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In India and Tibet, like in many ancient cultures, literary and religious heritage was usually handed down in oral form. This is one of the main reasons, why sound and word were attached a great importance. The repetition of the sacred phrases – mantras grew to play a crucial role both in Indian and Tibetan Buddhism. Mantras represent one of the oldest religious meditation forms, and they function as a medium leading the human mind to the divine truth. These sacred phrases, originating from Indian Vedic culture, were later inherited in Tibet Tantric Buddhism, where they were related to definite deities. Aryans who came from the North of India, present-day Iranian regions considered themselves as divine people and justified their superiority on the bases of their euphonic and grammatically complex ritual language – Sanskrit. It was juxtaposed to the common speech – Dravidian dialects of Central India. Aryans excelled their culture, calling local people barbarians who in their opinion had no access to the highest truth, because they could not use the medium of the divine speech. Tibetan Buddhists inherited the ritual reciting practice of definite Sanskrit syllables and also distinguished them from all other words. Mantras were seen as a medium to combine micro-cosmos of humans with the all embracing and divine macro-cosmos, for they did not concern with the conventional reality and did not differentiate between subject and object. They referred to the absolute value of things, transcending relativity and dualism. The author approaches the research subject from two different aspects: firstly, there is a historical overview of the development of Sanskrit alphabet and phonemes and, secondly, an explanation of symbolical and sacred meaning from a philosophical and religious point of view. The article consists of three parts – the first one traces back origins, the second one explains the practice and the third one gives examples of definite phrases.
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While translation is always a linguistic act, it is often associated with culture. In translation, universal words do not cause any particular problems in translation because it is usually easy to find their equivalents in the target language. Culture specific items, on the other hand, are difficult to translate and therefore they belong to the group of non-equivalent lexis (Pažūsis,2014, pp. 42-43). Translation of culture- specific items (CSI) is a challenging task for the translator, who has to choose from a variety of translation strategies. The translator is also constantly under the pressure to produce what would enhance cross-cultural communication.
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This paper is a pragmatic study of the speech act of implicit complimenting among Jordanian people. The researcher follows the ethno-methodological approach in order to identify the construction and organization of such a speech act. Such an approach renders the speech act of implicit compliment as an undivided, integral part of the discourse in which it occurs. Adopting this orientation enables the researcher to focus on the motives behind choosing an implicit compliment instead of an explicit one at a specific time of the discourse. The results of the study show that implicit compliments are different from explicit ones and that such a speech act belongs to a different category. The study also shows that implicit compliments convey many interactional functions that serve the speaker and the addressee and that some functions serve them both.
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M.G Vassanji, himself an Indian diaspora, has depicted in his works the paradoxical situation of the immigrants laying emphasis on the sociopolitical concerns that have had an impact on the migrant minds . The national boundaries for the migrants become some times less real and more arbitrary because as they move from one space to another and from there to the next, they keep positioning some thing of the cultural ethos of that particular country in themselves. They are in search of stability, tormented by the marginalization and the growing feeling of rejection at each adopted homeland. This paper shall deal with the journey of the diasporic consciousness of M.G.Vassanji through a study of his works in chronological order. A reading of The Gunny Sack(1989),No New Land(1990), Uhuru Street (1990),The Book of Secrets,(1993), Amrika (2000),The In Between World of Vikram Lall (2003), The Assassin’s Song (2007),The Place Within, Rediscovering India (2008) reveals a continuously evolving meaning of India –the land of his origin. This article shall focus on the changing paradigm of Vassanji from the outer to the inner world of the diaspora and also the relevance of India to Vassanji in the course of his writings. Political contexts play a significant role on Vassanji’s story telling and artistic imagination. His works trace the history of the Indians who arrive in East Africa and each successive novel narrates their journey from one land to another through the changing times and political conditions. The early works are a search for stability, for identity but as he proceeds he moves ahead of the earlier trauma and non-adaptability in the adopted homeland thus delineating his changing diasporic consciousness.
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In current research on the work of Franz Kafka, war issues occur rather incidentally. In the presented article, the Author points out the omission of kafkology and tries to indicate possible directions of belumic interpretation. The sketch for Kafka’s war portrait is inspired by the short story Fratricide. The text, which shows the inspiration of the biblical story of Cain and Abel, is a beginning of Kafka’s thinking about a world determined by violence, controlled by a bloody conflict. The first assassination is a prototype of mass destruction, war and genocide. Kafka seems to have subordinated his future feature projects on the subject of war. The author of the article postulates the reading of Kafka’s books as texts about war, not only about the metaphorical one but also the real one.
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The Theater Is always Dying traces the resilience of live theatrical performance in the face of competing performative forms like cinema, television and contemporary streaming services on personal, hand-held devices and focuses on theater’s ability to continue as a significant cultural, community and intellectual force in the face of such competition. To echo Beckett, we might suggest, then, that theater may be at its best at its dying since its extended demise seems self-regenerating. Whether or not you “go out of the theatre more human than when you went in”, as Ariane Mnouchkin suggests, or whether you’ve had a sense that you’ve been part of, participated in a community ritual, a Dionysia, or whether or not you’ve felt that you’ve been affected by a performative, an embodied intellectual and emotional human experience may determine how you judge the state of contemporary theater. You may not always know the answer to those questions immediately after the theatrical encounter, or ever deliberately or consciously, but something, nonetheless, may have been taking its course. You may emerge “more human than when you went in”.
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