Caveat lector, Sanskrit edition
In this week's Language Feed, there's an article entitled Sanskrit Language Loses Favor in Nepal. Here is the opening paragraph:
Is not it surprising to hear that the name of the German airline "Lufthansa" is derived from a Sanskrit word? Of course it is. The word "Lufthansa" means "The Flying Swan" in Sanskrit, an ancient language spoken in Nepal and other parts of South Asia.Waaaait a second! What about that pesky lack of [f] in Sanskrit? Am I misparsing when I see Luft + Hansa, parallel to Luft + Waffe? I'm all for learning Sanskrit, but not because of any connection to a German national airline.
4 Comments:
Righty-ho, Bridget. Fortunately we have at our fingertips the references the writers of that piece apparently lacked. Lufthansa.
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Margaret.
Sanskrit? Oops, 'bit of an error, that. The Hanse was a very old federation of Northern German cities, under the leadership of rich traders. Any German secondary-school pupil is forced to recite facts about that.
hamsa is, at least, sanskrit for a swan. Well, really a goose, but there's some kind of translators' conspiracy to make things picturesque rather than accurate, so the poor goose ends up as a swan impersonator. Occasionally even a flamingo, for some reason.
luft I have no idea about, though - buried in this page is the idea that it is 'lupta', which supposedly mean 'unseen'. It could mean that, at a pinch, but my dictionary gives more common meanings as 'broken, violated, hurt, injured, suppressed, lost, destroyed...'.
So - 'violated goose'? Probably not the image Lufthansa is looking for, on the whole.
I wouldn't read Indian journalism for accurate linguistic information. (Or Indian linguistic scholarship either, sadly.)
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