--- In [email protected], "BillyG." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > --- In [email protected], cardemaister <no_reply@> wrote: > > From a linguistic POV that's so confusing that I'd like > > to know what exactly is your source for that. > > The analogy of the crystal ball comes from Swami Yogananda's book, > "The Second Coming of Christ". > > > Actually, those Hindi truncations(?) of Sanskrit words > > make me "furious"! Well, at least a bit irritated... :] > > But there is a good reason for it as Brahm-a with 'short' a, signifies > something different than Brahmaa (two a's for effect only) with a long > a.
I'm not sure what you mean by "for effect only" but the difference between "brahma" (nominative singular *neuter* gender form of the word whose lemma , i.e, "dictionary form" is "brahman") and "brahmaa" (nominative singular *masculine* form of the..., etc.) is *almost* as essential as the difference in English between, say , "fit" and "feet". I know there's a *qualitative*, not just quantitative, difference between the vowels in those words, but that's the closest analogy I can think of in English to the importance of the length of vowels in Sanskrit, where it is a so called distinctive feature, that is, two words with totally different meanings can differ from each other only by the length of their vowel, like for instance "sama" (same) and "saama" (song, and stuff). Here are some forms of the singular inflectional paradigm of the word (whose lemma is) "brahman": nominative singular masculine brahmaa (Example: yatiinaam brahmaa bhavati saarathiH) accusative singular masculine brahmaanam nominative singular neuter brahma (anaadimat paraM brahma...) accusative singular neuter brahma Actually, the "criterion" for a neuter gender word in Sanskrit is that its nominative and accusative (English: objective) are identical in form. In the rest of the inflectional cases (instrumental, dative, ablative, genitive and locative) 'n' appears as a "separator" - or whatever it's officially called - between the stem and the suffix; for instance, genitive (English: possessive) singular of both masculine and neuter inflection is "brahmanaH" (because of a peculiar assimilation , actually: brahmaNaH - brahma-N-aH).
