a THOUGHT

[Vidyasankar Sundaresan]

T Swaminarayan <tvswaminarayan at YAHOO.COM> wrote:

>Is this because in the vedic period  rice grains were
>not existent? Was the word ,'Annam', essentially
>representing all edible food which comprised of fruits
>and vegetables?

anna comes from a verb root that means "to eat", and so
generally means food. Other words that derive from the
same root are attA - eater, annAda - eater of food, admi
- I eat, etc. We end up calling rice anna, because rice
is the staple food in most of India! The word for grain
is vrIhi, which is also used in TU.

In TU, anna stands for the element called pRthvi elsewhere.
It is common to find such things - tejas and agni are both
used to denote the fire element, AkASa and antariksha are
both used to denote the space element, etc.

Vidyasankar

--
bhava shankara deshikame sharaNam

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