Introduction

[Madhukar Vichare]

Finns
(phiha means angry but wicked man), who intro­duced a birch-tree
sweetener for gum, have found that the habit of chewing sticky lumps dates back
thousands of years. Last month, students in west­ern Finland found a piece of Stone Age birch-bark tar, be­lieved
to have been used for chewing and to fix broken ar­rowheads or clay dishes, ar­chaeologists
said. "Most likely the lump was used as an antique kind of chewing
gum," said Sami Vil­jamaa, an archaeologist who led the dig near Oulu, (Aulanam - Lake) north of Helsinki (helihi -the sun; sina – a period of “No Moon” night
when the small part of Moon is visible at certain latitudes). "But its main pur­pose was to fix things."
Vilja­maa said the piece of Neolith­ic gum was found among arti­facts in a
Stone Age village at the Kierikki (Kairavaḥ - Moon-lit-Night) Stone Age Center. "It's somewhere between 5,500 and 6,000 years
old," he said. The ancient Finnish habit of chewing gum surged in the
1980s when scientists discov­ered that gum containing xyl­itol prevented tooth
decay. 

 

Egyptian
archaeolo­gists have found what they said could be the oldest hu­man footprint
in history in the country's western desert, the Arab country's antiquities'
chief said. "This could go back about two million years," said Zahi
Hawass, the sec­retary general of the Egypt­ian supreme council of an­tiquities.
"It could be the most im­portant discovery in Egypt," he said. Archaeologists found the footprint,
imprinted on mud and then hardened into rock, while exploring a pre­historic
site in Shiwa (Shiva in search of water for cooling down), a desert
oasis. Scientists are using car­bon tests on plants found in the rock to
determine its ex­act age, Hawass said. Khaled Saad, the direc­tor of prehistory
at the council, said that based on the age of the rock where the footprint was
found, it could date back even fur­ther than the renowned 3­million year-old
fossil Lucy, the partial skeleton of an ape-man, found in Ethiopia in 1974. Most archaeological in­terest in Egypt is focused on the time of the pharaohs. Previously,
the earliest human archaeological evi­dence from Egypt dated back around 200,000 years, Saad said. 

 

I
have highlighted my views of looking at the old concepts with new insights in
view of the new knowledge: The subject of INDOLOGY will be meaningful.              Madhukar Vichare.

 

Anandamurti
JI wrote for the “Speaking Tree” (On Religion): 

 

Taraka
(Tarkaha
or Taaraka) Brahma wants to eman­cipate living beings, but only those who want
liberation get liberation. When you long for liberation, the search leads you
to the Sadguru. Every one of us has a fixed role to play. You are a character
in a divine drama. The composer of this drama is Taaraka Brahma. An episode in
the Maha­bharata is instructive in this regard: After battle, the battle­ground
at Kurukṣetra became a cremation ground. At the end of the war
some people came there from the Kauravas' side. Among them were women and a few
elderly men. Gandhaari, mother of the Kauravas, was also there. Kuntī, mother of the Pandavas, and Krushna, Pandavas'
friend, were present as well, along with the visually challenged Dhrutarashtra.
Everyone was weeping. Gandhaari had lost hundred sons in the war. Krushna
approached Gandhaari and said: "Mother, why are you weeping? Death is a
naturallay. One who is born will die. So why cry?" Gandhaari replied:
"Yes Krushna, you have come here to console me, but I ask you, behind this
great event whose mind was at work? Who was the author of this great plan? Was
it not you?" Krushna replied: "Those who have committed injustice and
sinned have been punished. What can I do about that?" Gandhaari said to Krushna:
"Everything you have said up un­til now is quite correct. From the worldly
point of view, everything that has happened until now is as it should be,
because every action must have its reaction. But my point is: You yourself are
Taaraka Brahma; your duty is to liberate living beings. You can give libera­tion
to whomsoever you please.

 

'As
Taaraka Brahma you can create and destroy as you wish. In this drama of yours
you have created characters who are honest, ideological people. If one does
virtuous deeds then one gets liberation. To teach the people you create these
kinds of characters. And you also create sinful charac­ters to show how much a
person degenerates because of sinful behavior. In this drama, you could have
had my hundred sons play roles of righteousness and the Pandavas play roles of
unright­eousness, if you had so wished. In that case my hundred sons would have
gotten salvation. Now, after having made me cry, you come to console me!" Taaraka
Brahma for­mulates his plan in order to create situations that lend themselves
to illustrating values, to create awareness. For instance, if one engages in
honest work then one moves towards eternal truth, and if one performs dishonest
work then one moves towards untruth. Thereafter comes the other part of the
story.

 

Gandhaari
said: "Kṛṣṇa, give me permission to curse you". Krushna
replied: "Okay, curse me. I give you permission". Gandhaari cursed
him: "Just as my entire lineage has been destroyed before my very eyes,
may your Yaadava lineage be destroyed before your very eyes as well".
"Let it be so", Krushna replied. Remember always that we are only
actors in a universal drama. This is not our real identity. Some­one may play
the role of a king, but he might not even have two hand­fuls of rice in his
house. Someone plays the role of a poor man, but in real life he may be very
rich. We ought to remember that we are only playing specific roles in a cosmic
drama. Act according to the role given. This is a person's duty. This is a
wrong note to end the moral of the “Cosmic Drama” – Man must keep on bettering
his lot; learning new things, and keeping himself fit to fight against the
odds. He must use his intelligence and apply his mind. Krushna is not
coming to salvage your soul; man has to come up to the expectation of the Super
Personality of Godhead- it is symbolic, you have to become Krushna.

 

Uyuni
is in Bolivia: On the edge of the world's biggest salt desert,
villagers optimistical­ly scrawl "salt for sale" signs on their mud
brick homes. In backyards, mountains of the stuff are heaped like year-­round
snow drifts. But mining salt is no longer the only way to survive in this cold,
arid corner of south­western Bolivia. The Salar de Uyuni is becoming a must-see for
adventurous visitors to South
 America, changing at least
some fortunes in the poor village of Colchani. "There's nothing here apart from salt... Tourists used to arrive
and they wouldn't buy anything, so we thought, 'How can we improve
things?" said Fermin Villca, who now sells ashtrays and llama fig­urines
carved from salt stone. Stretched between distant Andean peaks like a shimmer­ing
white carpet, the Salar de Uyuni is home to pink flamin­gos, 1,000-year-old
cacti, rare hummingbirds and hotels built entirely from blocks of salt. Earlier
this year, leading travel publisher Rough Guides listed the Salar as one of its
top 25 wonders of the world, along side far better-known attrac­tions such as
the Taj Mahal, Grand Canyon and Great
 Wall of China. 

 

A
gargantuan explosion ripped apart a star perhaps 150 times more mas­sive than
our Sun in a rela­tively nearby galaxy in the most powerful and brightest
supernova ever observed, as­tronomers said. And there is one such star in our
own Milky Way galaxy that appears to be on the brink of dying in just
such a super­nova. The exploding star's dra­matic death may have come in a rare
type of supernova reserved for "freakishly mas­sive" stars that
astronomers had speculated about but nev­er previously witnessed. The
supernova, designat­ed as SN 2006gy, occurred 240 million light years
away in a galaxy called NGC 1260, and was studied using observa­tions from NASA's
orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory as well as earthbound optical telescopes.. The
explosion occurred long ago but was detected last year after its light traveled
many trillions of kilometers before it could be observed from Earth. "That
sounds far away but it's actually quite nearby on the vast scale of the uni­verse,"
astronomer Nathan Smith of the University of California at Berkeley, who led the research, said. A supernova marks a star's
death in a spectacular explosion. Scientists say these events playa crucial role
in creating heavy ele­ments through nuclear fu­sion and synthesis and then
expelling them into space, seeding the cosmos with metals. 

 

The
travel of Manu and the great Fish, a symbolic story of the Puraana, the event
that occurred 10,000 BCE (ca): An
event like the one involving Noah's ark is depicted in- almost every ­ ancient
civilization or religion: Naunet in Egyptian; Manu in Hindu; Nuwa in Chinese;
Ziusudra in Sumerian; Atra-Hasis, Utnapishtim and Xisuthrus in Babylonian;
Deucalion in Greek; and Toptlipetlocali in Toltec. Noah is also mentioned often
in the Qumran, referred to as the prophet ‘Nuh’. All the names are
the corruption of original Sanskrit words used in Vedic rituals by the Āryans.

 

For
many scientists, the evi­dence that moral reasoning is a result of physical
traits that evolve along with everything else is just more evidence against
the exis­tence of the soul, or of a God to imbue humans with souls. For
many believers, particularly in the US, the findings show the er­ror, even wickedness, of
viewing the world in strictly material terms. And they provide for the­ologians
a growing impetus to rec­oncile the existence of the soul with the growing
evidence that humans are not, physically or even mentally, in a class by
themselves. The idea that human minds are the product of evolution is
"unassailable fact," the journal Nature said this month in an ed­itorial
on new findings on the physical basis of moral thought. A headline on the
editorial drove the point home: "With all defer­ence to the sensibilities
of reli­gious people, the idea that man was created in the image of God can
surely be put aside." Or as V S Ramachandran, a brain scientist at the University of California, San Diego, said in an interview, there may be soul in the sense
of "the universal spir­it of the cosmos," but the soul as it is
usually spoken of, "an im­material spirit that occupies in­dividual brains
and that only evolved in humans - all that is complete nonsense." Belief
in that kind of soul "is basically super­stition," he said. 

 

Greenland
was home to a number of Paleo-Eskimo cultures in prehistory, the latest of which disappeared around the year 200
AD. The island seems to have been uninhabited for some eight centuries till
Icelandic settlers led by Norwegian Erik the Red found the land when they
arrived in 982 AD. They thrived here for 450 years, after which they
mysteriously vanished. 

 ­

The
term tetra-pod, from the Greek 'tetrapoda,' (Sanskrit-“totra-vetram”- weapon of
Viṣṇu- + pada means feet) refers to vertebrate animals
having four feet, legs or leg-like appendages. Amphibians, lizards and mammals
are all tetra-pods. The term auto-pod, however, is used to refer to animals
whose limbs are subdivided into hands and feet, example: Humans.

 

The
researchers therefore believe that the capability of building limbs with
fingers and toes existed for a long period of time, but it took a set of
environmental triggers to make use of that capability. "Animals in the
Late Devonian period (385 to 359 million years ago) acquired limbs with fingers
using this primitive design, largely because their ecosystem - the small
streams that they lived in - was new," Shubin said "It had the tools,
but it needed the opportuni­ty as well." In yet another study on what
killed off the beasts of the Ice Age, researchers said that an extraterrestrial
object with a three-mile girth might have ex­ploded over southern Canada nearly
13,000 years ago, wiping out an ancient Stone Age culture as well as mega-fauna
like mastodons and mammoths. The blast could be to blame for a ma­jor cold
spell called the Younger Dryas that occurred at the end of the Pleistocene
Epoch, a period of time spanning from about 1.8 million years ago to 11,500
years ago. Research, presented at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union
(AGU) in Acapulco, Mexico this week, could shed light on major questions about
the mega-fauna extinction, the disappear­ance of the Clovis people, and an
abrupt climate change, Live-science reported. "Based on the distribution
of mate­rial, it looks like this impact probably occurred in southern Canada near the Great Lakes, over
what at that time would have been a major glacier, the Laurentide ice
sheet," said one of the presen­ters, Richard Firestone of Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratory. They couldn't find a distinct crater, suggesting the comet
burst in the air rather than slamming into Earth. Even an airburst should leave
its mark, so the scientists think the Laurentide Ice Sheet absorbed much of the
impact.

 

A
huge flood hundreds of thou­sands of years ago cut Britain off from the rest of Europe and turned it into an
island, according to a new study that of­fers clues to how England was settled.
Using high-resolution sonar waves, researchers mapped the floor of the Eng­lish Channel and turned up images of an enormous valley tens of
kilometers wide and up to 50 meters deep carved into chalk bedrock. The images
were similar to an area in the state of Washington where a mega-flood some 15,000 years ago also created
a landscape of distinctive land formations - indicating that the same thing
happened in Britain, the re­searchers said. Scientists said the study
provides the best evidence yet in the de­bate seeking to explain how the English Channel formed and cut Britain off from the rest of Europe.
"It showed us for the first time the ex­istence of this huge valley in the
centre of the English Channel," said Sanjeev Gupta, a researcher at Imperial
College London. 

 

Mexican
archaeologists using ground-penetrating radar have detected underground
chambers they believe contain the remains of Emperor Ahuizotl, who ruled
the Aztecs when Columbus landed in the Americas. Ahuizotl (ah-WEE-zoh-tuhl), an empire-builder who
extended the Aztecs' reach as far as Guatemala, in South
 America, was the last
emperor to complete his rule before the Spanish Conquest. Accounts written by
Spanish priests suggest the said area was used by the Aztecs to cremate and
bury their rulers. But no tomb of an Aztec ruler has ever been found. Now,
archaeologists said that they have located what appears to be a
Six-foot-by-six-foot entryway into a tomb about 15 feet below ground, off Mexico City's Zocalo plaza. The passage is filled with water,
rocks and mud, forcing work­ers to dig delicately. Later this year, they hope
to enter the inner chambers - a damp, low-ceilinged space - and discover the
ashes of Ahuizotl, who was likely cremated on a funeral pyre in 1502. Because
no Aztec royal tomb has ever been found, the archaeologists are literally
digging into the unknown. Radar indicates the tomb has up to four chambers, and
scientists think they will find a host of elaborate offerings to the gods on
the floor. "He must have been buried in solemn ceremony with rich
offerings, like vases and ornaments," said Luis Alberto Martos, director
of archaeological studies at Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History.

 

All
signs found so far point to Ahuizotl. The site lies direct­ly below a huge,
recently discovered stone monolith carved with a representation of Tlaltecuhtli
(tlahl-tay-KOO-tlee), the Aztec god of the earth. Depicted as a woman with huge
claws, the fearsome Tlaltecuhtli was believed to devour the dead and then give
them new life. In the claw of her right foot, the god holds a rabbit and 10
dots, indicating the date "10 Rabbit" - 1502, the year of Ahuizotl's
death. "Our hypothesis is precisely that this is probably the tomb of
Ahuizotl," said Leonardo Lopez Lujan, the lead government archaeologist on
the project. "Imagine it - this wasn't just any high-ranking man. The
Aztecs were the most powerful society of their time," Martos said.
"That's why Ahuizotl's tomb down there is so important."         

 

The
Aztecs is a term used for the Mesoamerican peoples of Mexico that thrived before the advent of Christopher
Columbus in the Americas. Aztec
culture had rich and complex mythological and religious traditions. For
Europeans, the most striking element of the Aztec culture was the practice of
human sacrifice which was conducted throughout Mesoamerica prior to the Spanish conquest Greenland was home to a number of Paleo-Eskimo cultures in prehistory, the
latest of which disappeared around the year 200 AD. The island seems to have
been uninhabited for some eight centuries till Icelandic settlers led by
Norwegian Erik the Red found the land when they arrived in 982 AD. They thrived
here for 450 years, after which they mysteriously vanished. Archeologists have
discovered what they think are ruins of an Aztec pyramid razed by vengeful
Spanish conquerors in what is now one of Mexico City's most crime-ridden districts. Construction workers
un­earthed ancient walls in the busy Iztapalapa neighbor­hood in June, and
government archeologists said on Wednes­day that they believe they may be part
of the main pyramid of the Aztec city, destroyed by conquistador Hernan Cortes
in the 16th century. 

 

In
the Gothic Bible, 'þiudans' is used of a king who goes to war: 



aiþþau hvas þiudans gaggands stigqan wiþra anþarana þiudan (vipra praana-yukta pinda) du wiganna, niu
gasitands faurþis þankeiþ, siaiu mahteigs miþ taihun þusundjom gamotjan þamma
miþ twaim tigum þusundjo gaggandin ana sik?



Or what king, going to make war against another king, sitteth not down first,
and consulteth whether he be able with ten thousand to meet him that cometh
against him with twenty thousand? 

Luke 14:31.



'frauja' (Praanaaha) "lord"
is also used with no Greek model for the noun in a military context (II Tim
2:4). I'm not sure whether 'reiks' is used anywhere in an explicitly military
context.



I am not a linguist but as far as I know they were reiks also when leading a
war expedition. Their sacral king, however, was never allowed to leave his own
territory when the people was permanently settled, but had to order a reiks (Rushis
–wandering Sages) to take command. During the wandering, according to Getica at
least, the þiuðans was sacral king and he used 'kings of the army' to lead
parts of the united army (like e.g. Cniva as Wolfram suggests) but I do not
know their title in Gothic. 

 

The clue to the root of the
hypothetical Gothic form though is in Old Norse 'ugla' and especially (Old) Swedish 'uggla'. These show a sound change common to North and East Germanic
whereby 'ww' > 'ggw', as described by Wright. In Old Norse, the medial vowel
of the suffix has been lost, which is normal, but presumably it would have been
present in Gothic (compare 'mawilo'
"little girl" San – mahilaa meaning a woman), and the 'w' has
been dropped, as always between two consonants. So, I'd reconstruct Gothic
*'uggwilo': weak noun, feminine on-stem, i.e. declined like 'mawilo', 'tuggo',
etc. One last clue is the Catalan word 'òliba', (San. – Ulooka) which it's been suggested may be derived from the
Gothic word for owl 

2.
örn "eagle" (San. – utkrosha)





Elof
Hellquist's Svensk etymologisk ordbok. 6 is especially interesting; both roots
are attested in Gothic. This would make a very handy addition to our
reconstructed "modern" vocabulary. There

is a Gothic derivative from the same root as 2 recorded, namely 'ara' "eagle",
cognate with Old Norse 'ari', but since ON had 'örn' (San. – “ara” one going with speed) there's no reason Gothic couldn't
have had both words too. 

 

Ah,
no need for embarrassment! I was just thinking of it as an exercise in phonetic
reconstruction. In other words, what would a Gothic cognate of (word descended
from the same Proto-Germanic

ancestor as) Modern English 'wood' look like? But you're right 'triu' does mean
"a tree" (San. – “taru” means
tree also wood,) or "a stick". I guess that illustrates another issue
in reconstruction: where a word already exists in the same semantic field, how
might that have related to the meaning of a hypothetical, reconstructed Gothic
cognate? Does that make sense?



In this case, it seems that the better attested early Germanic languages did
have a few partly overlapping words in this semantic field, e.g. Old Norse has a word 'viðr' which is
cognate with 'wood', as well as a word 'tré' congate with English 'tree'.
So there's nothing improbably about supposing Gothic had cognates for both,
even though only one, 'triu', is recorded.





The
gist is this: initial 'b' in English corresponds to Gothic 'b' (as in Go.
'broþar' : Modern English 'brother' Sanskrit
is “Bhaartru”)-- no catch there. I found a comparison chart but it didn't
tell me what to do with initial B, medial TH, or final -M, let alone the
morpheme -AM, so I'm a little lost right now.

other Indo-European languages (e.g. Latin 2nd declension nouns ending
in -um, Greek in -on, Sanskrit in -am).

The
3rd person singular 

(he/she/it does/is doing smth) ends in –iþ for the verbs used in the story.
"He's sleeping" is 'slepiþ' (from 'slepan' "to sleep" San. Root is “svap” - svapiti). The
last sentence is in subjunctive, but you can have a simpler translation. 

 

Some vocabulary you need: early morning – air uhtwon clothes – wasti  (Sanskrit
– Vastra) F.-jo (that is, feminine jo-stem) staff – hrugga F.-o to push –
stigqan to get awake – gawaknan to climb up – ussteigan to look like – wisan
galeiks (lit. "to be like") + noun in dative ("he's looking like
A." is 'ist galeiks A.'). Don't forget to put the A. ("owl" in
our case) in dative.

 

That
is, "I take" is 'nima' (from
'niman' "to take" Sanskrit word “nirgam” means get off, get away from
– ni-sru). The 3rd person singular (he/she/it does/is doing smth) ends in
–iþ for the verbs used in the story. "He's sleeping" is 'slepiþ'
(from 'slepan' "to sleep"). The last sentence is in subjunctive, but
you can have a simpler translation.





early
morning – air uhtwon; Sanskrit – ushas;






to
push – stigqan; Sanskrit – saahasin; to
climb up – ussteigan, San. – upari gama;

*kiggwan, OE cíowan, (San. –
‘charvanam”) ON tyggva? 6. däggdjur "mammal"





So
you are through with your Aztec torment,
unlike me. Everyone saying that Gothic is difficult should be immediately
reminded of the existence of Nahuatl.
A couple remarks. Ilnâmiqui is "to remember", right? Niquilnâmiqui –  þis (or þata) [ik] ga-man? Iirc 'cân' can be
both directional and stative. I mean weren't it better to say 'þarei' with
'ainshun ni gaswiltiþ' and 'manna sigis nimiþ'? Is it the 'îchân tônatiuh', the
place? An interesting parallel between 'in yâômiqui' and einherjar...





Irish
Suibhne geilt living on trees and perhaps also the Nahuatl (Aztec) word for "demon" (= Go. skohsl) –
tlâcatecolôtl, lit. "man-owl", used in the Anales de Cuauhtitlan of
the gods whom human sacrifices were due to.





 



--- On Tue, 3/6/08, Fredrik <gadrauhts at hotmail.com> wrote:
From: Fredrik <gadrauhts at hotmail.com>
Subject: [gothic-l] Re: Introduction
To: gothic-l at yahoogroups.com
Date: Tuesday, 3 June, 2008, 8:05 PM










    
            It's always nice with presentations so we can know a little about 

each other but why not just write some words here?



--- In gothic-l at yahoogroup s.com, Madhukar Vichare 

<madhukar_vichare@ ...> wrote:

>

> Most of my groups encourage members to share a bit about 

themselves, so I hope

> this is ok to post here. 

> 

> I just setup a profile on Grouply where you can see my photos, 

friends,

> interests, and a list of my groups. You can see my profile and set 

up your own

> here:  http://www.grouply. com/register. php?

tmg=260177&amp; vt=170949  

> 

> Look forward to seeing your profile! 

> 

> Madhukar 

> 

> ============ ========

> This message was posted by a fellow group member who uses Grouply 

instead of

> email to access this group. Grouply blocks additional invitations 

from being

> sent to this group by anyone for 30 days. Group owners can 

permanently block

> future invitations using Grouply Owner Controls:

> http://blog. grouply.com/ protect#prevent_ invites . 

> 

> 

> 

> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

>




      

    
    
	
	 
	
	








	


	
	


      Bollywood, fun, friendship, sports and more. You name it, we have it on http://in.promos.yahoo.com/groups/bestofyahoo/

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