This article investigates the authorship of the Īśopaniṣadbhāṣya and the Kaṭhopaniṣadbhāṣya, which are traditionally attributed to Śaṅkara. The first part of the article shows that according to Paul ...Hacker’s criteria of the specific usage of the terms avidyā, nāmarūpa, māyā and īśvara, there are no grounds upon which to disprove the traditional attribution of the Īśopaniṣadbhāṣya and the Kaṭhopaniṣadbhāṣya to Śaṅkara, although the analysis of the Īśopaniṣadbhāṣya rests mainly on the absence of un-Śaṅkarian features. The second part of the article reports on the results of computational experiments based on new developments in authorship verification. This analysis, according to the recently introduced General Imposters framework, affirms Śaṅkara’s authorship of the texts in question.
Filip Vesdin, better known by his monastic name Paulinus a Sancto Bartholomaeo, authored two rather short linguistic treatises, which can rightfully be considered the first published studies on the ...kinship of the Indo-European languages illustrated with a list of cognate words. The first treatise is De antiquitate et affinitate linguae zendicae, samscrdamicae, et germanicae dissertatio from 1798, and the second, the subject of this study, is entitled De Latini sermonis origine et cum orientalibus linguis connextione dissertatio published in Rome in 1802. It discusses the history of the Latin language and its connection to the "Oriental" languages illustrated with a word-list. This study will therefore attempt to evaluate how successful Vesdin was in identifying Sanskrit and Latin cognates. Vesdin's original list is divided into: a) acceptable identifications, b) unacceptable identifications, c) loanwords and d) other cases. Despite relying on highly unreliable phono-semantic correspondences and a rather naive and unsystematic procedure that occasionally ignored phonetic correspondences in favor of semantic resemblances, Vesdin was successful in identifying 200 cognates out of 260 entries. Four entries are loanwords and 56 words are either not accepted as cognates in modern scholarship, have no established etymology, or cannot be identified at present.
The oldest preserved commentary on the Br̥hadāraṇyaka-Upaniṣad was composed by Śaṅkara. Sureśvara composed a sub-commentary on this commentary, while Ānandagiri composed commentaries both on ...Śaṅkara's commentary and on Sureśvara's sub-commentary. All these four books contain a number of passages from earlier works which are not preserved. Sureśvara and Ānandagiri attributed some of these passages to a commentator named Bhartr̥prapañca. The aim of this article is to present a philological method which will establish which of the passages might be paraphrases and which might be quotations from Bhartr̥prapañca's lost commentary composed in the scope of the bhedābheda theory. This article will argue that Śaṅkara paraphrases Bhartr̥prapañca's text, while Ānandagiri quotes most probably Bhartr̥prapañca's text literally. This text was metrically adjusted by Sureśvara who paraphrases Bhartr̥prapañca by shortening and adjusting the original text (preserved in Ānandagiri's accounts) in order to fit into the pattern of the śloka meter. If this is true, it is possible to establish a methodology which may help us to reconstruct portions of the oldest known commentary on the Br̥hadāraṇyaka-Upaniṣad.
This article presents philological observations which may help to establish a relative chronology of some of the works attributed to Śaṅkara. Commentaries on the Upaniṣads ascribed to Śaṅkara are ...compared to his commentaries on those parts of
that discuss the same Upaniṣadic passages. Closer investigation of some of these passages might lead to some conclusions about the chronology of these works. The article investigates examples from
2.1–5 and
3.7 respectively discussed in
1.1.12–1.1.19 and 1.2.18–20, an example from
1.3.1 (3.1), which is presented both in
1.2.11–12 and in
1.3.1, together with some examples of interpretations of the same verses in different Upaniṣads, such as the verse which occurs as
2.2.10 and
2.2.15 (5.15) and two verses shared by
,
and
. These examples will reveal some textual parallels in these commentaries, which might provide some clues for establishing a chronology of these passages.
Filip Vesdin, known by his monastic name Paulinus a Sancto Bartholomaeo (1748-1806), was a Carmelite missionary stationed from 1776 to 1789 in Southwestern India. Vesdin authored an impressive opus ...of 32 books and smaller treatises on Brahmanic religion and customs, oriental manuscripts and antiques collections, language comparison and missionary history. This article focuses on the field of language comparison, principally on Vesdin's book De antiquitate et affinitate linguae Zendicae, Samscrdamicae, et Germanicae dissertatio (= Dissertation on the Antiquity and the Affinity of the Zend, Sanskrit, and Germanic Languages), published in Rome in 1798. In this rather short treatise (56 pages), the most important part consists of three word-lists where a large number of words from Avestan, Sanskrit and Germanic languages are compared in order to prove that these languages are related. The paper presents Vesdin's three word-lists together with a description and evaluation of his views on the relationships between these languages in order to highlight his significance in the history of comparative and historical linguistics. The paper also provides new insights into the relationship of De antiquitate to Vesdin's later proto-linguistic treatise, De Latini sermonis origine (1802).
Abbreviations Av.: Avestan; Guj.: Gujaratī; IIr.: Indo-Iranian; Lat.: Latin; Malab.: Malabaricum (Vesdin's term for Malayāḷam); Malay.: Malayāḷam; MHG: Middle High Germa; NHG: New High German; NP: New Persian; OAv.: Old Avestan; OFris.: Old Frisian; OHG: Old High German; OSax.: Old Saxon; Pahl.: Pahlavi; PG: Proto Germanic; PIE: Proto Indo-European; Skt.: Sanskrit; YAv.: Young Avestan
PDF
