Sanskrit sardigrdi-.

• Author: Melchert, H. Craig

IT IS A GREAT PLEASURE to offer in honor of my good friend Stanley Insler the following modest contribution towards elucidating the prehistory of an obscure Sanskrit lexeme. The first appearance of sardigrdi- is in the (in)famous passage of the Asvamedha Ritual where various participants recite verses with very explicit sexual content while the queen has intercourse under a blanket with the just-suffocated stallion. (1) Until recently, all that was known about our word was that it refers to some part of the female sexual organs.

Rahul Peter Das has now shown in a 1998 article that sardigrdi- (also with later variants sardagrdi- and sardigrda-) surely refers specifically to the portio vaginalis of the uterus. (2) He does not discuss a possible etymology for the word, but he offers one crucial observation that helps direct the search for a source: he cites evidence (1998: 305) that in both Indian and Western medical tradition the portio vaginalis is often regarded as a penis within the vagina. This fact first of all strongly supports the suggestion of Hoffmann (1975-76: 570 (2)), cited by Das, that the second part of the word is to be identified with Vedic grda- 'penis'. (3) It furthermore suggests that sardi-grdi- is an ordinary determinative compound *'vagina-penis', 'penis of/in the vagina'. We are thus led to a preform *sarda/i- *'vagina'.

To my knowledge, no one has suggested any PIE source for this first element of our compound, but I believe there are comparanda available. First, there is the West Germanic strong verb *serdan 'futuere', attested in Old Norse seroa (with a metathesized variant streoa) and Middle High German serten. (4) As per Seebold (1970: 396), the Germanic stem points to a PIE *serdh-. The adduction of Welsh serth 'ribald, obscene' (Pokorny 1959: 911; Johannesson 1956: 788; de Vries 1961: 470; et al.) is false, and there is thus no basis for supposing a preform *sert- and generalization of a Verner variant in Germanic. (5)

Two difficulties stand in the way of the comparison of Sanskrit *sarda/i- *'vagina' with Germanic *serdan, one phonological and one semantic. The first, the discrepancy between the voiced stop of Sanskrit *sarda/i- and the voiced aspirate presupposed by Germanic *serda-, is not a serious obstacle to connecting the two. Such variation in the quality of root-final "enlargements" is not unusual. Even if one eliminates the more questionable material cited by Pokorny (1959: 1011ff.), it is in my view difficult to disassociate Germanic *step- < PIE *steb- seen in English 'stop (up)' from the *stebh- that appears in Sanskrit stabhnati 'block, prop up', or to separate *werg-and *wergh- 'turn' (Pokorny 1959: 1154). Compare further the doublets *dheub- ~ *dheubh- and *streb- ~ *strebh- cited in Watkins (2000), among others.

As for the semantic development, I cannot cite a direct parallel for derivation of a noun for 'vagina' from a verbal root referring to sexual intercourse. I do not regard this absence as particularly grave, given the relative dearth of reference works that offer full access to this extensive area of the lexicon. Such a derivation is in any case typologically unremarkable. While concretization of action nouns often leads to result nouns, it is also common enough for such nouns to refer to the patient (person or thing) upon which the action is performed, not the product of the action. From Sanskrit a-stem action nouns one may cite ksaya- 'dwelling-place' or vara-'choice' (in the sense of the person or thing chosen). Such a development is normal with what one may term "experiential" verbs: Grk. [LANGUAGE NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] 'food', [LANGUAGE NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] 'drink', [LANGUAGE NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] 'sight (thing seen)' (likewise the last two English glosses). The English noun 'lay' in the sexual sense refers not only to the act of...