Sanskrit, Hindi: etaSHa nuH pitaa yasya shvashuras tasya pitaa me shvashuraH

M

MindBoggle

Senior Member
Copenhagen
Danish. English from childhood
Hello everybody! :)

Of a man next to her, a woman says:

etaSHa nuH pitaa yasya shvashuras tasya pitaa me shvashuraH.

Then she asks:

sa naa tasyaa naaryaa bhartaa vaa bhraataa vaa putro vaa?


I can't figure this out. :mad: The first statement says something like: 'This man's father, the one whose father-in-law, whose father is my father-in-law.'

:confused:

This is very confusing, and I cannot answer the question, although the meaning is clear to me:

'Is this man the woman's husband, or brother, or son?'

Can anybody help, please?

MindBoggle
 
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    • The meaning is also clear to me thanks to this good piece of Sanskrit which because of its simplicity not even more exquise.

    I can imagine this dialog was meant to be mind-boggling. I can tell a couple of suggestions off the top of my head but we would need discussion and that would expand beyond a language question.

    Edit:I can see that you edited your post due to transliteration. Your transliteration is perfect!
     
    Yes, now the transliteration is good, before the edit it wasn't. ;)

    And yes, I'm sure it's meant to be a riddle. We have similar ones in my country, and they can be hard enough even in one's own language. How would you translate the first sentence, Marrish?
     
    MindBoggle said:
    etaSHa nuH pitaa yasya shvashuras tasya pitaa me shvashuraH.

    Then she asks:

    sa naa tasyaa naaryaa bhartaa vaa bhraataa vaa putro vaa?
    Click to expand...

    Assuming that the first word is "etasya", it means:
    The father of the man(1), whose father-in-law is this man's(2) father, is my father-in-law.
    Is that man(2) that woman's husband, or brother or son?

    Sorry, I had to introduce the man(1) in my translation because of the syntactic difference between the two languages, and probably thereby solved the riddle. :)
     
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    Btw, it's strange to see nṛ in genitive (nuḥ). Monier-William's says the actual abl-gen attested in Vedic is náraḥ; and I believe it is not a common word in later Sanskrit.
     
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