular collocations of texts would provide a valuable insight into reading habits, the circulation of texts and knowledge, and the personal tastes and obsessions of pre-modern Indian readers.

printer driver

Ubuntu, HP LJ 1300 - use the Gutenprint or the Foomatic/pxlmono driver.  Not CUPS or HPLIP.

Greedy grepping

to make a regular expression not greedy, append ?

Gleick

I'm reading Gleick's The Information.  Very enjoyable and interesting romp through loosely-connected stories in the history of science from Babbage to Shannon and beyond.  I've very much enjoyed all of Gleick's books.

Viruses and bacteria

Why computer "virus"?  The metaphor would surely work better with the image of a computer "bacterium," wouldn't it?  A bacterium can be eradicated, unlike most viruses.  Bacteria can be contagious, and can multiply cells and colonize a particular location.

Yes, "Computer bacterium" from now on, I think.

Natty tweaks

Essential tweaks for 11.04, from Webupd8

Ubuntu / dropbox

 If you get the warning

Unable to monitor filesystem
Please run "echo 100000 | sudo tee /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_watches" and restart Dropbox to correct the problem.

here's one way to increase the default value of /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_watches at startup, so one doesn't have to do it manually at every boot.

As root (or with sudo), create a file

/etc/sysctl.d/30-inotify.conf

with the contents

fs.inotify.max_user_watches=100001

Reboot, or run "sudo service procps start".


That's it!

devanagari.sty / xelatex clash

devanagari.sty uses the LaTeX2e font conventions (of course).  Today I had an old document using devanagari.sty that I'm just converting to XeLaTeX and UTF8.  It was fine, except that the document's English parts were in the chosen polyglossia font, while the table of contents was in cmr.

That was because of a statement

\def\DNrmdefault{cmr}

used by \NormalFont in devanagari.sty

The answer was to define \englishfont

\newfontfamily\englishfont{IndUni-P}

and then redefine \NormalFont as follows:

\DeclareRobustCommand\NormalFont{\dn@penitshape\englishfont}

In the end, this is all transitional nonsense, of course, since I will get rid of devanagari.sty and use XeLaTeX's internal facilities for the Devanagari in a day or two.

Hyphenating Sanskrit in roman transliteration

%!TeX program = xelatex
%
% Thanks to Yves Codet for the first version of this test file, and to Yves
% and Jonathan Kew for the hyphenation tables
% for Sanskrit (hyph-sa.tex):

%

% This file exemplifies the case where some Sanskrit is embedded in a
% mainly-English document, but the Sanskrit words are appropriately
% hyphenated. The Sanskrit words are in the argument of the
% \textsanskrit{} command.

\documentclass[12pt]{article}

\usepackage{fontspec}
\usepackage{polyglossia}

\setdefaultlanguage{english}
\setmainfont{Charis SIL}

\setotherlanguage{sanskrit}
\newfontfamily\sanskritfont{Charis SIL}

\textwidth=0.5cm
\parindent 0pt

\begin{document}

Sanskrit hyphenation:
\par\smallskip

\textsanskrit{manum ekāgram āsīnam abhigamya maharṣayaḥ |\par}

\bigskip

English hyphenation:
\par\smallskip

manum ekāgram āsīnam abhigamya maharṣayaḥ |

\end{document}

DLI - DownLoad Impossible?

An exceptionally useful series of remarks about the Digital Library of India from PW, here: http://www.indologica.de/drupal/?q=node/1240

Thanks, Peter!

XeLaTeX, Velthuis encoding, and palatal nasals

When using the Velthuis input coding for Devanāgarī, and wanting to have it handled by XeLaTeX, one finds the palatal ñ disappears in the Nāgarī.

input: sa~njaya

output: स न्जय


That's because the Velthuis input code for ञ् is ~n, and the "~" is a special code in TeX, meaning "hard space".

Here's the workaround. I define a font-switching command \dev that will turn Velthuis into Devanāgarī. \dev is mostly made up of "\textsanskrit" which is set up using the standard XeLaTeX/polyglossia \newfontfamily commands. \textsanskrit does the work of invoking the mapping-conversion (from XeTeX's velthuis-sanskrit.tec file).

But just before \textsanskrit, we change tilde into a normal character. And after \textsanskrit, we turn tilde back into an "active" hard space. We use the \aftergroup command so that the "active" version of tilde is activated after the closing of the group that contains the Devanāgarī.

Here's the code:

\newfontfamily\textsanskrit [Script=Devanagari,Mapping=velthuis-sanskrit]{Nakula}

% Make the tilde into a normal letter of the alphabet

\def\maketildeletter{\catcode`\~=11 }

% Return tilde to being the default TeX "active" character for hard space

\def\maketildeactive{\catcode`\~=13 }

\def\dev{\maketildeletter\textsanskrit \aftergroup\maketildeactive}

Here's how you use it:

input: {\dev sa~njaya uvaaca}. What did Dr~Sañjaya say?

output: सञ्जय उवाच. What did Dr Sañjaya say?

where that space betwen "Dr" and "Sañjaya" is hard, and you can't break a line there.

Enjoy.

 

Update 2020:

Using David Carlisle's much better idea from the comments below, here's the new code:

 

\newfontfamily\textsanskrit [Script=Devanagari,Mapping=velthuis-sanskrit]{Nakula}

\def\dev{\edef~{\string~}\textsanskrit }
 

\begin{document}

{\dev sa~njaya uvaaca}. What did Dr~Sañjaya say?

\end{document}

 

 

Dr T. Bhaskaran

I am sorry to read today that Dr T. Bhaskaran has died (d. 12.8.2010).

In the 1980s, Dr Bhaskaran was Director of the Oriental Manuscript Library and Research Institute, University of Kerala. (On the OMLRI, that many of us will have visited over the years, see here). Amongst his many books, Dr Bhaskaran was particularly proud of his publication, with his successor Dr K. Vijayan, of the facsimile edition of a beautiful illustrated palm-leaf manuscript of the Rāmāyaṇa, over which he took great pains to ensure high-quality colour reproduction and typesetting (Chitra Ramayanam, 1997, published by the University of Kerala, Trivandrum Sanskrit Series no.265, and on CD by CDIT).


Dr Bhaskaran also prepared and published three volumes of the Alphabetical Index of Sanskrit Manuscripts in the Oriental Research Institute and Manuscripts Library, Univ. of Trivandrum, that are essential guides to the MS holdings of the library.  This series was started with vol.1 (a - na, 6079 works) in 1957 by Suranad Kunjan Pillai, and continued with vol.2 (ta - ma, 7980 works) in 1965 by K. Raghavan Pillai. There the series halted for decades, until Dr Bhaskaran re-enlivened it, finishing off the alphabet (vols 3 & 4, 1984 & 1986, 5253 & 2218 works), and starting a supplemental series (vol. 5, 1988, covering 4643 works). Few people in the world can say that they have catalogued 12,000 Sanskrit manuscripts.  The impulse of Dr Bhaskaran's diligent cataloguing work directly inspired the library to complete the Supplementary Index in two further volumes (1995, 2000).  These seven volumes cover the 35,060 Sanskrit MSS in the library that have been catalogued, amounting to about half the library's total holdings.


Dr Bhaskaran was a member of the Ezhava community.  He was proud to have been such a leading figure in Sanskrit studies in Kerala, and explained to me a few years ago, when I visited him in his retirement in Aleppey, that the Ezhavas as a group were often quite wrongly categorized merely as toddy-tappers, when in fact many members of their society were physicians and herbalists, as well as Sanskritists.  As an example, he cited the famous facsimile inscription of 20 April 1675 in the Hortus Malabaricus (Amsterdam, 1678-1693) in which the Ezhava Itty Acyutan, "Doctor Malabaricus," wrote about his own contribution to that magisterial work of Dutch botanical science.


Dr Bhaskaran was a kind and learned man, who did much quiet and important work for the indological field of studies.

Wellcome Library: The Test of Time

Wellcome Library: The Test of Time: "Last year we brought you news of The Test of Time, a BBC Radio 4 series in which present day scientists reflected on the work of their ancie..."