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Edition des Maṅkhakośa mit Ṭīkā

For a long period in history Sanskrit has been the cultured language of poetry, politics, religion
and culture in most South Asian regions, extending at times to parts of Central as well as South
East Asia. The language was kept highly regulated by the proliferating grammatical traditions of
the subcontinent, but also through a corpus of monolingual lexica (kosha) that aided the learner
and served as reference to readers and commentators. These ancient and medieval dictionaries had
normative power, but some also tried to record the usage of words in actual literature and thereby
to update the recognised vocabulary of the language.

Among this corpus the lexicon composed by the poet Maṅkha, who lived in Kashmir during the twelfth
century, is in many respects unique. The author tries to capture new senses of words previously
unrecorded, and he provides in his autocommentary quotations from actual literature for the senses
given. The text has been edited only once in 1897 and thus came too late to be included in the
still current academic Sanskrit lexica. The value of its quotations lies not only in the fact that
it provides early testimonia for words and senses, they also enable us to date authors and texts
quoted with more precision. All this can, however, not be achieved by the edition of 1897, in which
the text of the commentary appears only in the form of small and fragmented extracts.

The present project will produce a critical edition of the text and commentary and thereby make the
vocabulary of the Mankhakosha and the testimonia in the commentary accessible to Sanskrit
lexicography as well as to the many other branches of pre-modern Indian studies that depend on
Sanskrit sources.