The best books in life are free

[muckefuck]

Not.

Ah, gift books! A treasure trove of the bizarre, the trivial, the irredeemably misguided. What do we have today? Why it's a treatise of the relationship of Sanskrit to English! Who's the author, a world reknown linguist? Um, not exactly. Okay, then, a self-taught scholar? You could say that--but why, when "retired barrister in Joliet" is what really fits?

Oh, lookit that, it opened naturally to the page where the paperwork was stuck in. Let's have a look-see:

Another language family is the Tibetan, Chinese, Thai, Burmese, Vietnamese, and Cambodian. Tibetan and Chinese belong to this family. The Tibeto-Chinese language consists of mono-syllabic words, words pronounced in four different tones--level, rising, falling and high rising--to distinguish words or syllables that have the same series of consonants and vowels but different meanings. They have more 'vowel-like sounds' and 'vowel-like accents' than the Indo-European languages. French is a good illustration to show how vowel sounds change in these languages.

Hey, kids! How many gross factual errors can you spot? (I found six, or more than the number of complete sentences.)

Of course, our polymath can't restrict himself to languages--what dilettante this talented could? Let's see what he has to say on the complex topic of religion:

The Jews also originally followed the Vedic religion at one time, but because of heir captivity [sic] in Babylon and Egypt they adopted some of creeds of these countries. The Ten Commandments of Moses are from the Vedas.

I know I have some Jewish readers and I'm betting they didn't know that. (Sad how little modern secularised Jews know about their own religion!)

After excursus like these, it's almost an anticlimax to get to the meat of the work and find typical dirt-ignorant popular etymologising like "The word cerebellum for a part of the head comes from the Sanskrit word Shri Brahm (Siri is head which becomes cere, and brahm becomes bellum.(the 'ra' becomes 'la')." Of course, that doesn't mean there aren't still gems to be unearthed. I particularly like the correspondences:

D'Silva -- of Shilpa
Lufthansa -- Lift+hansa Flying=swan
Nickelodium -- Relating to young ones
Vatican -- Vaatika (residence, as in Panch +vatika of Ram in forest) Vatican in Rome is Ram Vaatika

Why, your very own name or surname may be Sanskrit and you didn't even know it!

Comments

[shdwpoet.livejournal.com]

*laugh*

I have encountered wizards of sarcasm before, but this post was just a work of art. :)

Let all ye denizens of Joliet know, henceforth, that your pathetic attempts at academic analysis shall come to naught, for ye are stinky, and have not wisdom!

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Now, now, Joliet has a university, you know. I don't think the academics there are particularly ignorant, but Mr S.L. Verma, LL.B. is clearly no academic.

[shdwpoet.livejournal.com]

Mr. S.L. Verma, LL.B. ... what is an LL.B? Is that an honorific like O.B.E., or C.P.A.?

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

It's an abbreviation of Legum Baccalaureus or "Bachelor of Laws". We don't really have an equivalent in the States, although some colleges do offer pre-law programmes.

(BTW, I wouldn't call "C.P.A." an "honorific"; it's simply a professional title that follows the name, like "RN".)

[lhn.livejournal.com]

LL.B. was the standard degree awarded by American law schools until about a generation ago. (Though they were still graduate programs-- you got a regular bachelor's degree, and then you spent three more years getting an LL.B.) My dad says that the changeover to Juris Doctor was driven by Civil Service regulations (it was easier to justify the salaries under the regs if a degree-holder had a doctorate rather than a bachelor's), but I've never followed that up to confirm. FWIW, my dad was originally awarded an LL.B., and then his school sent him a J.D. diploma several years later when they made the changeover.

Law schools' more advanced degrees are still LL.M. and LL.D.-- which, yes, means that you can get a "doctorate", then a master's, and then another doctorate.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

My dad (B.S., M.S., J.D.--some people never learn, eh?) once tried to convince me that I should be calling him "Doctor" since, after all, he had a doctorate. I shot back, "So what was your doctoral thesis on?"

He never tried that again.

[lhn.livejournal.com]

Not that I'd ever try that myself (a law degree is clearly a master's level professional degree). But the variety of doctors most people are most familiar with complete neither a dissertation or a defense. I suspect that physician envy had more to do with "Juris Doctor" than a desire to be on par with Ph.D.s. (Though given that the LL.B/J.D. is also the only degree required to teach law in academia, I may be wrong about that-- law faculty may have wanted to be titular peers of their fellow professors.)

[tyrannio.livejournal.com]

I spotted a book about the relationship of Sanskrit to English in the Reg, but I think it was a different one, because there's no entry for Verma, S L, and because I remember it having the orangey PL 480 binding.

[innerdoggie.livejournal.com]

I thought that we had seen maybe this very book at that bookstore on Devon. But I may be misremembering.

[lifeandstuff.livejournal.com]

The ten commandments from Moses are from Moses!!! They really shouldn't blasphem a great movie like that. I love it when the water parts and all...

[innerdoggie.livejournal.com]

Don'tcha love Hindu syncretism?