Why Devanagari is awesome

I was disappointed to hear that the students of Sanskrit in the Eastern Classics program at St. John’s aren’t working much with Devanagari this year, at the discretion of their tutor (we used it a lot last year, with a different one). Apart from the practical consideration that a large number of Sanskrit texts and resources assume knowledge of the script, I found myself explaining to a current student why I think Devanagari is totally awesome. To wit:

In our (the Roman) alphabet, the order of the letters roughly follows that of the Greek alphabet, which itself follows that of the Semitic alphabets. Thus, a-b-c from alpha-beta-gamma from aleph-bet-gimel. But in all of them, this order is to all appearances arbitrary. Not so in India.

All of the consonants in Devanagari, as in most (or is it all?) of the other Indian scripts, are divided into five groups called sthānas—which literally means “standing,” or “position”—according to the place of articulation in the mouth, and the sthānas are themselves arranged according to distance from the throat.

Thus, the first group is articulated nearest the throat: the ka-sthāna.
The second is forward slightly: the ca-sthāna (“ca” being pronounced as what in English we would write “cha”).
The third is not necessarily further from the throat, but uses a further-forward part of the tongue: the ṭa-sthāna. (This is the “retroflex” sthāna, pronounced with the tip of the tongue straight up in the palate. It’s the stereotypical feature of Indian speech mocked in fake Indian accents.)
The fourth is at the teeth: the ta-sthāna.
The fifth is at the lips: the pa-sthāna.

Now, within each sthāna the letters are arranged according to prayatna (literally, “effort”). These begin with the unvoiced, unaspirated consonant, so the first letter in the pa-sthāna is “pa.” Next is the unvoiced but aspirated form, so the second letter in the pa-sthāna is “pha” (pronounced the same as “pa,” but with more breath). Next is the voiced and unaspirated: “ba.” Then the voiced and aspirated: “bha.” Then the nasal: “ma.” This pattern is repeated for all of the sthānas.

Some of these distinctions can be hard for English-speakers to hear and produce, since we pay less deliberate attention to them. For instance, we do have aspirated and unaspirated consonants, but we don’t distinguish them in writing, and most of us are usually unaware of the difference though we hear people who get them wrong as somehow vaguely foreign-sounding. The “p” in “pot” is aspirated; the “p” in “spot” is unaspirated. If you’re a native speaker, you’ll put more breath into the former, though you might not realize it, and you’ll think people sound non-native when they get it wrong.

It also looks like we don’t have so many nasals in English; but we have more than you might think, and just use “n” as a generic nasal-marker. For instance, people sometimes refer to “dropping” the letter “g” from words ending in “ing”; but nothing is being dropped, only replaced. “Talking” ends in a nasal of the ka-sthāna (a “velar nasal”); “talkin” ends in a nasal of of the ta-sthāna (a “dental nasal”). The place of articulation of the sound has changed, but neither form has more sounds than the other. You might say we’re using “ng” to indicate a single sound, which would be indicated with a single letter in Devanagari.

So the consonants in Devanagari are arranged like so:

k — kh — g — gh — ṅ
c — ch — j — jh — ñ
ṭ — ṭh — ḍ — ḍh — ṇ
t — th — d — dh — n
p — ph — b — bh — m

Each row is a different place in your mouth; and then within each row, all of the letters are pronounced with your mouth in the same position, but changing the manner of enunciation. So with your mouth in the position for the “k,” add breath to get “kh,” add voice to get “g,” add breath and voice to get “gh,” and make it nasal to get “ṅ” (which is the “ng” in our “-ing” words).

(The vowels and other letters come before the consonants, and are similarly—though perhaps less obviously—arranged according to manner of enunciation.)

One consequence of this ordering is that, whereas when looking up a word in an English dictionary I find myself singing the alphabet song in my head, when looking up words in Sanskrit I find myself moving my tongue through the different positions in my mouth.

When I first learned this, it seemed like something Tolkien would have used for Elvish. And it’s the main reason I think Devanagari is awesome.

November 14, 2009 · Language, Sanskrit · 7 comments

A public service for teachers

Thanks to @randomspaces for the idea. Feel free to print or distribute.

(Download PDF)

Do Not Interrupt This Class (Sign)

August 25, 2009 · Teachering · (No comments)

The Moon

These photos were taken 40 years ago tonight, probably by my father but conceivably by my uncle, aunt, grandfather, or grandmother, about 14 months after they arrived to the United States from Argentina.

July 20, 2009 · History, Photos · 1 comment

You think the Victorians are subtle?

To set the scene: Genji is the emperor’s son, but of the wrong mother, so he’ll never be emperor himself (but he’s the coolest, best-looking guy around, so pretty much everybody loves him and wishes he could be emperor instead of his brother). His mother was his father’s favorite, and she dies while Genji is a boy, leaving the emperor distraught. He finds a much younger woman to replace her—she enters the story at 16 when Genji is 11—and Genji takes a liking to her. A very strong liking.

Her name is Fujitsubo. Her gentlewoman is Ōmyōbu. Now, some years later, Genji is about 18:

Princess Fujitsubo was not well and had withdrawn from the palace. Genji felt deep sympathy for His Majesty, whose anxious distress was evident, but he also ancitipated feverishly now, at last, a chance for himself, and he no longer went out at all. At the palace or at home he spent the daylight hours daydreaming and those after dark hounding Ōmyōbu. How Ōmyōbu brought off their meeting is impossible to say, but to poor Genji even these stolen moments with her seemed quite unreal. To Her Highness the memory of that last, most unfortunate incident was a source of enduring suffering, and she had resolved that nothing of the kind should ever happen again, yet despite her obvious consternation she remained thoughtful and kind, even while she continued to resist him with a profound dignity so far beyond the reach of any other woman that Genji could not help wondering in anguish why it was never possible to find in her the slightest flaw.

How could he have told her all he had to say? He must have wished himself where darkness never ends, but alas, the nights were short now, and their time together had yielded after all nothing but pain.

“This much we have shared, but nights when we meet again will be very rare,
and now that we live this dream, O that it might swallow me!”

he said, sobbing; to which Her Highness compassionately replied,

“People soon enough will be passing on our tale, though I let our dream
sweep me on till I forget what misfortune now is mine.”

Genji could not blame her for being in such torment, and he deeply regretted having caused it. Ōmyōbu gathered up his dress cloak and so on and brought it to him.

There, did you miss it? You can hardly be blamed if you did. But she’s pregnant on the next page! (There’s no other reference to the “most unfortunate incident,” but there is a translator’s footnote suggesting that “stolen moments” contains a verb for “seeing,” which implies sexual intimacy.)

Shortly later:

Her highness continued to lament the misery of her lot, and meanwhile she began feeling more and more unwell, so that she could not make up her mind to go straight back to the palace, despite a stream of messengers from there urging her to do so. No, she really did not feel herself, and her silent guesses at what this might mean reduced her to despair over what was to become of her.

She rose less and less during the summer heat. By the third month her condition was obvious enough that her women noticed it, and the horror of her fate overwhelmed her. Not knowing what had actually happened, they expressed surprise that she had not yet told His Majesty. She alone understood just what the matter was. Women like Ōmyōbu or her own foster sister, Ben, who had attended her intimately when she bathed and therefore had before their eyes every clue to her condition, did not doubt that something was seriously wrong, but they could not very well discuss the matter, and Ōmyōbu was left to reflect in anguish that her mistress’s fate had struck after all. To His Majesty, Ōmyōbu presumably reported that a malevolent spirit had obscured Her Highness’s condition, so that at first it had gone unnoticed. This was at any rate what Her Highness’s own women believed. His Majesty was deeply concerned about her, and the unbroken procession of messengers from him inspired mingled dread and despair.

But no need to fear, at least so far. I’m only about 200 pages into the 1100-or-so pages of The Tale of Genji, but the little boy has been born, and though the narrator tells us he looks just exactly like Genji, the emperor and everyone else seem to think that since Genji is so damned beautiful, how could anyone else so beautiful fail to look a lot like him? The little tyke even appears to be on the road to becoming emperor himself one day.

(And this book—ostensibly written by a Japanese noblewoman about 1000 years ago—continues to be excellent and entertaining, and of everything I’ve read in the last year would be my most unreserved recommendation to any amateur lover of books.)

June 24, 2009 · Literature, Quotations · (No comments)

The Wire, Seasons Two & Three

There are these people with the remarkable predilection, after having discovered a television show that they like, to get all the DVDs and to make their way through the whole series crazy fast. I’m not one of these people. Two people I follow on Twitter who reported starting on The Wire long after I had finished the first season have now finished the series while I’m still in the middle of Season Four. I have no doubt that it is among the best shows in the history of television, and perhaps it is the very best. And I own the complete set of DVDs. I’m just lousy at regular DVD watching. A dog-eared book on the coffee table or night stand? No problem. Magazine that imposes itself on me, presenting its most recent installment into my mailbox each week or month? I’m scanning the table of contents before making it back up my driveway. The unending flow of blogs regenerating in Google Reader? To the point of distraction and unfortunately beyond, I’m on them. But I just can’t figure out this serial DVD watching. I’d probably do better if I were trying to catch its weekly television broadcast—or even aware of a growing Tivo queue to prune. But it’s always there, neither growing nor diminishing, no urgency at all, tucked away on a shelf. Maybe I should set it out in a more obvious place to get my attention.

I’ve got a few weeks away from school, so maybe I’ll finally finish. I would like to go back to the beginning, but maybe that’ll have to wait awhile.

Thoughts on seasons two and three:

(1) Most intriguing and perhaps most unlikely character: Brother Mouzone. Where can such a man come from, and can he even be? A neatly-dressed, bow-tied and jacketed, eloquent Muslim killer-for-hire who reads all the same magazines I do. The allusion seems to be, at least superficially, to the Nation of Islam (or perhaps their paramilitary wing), but no such affiliation is ever mentioned by name; and his showing up to provide muscle for a drug operation doesn’t seem to be a good fit. I immediately wondered about his background, about the world that could have produced a Brother Mouzone, and hoped the series would be up to exploring it, but it seems not to be.

Ah, but they do say where he is from: New York. Of course. And he is thus one more facet (maybe the plainest, actually) of the nebulous but recurring role of New York City on the periphery of The Wire (and of Baltimore?). In Brokeback Mountain—I don’t remember whether the movie or the short story or both—either Jack or Ennis wonders exasperatedly what people do who find themselves in their situation, and the other says he doesn’t know, they must go to Denver or something. Denver might be Athens or Babylon, it’s fairly close but strangely far away, quite like here and full of people from here but bigger than here and more complicated and mysterious and maybe frightening, and just as much of the rest of the world as of here, or maybe where the rest of the world and here meet, so really not like here at all. This might be something like the relation people have with nearby cities everywhere; but Baltimore is itself a city, its inhabitants not rural people, and yet something like this relation seems to be what the hazy presence of New York City on the horizon means in The Wire. And of course Brother Mouzone is from there. I want to know about his world, but The Wire just places it in New York and doesn’t have the audacity to go there. I suppose he stands in for the bigness of the world, and for the non-exhaustiveness of The Wire‘s depiction of it—that the Barksdale empire should have connections all the way to NYC and to people like Brother Mouzone!—but I’m not sure whether to think his mysteriousness is a strength of the show, or if its inability to account for him is a weakness and its appeal to him a gimmick. I do want to like him, in either case.

(2) After my growing excitement and awe over the first season, my first impression of the second, taken together, is that it seems to be less of a whole. This is one reason I want to go back to the beginning, since I’m not sure whether this impression is accurate or an artifact of viewing the first season without many expectations and then placing the second into the context of the first. But it seemed to me that the show could have finished after the first season and been a complete entity, and an admirable work of art, while the second season had a different rhythm and sent out more narrative threads. It occurred to me that the first season, at least in outline, might have been made without expectation of continued funding, but that the second season was anticipating the continuation of the series. I don’t know whether it happened that way, but that’s how it felt to me. At the end of the first season, the second might never have come, or it could have come and done anything; at the end of the second, I thought I could tell basically how the third would have to start.

(3) The feds are generally presented as being hyper-competent, having unlimited money and resources, and being utterly uninterested in what’s going on locally. Their distance, their powerful but transient influence, their mysterious depths and mostly superficial depiction, make their role not entirely unlike that of New York. (If ever there is anything like a deus ex machina in The Wire, it will be connected either to New York or the feds.)

The way the feds deflate the local investigation into The Greek was maddening, and though it’s not hard to believe that this is often quite how it works in such a vast web of bureaucracies and competing interests, I want to believe there’s a better way. So this guy is helping you with information in your investigation into international terrorism, and he’s under investigation for unrelated crimes by another agency. Tip him off and spoil their investigation, or communicate with that agency? I suppose if you’re dealing with very sensitive stuff you don’t want to create any new possibility for leaks. Also a possibility is that you don’t give a shit about that agency or their investigation. But really? Is this how it has to be? Can there be no better way? (That may be a fairly characteristic reaction to the show in general, I guess.)

(4) In the way that the first season is clearly about the drug trade and the Barksdale empire, and the second is clearly about the longshoremen, the third season is not so clearly about anything. From what I had heard, I anticipated its being similarly focused, but on city politics. It seemed instead to be more like a return to the first season, but with a newly expanded scope. Is this because local politics is by itself less whole and delimited than the drug trade or the docks? Because, quite the contrary, it is too isolated, and would too much change the character of the show? Because the one-season-one-setting paradigm is wrong?

(5) Perhaps the most obvious foray into concrete public policy debate is the “Hamsterdam” plotline. They make it unambiguous several times, someone or other saying in disbelief to Major Colvin, “You legalized drugs.” And despite the unsubtlety of that repeated assertion, I appreciated the subtlety in their depiction. The “legalization” does have immediate and obvious beneficial effects, but they don’t shy away from the ugliness, either, which makes for a more fair-minded look at the problem of drugs and the law than most.

I’m now working my way slowly through Season Four. The understanding of the public school system is remarkable, and not just of the classroom, which movies and television are notoriously bad at. The look of the school, the meetings. Oh, the meetings. Watching the school scenes, after trial-by-fire in Mississippi, is unspeakably bizarre. It manifests physically. I feel dazed and slightly giddy, utterly enthralled. Mary goes noticeably pale and sweaty, and wants to turn it off.

May 27, 2009 · Literature · 3 comments

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