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LaReevaar, Grammar & other faith-scriptures
Posted by: Atma Singh (IP Logged)
Date: February 02, 2008 02:14AM

[www.pavandeepkaur.com]

Most of the time that I do Nitnem, I’m not doing it “actively”. My mind wanders, but isn’t Guru Ji great? To help their Sikhs stay focussed Bani was written in a continuous script. This way we would have to use our minds to read Gurbani and doing it in a casual, unenlightened way becomes almost impossible.

I wish no one had ever altered the way Gurbani was originally written: with no spaces. I’m sure that person meant well, but who was he to make his version the “official” version? He (or they) robbed us of so much. A lot of people who are Sikh probably don’t know that larreedaar script exists or ever existed. That’s unfortunate.

It’s also noteworthy that Gurbani doesn’t have commas, semicolons, and other types of punctuation. We’re expected to figure it out so that we gain something from reading Bani… so that the “glorification of God” comes with each line.

Last month I was reading a book called Eats Shoots & Leaves (Lynne Truss). The book is about grammar and is actually quite interesting:


…Perhaps the key thing that one needs to realize about the early history of punctuation is that, in a literary culture based entirely on the slavish copying of venerated texts, it would be highly presumptuous of a mere scribe to insert helpful marks where he thought they ought to go. Punctuation developed slowly and cautiously not because it wasn’t considered important, but, on the contrary, because it was such intensely powerful ju-ju. Pause in the wrong place and the sense of a religious text can alter in significant ways. For example, as Cecil Hartley pointed out in his 1818 Principles of Punctuation: or, The Art of Pointing, consider the difference between the following:

“Verily, I say unto thee, This day thou shalt be with me in Paradise.”

and

“Verily I say unto thee this day, Thou shalt be with me in Paradise.”

Now, huge doctrinal differences hang on the placing of this comma. The first version, which is how Protestants interpret the passage (Luke, xxiii, 43), lightly skips over the whole unpleasant business of Purgatory and takes the crucified thief straight to heaven with Our Lord. The second promises Paradise at some later date (to be confirmed, as it were) and leaves Purgatory nicely in the picture for Catholics, who believe in it. Similarly, it is argued that the Authorized Version of the Bible (and by extension Handel’s Messiah) misleads on the true interpretations of Isaiah xl, 3. Again, consider the difference:

“The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness: Prepare ye the way of the Lord.”

and

“The voice of him that crieth: In the wilderness prepare ye the way of the Lord.”

Also:

“Comfort ye my people”
(please go out and comfort my people)

and

“Comfort ye, my people”
(just cheer up, you lot; it might never happen)

Of course, if Hebrew or any of the other ancient languages had included punctuation (in the case of Hebrew, a few vowels might have been nice as well), two thousand years of scriptural exegesis need never have occurred, and a lot of clever, dandruffy people could definitely have spent more time in the fresh air. But there was no punctuation in those ancient texts and that’s all there is to it. For a considerable period in Latin transcriptions there were no gaps between words either, if you can credit such madness. Texts from that benighted classical period – just capital letters in big square blocks – look to modern eyes like those word-search puzzles that you stare at for twenty minutes or so, and then (with a delighted cry) suddenly spot the word “PAPERNAPKIN” spelled diagonally and backwards. However the scriptio continua system (as it was called) had its defenders at the time. One fifth-century recluse called Cassian argued that if a text was slow to offer up its meaning, this encouraged not only healthy meditation but the glorification of God- the heart lifting in praise, obviously, at the moment when the word “PAPERNAPKIN” suddenly floated to the surface, like a synaptic miracle.”

ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖ਼ਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫ਼ਤਹਿ

ਦਾਸ,
ਆਤਮਾ ਸਿੰਘ

 



Re: LaReevaar, Grammar & other faith-scriptures
Posted by: admin (IP Logged)
Date: June 02, 2010 07:52AM

Bump

 





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