Michael E. J. Witzel
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Michael E. J. Witzel
Michael Witzel (born July 18, 1943) is a German-American philologist, comparative mythologist and Indologist. Witzel is the Wales Professor of Sanskrit at Harvard University and the editor of the Harvard Oriental Series (volumes 50–80). Witzel is an authority on Indian sacred texts, particularly the Vedas, and Indian history. A critic of the arguments made by Hindutva writers and sectarian historical revisionism, he opposed some attempts to influence USA school curricula in the California textbook controversy over Hindu history. Biographical information Michael Witzel was born July 18, 1943, at Schwiebus in Germany (modern Świebodzin, Poland). He studied Indology in Germany (from 1965 to 1971) under Paul Thieme, H.-P. Schmidt, K. Hoffmann and J. Narten, as well as in Nepal (1972–1973) under the Mīmāmsaka Jununath Pandit.
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LAYOUT
Layout may refer to: * Page layout, the arrangement of visual elements on a page ** Comprehensive layout (comp), a proposed page layout presented by a designer to their client * Layout (computing), the process of calculating the position of objects in space * Layout engine, another name for web browser engine, the core software that displays content in a web browser * Automobile layout, a description of the locations of the engine and drive wheels on a vehicle * Integrated circuit layout, the representation of an integrated circuit in geometric shapes * Keyboard layout, an arrangement of the keys on a typographic keyboard * Model railroad layout, a diorama with tracks for operating scaled-down trains *Layout (dominoes), the tableau in a domino game * Layout or marking out, the transfer of a design onto a workpiece in manufacturing * Plant layout study, an engineering study to analyze physical configurations for a manufacturing plant * Layout, a specific version of the splits, a ...
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Kyoto University
, mottoeng = Freedom of academic culture , established = , type = National university, Public (National) , endowment = ¥ 316 billion (2.4 1000000000 (number), billion USD) , faculty = 3,480 (Teaching Staff) , administrative_staff = 3,978 (Total Staff) , students = 22,615 , president = Nagahiro Minato , city = Kyoto , state = Kyoto Prefecture, Kyoto , country = Japan , coor = , undergrad = 13,038 , postgrad = 9,308 , campus = Urban area, Urban,, , colors = Dark blue (color), Dark blue , nickname = Kyodai , mascot = None , free_label = Athletics , free = 48 varsity teams , affiliations = Kansai Big Six, Association of Southeast Asian Institutions of Higher Learning, ASAIHL , logo = , website www.kyoto-u.ac.jp , or , is a public university, public research university located in Kyoto, Japan. Founded in 1897, it is one of the former Imperial Universities and the second oldest university in Japan. KyotoU is consistent ...
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Comparative Mythology
Comparative mythology is the comparison of myths from different cultures in an attempt to identify shared themes and characteristics.Littleton, p. 32 Comparative mythology has served a variety of academic purposes. For example, scholars have used the relationships between different myths to trace the development of religions and cultures, to propose common origins for myths from different cultures, and to support various psychoanalysis, psychoanalytical theories. The comparative study of mythologies reveals the trans-national motifs that unify spiritual understanding globally. The significance of this study generates a "broad, sympathetic understanding of these "stories" in human history". The similarities of myth which remind humanity of the universality in the human experience. Background Anthropologist C. Scott Littleton defined comparative mythology as "the systematic comparison of myths and mythic themes drawn from a wide variety of cultures". By comparing different cultures' ...
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Khasi Language
Khasi () is an Austroasiatic language with just over a million speakers in north-east India, primarily the Khasi people in the state of Meghalaya. It has associate official status in some districts of this state. The closest relatives of Khasi are the other languages of the Khasic group; these include Pnar, Lyngngam and War. Khasi is written using the Latin and Bengali-Assamese scripts. Geographic distribution and status Khasi is natively spoken by people in India (as of 2011). It is the first language of one third of the population of Meghalaya, or , and its speakers are mostly found in the Khasi Hills and Jaintia Hills regions. There are also small Khasi-speaking communities in neighouring states of India, the largest of which is in Assam: people. There is also a very small number of speakers in Bangladesh. Khasi has been an associate official language of some districts within Meghalaya since 2005, and as of 2012, was no longer considered endangered by UNESCO. There ...
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Munda Languages
The Munda languages are a group of closely related languages spoken by about nine million people in India and Bangladesh. Historically, they have been called the Kolarian languages. They constitute a branch of the Austroasiatic language family, which means they are more distantly related to languages such as the Mon and Khmer languages, to Vietnamese, as well as to minority languages in Thailand and Laos and the minority Mangic languages of South China. Bhumij, Ho, Mundari, and Santali are notable Munda languages. The family is generally divided into two branches: North Munda, spoken in the Chota Nagpur Plateau of Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, West Bengal, and Odisha, and South Munda, spoken in central Odisha and along the border between Andhra Pradesh and Odisha. North Munda, of which Santali is the most widely spoken, has twice as many speakers as South Munda. After Santali, the Mundari and Ho languages rank next in number of speakers, followed by Korku and Sora. The re ...
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Austroasiatic
The Austroasiatic languages , , are a large language family A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ''ancestral language'' or ''parental language'', called the proto-language of that family. The term "family" reflects the tree model of language origination in h ... in Mainland Southeast Asia and South Asia. These languages are scattered throughout parts of Thailand, Laos, India, Myanmar, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Nepal, and southern China and are the majority languages of Vietnam and Cambodia. There are around 117 million speakers of Austroasiatic languages. Of these languages, only Vietnamese language, Vietnamese, Khmer language, Khmer, and Mon language, Mon have a long-established recorded history. Only two have official status as modern national languages: Vietnamese in Vietnam and Khmer in Cambodia. The Mon language is a recognized indigenous language in Myanmar and Thailand. In Myanmar, the Wa language is the de facto official la ...
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Substrata In The Vedic Language
Vedic Sanskrit has a number of linguistic features which are alien to most other Indo-European languages. Prominent examples include: phonologically, the introduction of retroflexes, which alternate with dentals, and morphologically, the formation of gerunds. Some philologists attribute such features, as well as the presence of non-Indo-European vocabulary, to a local substratum of languages encountered by Indo-Aryan peoples in Central Asia ( Bactria-Marghiana) and within the Indian subcontinent, including the Dravidian languages. Scholars have claimed to identify a substantial body of loanwords in the earliest Indian texts, including evidence of Non-Indo-Aryan elements (such as -s- following -u- in Rigvedic ''busa''). While some postulated loanwords are from Dravidian, and other forms are traceable to Munda or Proto-Burushaski, the bulk have no proven basis in any of the known families, suggesting a source in one or more lost languages. The discovery that some words taken to b ...
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Indian Subcontinent
The Indian subcontinent is a list of the physiographic regions of the world, physiographical region in United Nations geoscheme for Asia#Southern Asia, Southern Asia. It is situated on the Indian Plate, projecting southwards into the Indian Ocean from the Himalayas. Geopolitically, it includes the countries of Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka."Indian subcontinent". ''Oxford Dictionary of English, New Oxford Dictionary of English'' () New York: Oxford University Press, 2001; p. 929: "the part of Asia south of the Himalayas which forms a peninsula extending into the Indian Ocean, between the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal. Historically forming the whole territory of Greater India, the region is now divided into three countries named Bangladesh, India and Pakistan." The terms ''Indian subcontinent'' and ''South Asia'' are often used interchangeably to denote the region, although the geopolitical term of South Asia frequently includes Afghanist ...
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Historical Vedic Religion
The historical Vedic religion (also known as Vedicism, Vedism or ancient Hinduism and subsequently Brahmanism (also spelled as Brahminism)), constituted the religious ideas and practices among some Indo-Aryan peoples of northwest Indian Subcontinent (Punjab and the western Ganges plain) during the Vedic period (1500–500 BCE). These ideas and practices are found in the Vedic texts, and some Vedic rituals are still practiced today. It is one of the major traditions which shaped Hinduism, though present-day Hinduism is markedly different from the historical Vedic religion. The Vedic religion developed in the northwestern region of the Indian subcontinent during the early Vedic period (1500–1100 BCE), but has roots in the Eurasian Steppe Sintashta culture (2200–1800 BCE), the subsequent Central Asian Andronovo culture (2000–900 BCE), and the Indus Valley civilization (2600–1900 BCE). It was a composite of the religion of the Central Asian Indo-Aryans, itself "a syncreti ...
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Indian History
According to consensus in modern genetics, anatomically modern humans first arrived on the Indian subcontinent from Africa between 73,000 and 55,000 years ago. Quote: "Y-Chromosome and Mt-DNA data support the colonization of South Asia by modern humans originating in Africa. ... Coalescence dates for most non-European populations average to between 73–55 ka." However, the earliest known human remains in South Asia date to 30,000 years ago. Settled life, which involves the transition from foraging to farming and pastoralism, began in South Asia around 7000 BCE. At the site of Mehrgarh presence can be documented of the domestication of wheat and barley, rapidly followed by that of goats, sheep, and cattle. By 4500 BCE, settled life had spread more widely, and began to gradually evolve into the Indus Valley civilisation, an early civilisation of the Old World, which was contemporaneous with Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. This civilisation flourished between 2500 BCE and 1900 ...
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Vedic Sanskrit
Vedic Sanskrit was an ancient language of the Indo-Aryan subgroup of the Indo-European language family. It is attested in the Vedas and related literature compiled over the period of the mid- 2nd to mid-1st millennium BCE. It was orally preserved, predating the advent of writing by several centuries. Extensive ancient literature in the Vedic Sanskrit language has survived into the modern era, and this has been a major source of information for reconstructing Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Indo-Iranian history. In the pre-historic era, Proto-Indo-Iranian split into Proto-Iranian and Proto-Indo-Aryan and the two languages evolved independently of each other. History Prehistoric derivation The separation of Proto-Indo-Iranian language into Proto-Iranian and Proto-Indo-Aryan is estimated, on linguistic grounds, to have occurred around or before 1800 BCE. The date of composition of the oldest hymns of the Rigveda is vague at best, generally estimated to roughly 1500 BCE. Both ...
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Dialect
The term dialect (from Latin , , from the Ancient Greek word , 'discourse', from , 'through' and , 'I speak') can refer to either of two distinctly different types of Linguistics, linguistic phenomena: One usage refers to a variety (linguistics), variety of a language that is a characteristic of a particular group of the language's speakers. Under this definition, the dialects or varieties of a particular language are closely related and, despite their differences, are most often largely Mutual intelligibility, mutually intelligible, especially if close to one another on the dialect continuum. The term is applied most often to regional speech patterns, but a dialect may also be defined by other factors, such as social class or ethnicity. A dialect that is associated with a particular social class can be termed a sociolect, a dialect that is associated with a particular ethnic group can be termed an ethnolect, and a geographical/regional dialect may be termed a regiolectWolfram, ...
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