On 2008-02-16 16:22, kishore patnaik wrote:
> Coming from you, this is indeed a very strong reaction. Is it or is
> it not possible to clarify this dumb or otherwise question?
What for? I'm sure you now the answer in advance, which is precisely why
the question is dumb. Or maybe it's supposed to be Socratic. Assuming,
for the sake of the argument, that you are honestly interested in how we
can determine the direction of borrowing, here are some of the obvious
arguments:
(1) <jagan-na:tHa-> is a meaningful compound in Indo-Aryan, made up of
known Sanskrit elements ('world-lord'). Its earliest attestation as an
epithet dates back to the mid-1st millennium BC, a thousand years before
the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons in Britain.
(2) By contrast, <juggernaut> is first attested in the 17th c. It has no
internal etymology in English and can't be inherited (no English word
with initial /dZ/ can be). Its early use is with reference to Hindu
religious festivals.
(3) It's easy to trace the path from the title of Krishna to the English
metaphorical meaning (statues of Krishna --> the ceremonial chariot
carrying them and occasionally crushing people who get in its way -->
any relentless force to which people are sacrificed. There are no
problems with the phonetic derivation either (both the substitution of
/O:/ for Hindi /a:/ and the non-etymological <er> for /a/ make sense in
the light of what is known about English pronunciation in the 17th c.
and the way foreign loans were handled at that time).
Piotr