Still more on "mother"

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A week or so ago, I wrote a post about the notion of "mother" in Indian phonology (with a link to an earlier post written over a year ago about the concept of "mother" in linguistics more generally):

"More on mother' (focus on India) " (8/5/15)

Ben Buckner has called additional information to my attention.  Because the new material is fairly substantial, I did not want it to get buried as a comment to the previous post, which is no longer active.  Consequently, I am presenting this additional material from Ben as a separate post of its own.

I found something else which might be relevant to this – Bernard Frank in Dieux et bouddhas au Japon points out the connection between the use of Prakrit mata (matrka) to designate vowels and the vowel diacritics in the Siddham script. His Japanese sources unambiguously connect that vowel term to the matr-mother root rather than the matra-measure root. He doesn't connect it to mater lectionis, but I think this shows that matra and matrka are in use in this context at least back to the Siddham period and probably from the same root, as one would naturally assume.

Midway on p. 333 Frank links the Siddham usage to the Japanese jimo, which is of course the Japanese on reading of zimu 字母. The way he looks at it, and it's supported by quotes from Japanese Sanskritists, the Siddham characters are viewed as a fusion of two halves, a consonant body and a vowel (mother-ka). This seems to me to be consistent with the Sanskrit usage matrkaksara to denote whole characters, though Frank takes the consonant term to be equivalent to vjanjana (consonant stricto sensu) rather than aksara. I'd say Frank pretty well proves that the Sino-Japanese usage of 字母 is linked to the Indic usage of matrka though.

Note:

MSM zìmǔ / Jap. jibo 字母 ("letter [of the alphabet]")
Frank notes that jibo is the modern pronunciation, the standard on. I suppose that jimo is the old goon reading.

References:

Bernard Frank.  Dieux et bouddhas au Japon (Odile Jacob, 2000), pp. 331-332.

Robert Hans van Gulik.  Siddham: An Essay on the History of Sanskrit Studies in China and Japan.  International Academy of Indian Culture, 1956.

Saroj Kumar Chaudhuri.  "Siddham in China and Japan", Sino-Platonic Papers, 88 (December, 1988), 9, 124 pages.

__________.  Sanskrit in China and Japan.  New Delhi:  International Academy of Indian Culture and Aditya Prakashan, 2011.

 



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