Talk:Vedas/Archive 1

message: This sounds like religous dogma to me and is presented as historical fact:
"The Vedas were compiled by the great sage Krishna Dwipayana during the Dwapara Yuga with the goal to come up with a de-facto standard of education. Upon gathering all the teachings passed on from the Acharyas(Teachers) to their Sishyas(Students) from Kingdom to Kingdom" 
Another example:
"The Vedas are considered Shruti (or Sruti), or revealed texts. They were not given by a prophet, but heard by many different Rishis (or very advanced Yogis) during deep meditation"
--Qweniden 16:32, 24 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Why should the origin of Vedas be considered mythical? After all a poem is written by a human. And why should the sages be considered mythical if a book clearly mentions the name, geneology, and region from which they hail (Upamanyu was a Kamboja, probably Charsadda in Afghanistan, and Vishwamitra was a Kaushik, from Kusha-dwip, grass-land, probably the steppes of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan). Why should these personages be considered mythical without any proof? These were real persons. There is correct cross reference in various verses. Aupmanyav 13:35, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Major Point of View problems with this article 

message: The article states that vedas were composed 5,000 to 20,000 years ago. pls check this
sandy
for all of you who think that it is the "scholarly consenus" that 1500BC is the legitimate date, I urge you to contact Professor Santucci of California State University Fullerton.  
http://faculty.fullerton.edu/jsantucci/
He is the head of comparitive religion and also an "indologist" that is well versed Sanskrit, the Upanishads, and the Vedas.
He himself has stated that the dating on the Vedas is speculative and there isnt a single shred of proof for 1500BC.  
If anything, all of the proof points to a much older date.
So no, it is NOT the "scholarly consensus" that the Vedas are dated to 1500 BC.
Anonymous, please register with Wikipedia and give yourself an identity. I agree with you. 1500 BC is orientalist bullship for something which may be 15000 years old. Aupmanyav 02:31, 19 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The dating of Taittiriya Samhita can be stated quite accurately. This was when it was found that sun rose in Pleidas (Krittika) instead of Orion (Mrigashiras). That gives us a date of 2,500 BCE. B.G.Tilak in his 'Aryan Homes in Vedas' opines that the European and Iranian branches had separated from the Indian branch. Avestan story of Yima saving species of humans, animals, and vegetation by keeping them in an enclosure (Vara) is the original deluge story and is 20,000 years old. When the story reached regions where there was no snow, it changed into a deluge by water. New research has found that at least some parts of the RigVeda existed in prose before they were versified by later makers of Samhitas. The culture, of course, kept on changing and is found in India today with its admixture of indigenous Hindu culture and in Parsis as modified by Zarathrushta. Aupmanyav 18:34, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

text: Vedas are called shruti. They were transferred vocally from generation to generation, when some one decided to write them down. If anything can be said about their history, it will only be about when they were written down as text, and not at all about when they were created. As far as 1500 years is concerned, that date is debated from long time. As a matter of fact, there has been a lot of other debates about mention of vanishing of river Saraswati in vedas, or is really Saraswati, or if the date concides with Indus valley civilizations etc. All in all, it is debated. The article should mention this inherent inaccuracy in determining the correct date and move along.-- Anupamsr|talk |contribs  05:54, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I am referring to the last two unsigned posts. Dr. Stuart Ray Sarbacker is a ternured professor at Northwestern university and the poster believes that he is the chairperson of the religious studies department. But he/she has forgotten to mention why what Sarbacker says must be accepted by the whole world? Only Mandala I and X are in Sanskrit, the other eight are older and in Vedic Sanskrit. How does the coming of existence of Sanskrit in 150 AD (some people give 400 BC as Panini's date) give any idea about the dating of Vedas. The two things are completely different. Since writing came only in 1500 BC, we have to look for other pointers to the antiquity of Vedas. Basically the astronomical references in Vedas. The Vedas mention Vernal Equinox on the day when sun rose in the asterism of Orion. If we accept that it brings the reference to 4000 BC. There is also a mention of "Aditi being the beginning and end of Satra (the annual yagna cycle)". Aditi is related to asterism Punarvasu. If we accept that it bring the reference to 6,500 BC. Aupmanyav 17:49, 2 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Anupamsr, perhaps there were many Saraswatis in history apart from the mythical one, i.e., the milky way. Even the croats say that their name 'hrv' derives from Haravaiti. Hari-rud and Helmand also can claim to be Saraswatis at different periods of time. Alexander met the Arians in Merv, the second homeland of Aryans according to Avesta. Indian Saraswati was in their fifteenth homeland. Geologists opine that Indian Saraswati dried up around 1900 BC due to the capture of Sutlej by Indus and the capture of Yamuna by Ganges due to techtonic movements and what remains is the intermittant streams of Gagghar in Haryana, Hakra and Nakra in Rajasthan and Sindh. So the 1500 BC date is just funny. RigVedic language changed many a times, even at the time of Brahmanas, it was unintelligble to its votaries, and repeated attempts were made all through the history to ascertain the correct meaning of verses. Aupmanyav 08:33, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I am not very knowledgeable about Vedas as such, so I don't feel I can put any strong statement as fact. I agree to what you are saying, and that is exactly what I was saying. I main point was, that if something is debated, we should mention that and be done with it. In forming an article, it is hardly ever the case that you do everything one by one and at the end have a good article. Instead, we should make the article 'complete' as soon as possible, in literary sense; and then we can debate about the debatable facts, and remove/replace/add stuff. It is nothing about the date, just mention any date and say it is debatable (may be explain how) and focus on other parts that need attention. I hope I make myself clear :)--æn↓þæµß¶-ŧ-¢ 08:47, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Vedic Dating Continued 

message: this should be moved to Veda (singular), like Brahmana, Aranyaka, Upanishad (also Shrautasutra, Grhyasutra). dab 08:54, 17 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: move

message: Moved from Wikipedia:Copyright problems
*Vedas (old edition) from . From "There is hardly any Hindu" up to "Why this circumlocution?" - Vague | Rant 07:56, Nov 21, 2004 (UTC)
**203.199.120.7 is a serial copyright violator. I have commented on his user page twice, and since I have noticed that in addition to violations I have found, BrokenSegue also removed Problems In Hinduism, a repost of Riddle In Hinduism, which I removed. - Vague | Rant 08:10, Nov 21, 2004 (UTC)
End moved text
Copyvio revisions deleted from article history. -- Cyrius|✎ 01:32, 20 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Copyvio 

message: Vedas are also referred to as Vedam in the various Indian languages. Hence i added "Vedam" too as part of the intro to Vedas.
:Veda, Vedam, SrimadBhagawat, SrimadBhagawatham, Geeta, Gita, Geetha. Does it make any difference when we are thinking of these sublime philosophies. Aupmanyav 15:34, 28 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: "Veda"s are "Veda"s only in Sanskrit. If it's "Ved" with the final vowel absent you're probably looking at a North Indian spelling. If it's "Vedam" with an unnecessary 'm' in religious spellings you're probably looking at a South Indian spelling. Maquahuitl 14:59, 27 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Vedam 

message: I wanted to know the correct pronunciation, but there was nothing on the main entry page. I see one reference in the discussion here ("Ved-ah"?). If there is agreement amongst the scholarly, could this be added to the main page?
This confusion about a word ending with a vowel is common among non-native speakers of Indian languages. There is this characteristic among the different laguages of India where some words are pronunced ending with a vowel or consonant. For eg. "ved" in Hindi is equivalent to "veda" in Telugu. Silmilarly, for Ramayan/Ramayana, Mahabharat/Mahabharata, yug/yuga, swarn/swarna. Native Indian speakers do not see these differences as any significant but as mere differing phonetic forms. Sriwiki
Regarding Vedic/Sanskrit pronunciation:
All sounds in the older language were meant to retain their full value. Thus, final vowels were never dropped. Vedas was meant to be pronounced thus. The letter "A" was not written out
unless it appeared individually. Other vowels besides A, when preceeded by a consonant, were written out. Today, most Indian languages drop the final vowels from Sanskrit words, hence:
Raja becomes "Raj", Rama becomes "Ram", etc. This is incorrect and is simply a simplification and "modernizing" of Sanskrit based words. Hindi, Gujarati, Panjabi, etc, are languages that have retained some Sanskrit words (along with a staple of Irano-Arabic vocabulary) and a general Indo-European grammar.
By the time of the Grammarian Panini, Sanskrit was regarded as an almost "algebraic language" due to its increasingly complicated and stratified grammatical rules including: consonant and vowel replacements and substitutions, word and sound combinations, word fusions and amalgamations. A simple example of this is the fact that Sanskrit words are not seperated in a sentence but, rather, fuse into one continuous stream of Devnagari letters.
Additionally, Vedic was a musical, or tonal language in many aspects. Sanskrit retains a compendium of accents based on the earlier language but these really do not function in the same accord as the older language. Vedic/Sanskrit are highly inflected languages much like Latin, Old Greek, Modern Slavic languages and many North American Indian languages. In contrast Hindi, which uses Devnagari script, and Urdu, which uses an Arabic script, are both showing signs of drifting from an inflected state to a non-inflected state. Hence, modern Indian languages are streaming towards simplification. Most of the case endings in the modern Aryan based Indian languages have diminished along with the dual number and certain tenses. User: Michael Hajko
"Inflectionary" character has nothing to do here. Indian languages (Dravidian or non-Dravidian) have not changed a wee bit except for imbibing foreign words into their vocabulary. The drifting patterns with reference to inflection are imaginary and baseless. Unlike the old European languages with notable use of inflections, inflection is a rule for any constructed speech and grammar in Indian languages.  The non-observance of certain vowels at the end of words is characteristic of the language. The current day Hindi usage is vastly influenced by Urdu and related Arabic languages (where the word end vowel property is absent). Thus it turned out for the Hindi speakers a matter of convenience to ignore the vowel ending sounds.. prefer to call "Ram/Raj" than calling as "Rama/Raja" as in Sanskrit, Telugu or Kannada. This is the case not only for nouns but also for verbs and adjectives. The simplification with respect  to the vowel relaxation in North-Indian languages is not a drift but has existed since their association with Arabic languages. 
"Hindi, Gujarati, Panjabi, etc, are languages that have retained some Sanskrit words (along with a staple of Irano-Arabic vocabulary) and a general Indo-European grammar." The above quote is completely incorrect. There is hardly any Indian language that has not been sanskritised. Notable difference is about the North-Indian ("Indo-European/Aryan") languages that have a heavy Arabic flavor and vocab when compared to their South-Indian counterparts that have remained largely untouched. For the same reason, the classical Carnatic music (the traditional Hindu/Sanskrit music) is associated with Telugu/Tamil/Kannada/Malayalam (all Dravidian/Southern languages) and Sanskrit. Carnatic music is NOT composed in Hindi/Punjabi/Gujarati despite the Sanskrit presence, because, 1) the languages have not retained the Sanskrit flavor (though retained the words) 2) (/say consequence) a large number of Carnatic musicians have hailed from the South. In contrast, North Indian languages have become associated with Hindustani music (with heavy Arabic influences). Sriwiki 04:31, 27 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: It should be noted that the North-Indian languages that you mention to have a heavy Arabic or Persian flavour have retained nearly all their verbs from Sanskrit (Hasana, Khana, Peena, Rona, Gana, Aana, Jaana, Sona, Jagana, Karna, Marana, Jeena, ..). Should I say Urdu is 70% Sanskrit? Aupmanyav 04:11, 8 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The simplification with respect  to the vowel relaxation in North-Indian languages is not a drift but has existed since their association with Arabic languages. 
Apparently it may seem that North Indian languages have lost the final vowel because of the Islamic influence(better use the phrase 'languages of the Islamic rulers' rather than "Arabic languages" which is a senseless phrase). However this is not true. A simple proof towards this is that there are several names of people who lived before the Islamic rule but don't have a final 'a' vowel at the end of their names.
Notable difference is about the North-Indian ("Indo-European/Aryan") languages that have a heavy Arabic flavor and vocab when compared to their South-Indian counterparts that have remained largely untouched.... Carnatic music is NOT composed in Hindi/Punjabi/Gujarati despite the Sanskrit presence, because, 1) the languages have not retained the Sanskrit flavor (though retained the words) 2) (/say consequence) a large number of Carnatic musicians have hailed from the South. In contrast, North Indian languages have become associated with Hindustani music (with heavy Arabic influences). 
What does all this have to do with the topic at hand? Hindustani music has Persian not Arabic influences.  Seems you are bent on proving that all non-South Indians are half-Arabic. Maquahuitl 15:14, 27 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Pronunciation 

message: Substituted at 20:57, 4 May 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: Assessment comment