From: Rick McCallister
Message: 53429
Date: 2008-02-16
> 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
>
>
>
>
>