कुक्कुरोवाच
Update:Okay, consider me back-ish. I'm not going to have time to go over the changes I've missed, so hopefully nobody slipped anything by me. I know I left at least one conversation hanging, and I'll get back to that as soon as I can, and try to keep up with new events. Let me know about anything I should know about.
I'm a student currently on leave from Brown University; I'm originally from Oakland, CA, and currently reside in Berkeley. My first and enduring loves are the studies of education and religion. My main educational interests are John Dewey (generally) and particularly the problems of philosophy of education which occur in democratic education. My religious interests are broad, though I have soft spots for early Christianity, existential Christianity (Søren Kierkegaard, Simone Weil), Buddhism (esp. Earliest Buddhism, Nagarjuna, and Lin-chi), and the Taoism of Zhuang zi. I've also got three years of Sanskrit and a related interest in Pali and Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit.
By temperment and choice, I'm more or less a pragmatist, an empiricist, and an anti-foundationalist, though I am not uncritical in my acceptance of these tendencies; particularly, I'm conscious of the underrepresentation of the tragic in american pragmatism (cf. Cornel West's The American Evasion of Philosophy]]) and of the difficulties that occasionally arise in integrating the religious into them. My pragmatic allegiance is thus more through James than through Dewey, despite my background in education.
"Kukkurovaca"; कुक्कुरोवाच in Devanagari; Kukkurovāca with the appropriate macron. This is usually glossed by those who were familiar with its creation as "Dog Say," the ungrammaticality of which we can get to in a second, but it can't be anything like "Dog Say" or "The Dog Says", because "kukkurovāca" is totally unresolvable with the dog as the subject: the only sandhi which will produce that "o" is a+u, and since the uvāca can't be in fine compositum (am I spelling that correctly? I don't do latin), the only possible sentence is with the dog in the vocative: "O, (you) dog, (some third party) said (something)."
But the whole thing is just a sort of self-deprecatory in-joke between myself and a classmate. What we were shooting for and missed when we invented the term was "kukkuro brute", "The dog said," which is a quote from the Hitopadesha. It was a reference to a sentence I translated as "Dog say: repetition of my business how by you doable"--which should really read something like "The dog said, 'Who are you to worry about my business.'" (Both the error and the original translation are, of course, a function of doing your Sanskrit homework exclusively in all-nighters.)
So, "kukkurovāca" defines my translation style--drastically literal. Or it was supposed to. But given that we forgot both the correct vocabulary and regular sandhi rules, "kukkurovaca" stands as both a testament to my absurd literality and a caution against error-prone laziness. I habitually use it a username because it's unique and I kind of like the sound of it. Plus, I enjoy the anecdote.
I am probably classifiable as an inclusionist and eventualist, and my interpretation of NPOV (coupled to some bad experiences with Dvaita fundamentalism) leads me to be a devout ::cough:: secularist as well, though this doesn't appear to be a recognized wiki-"faction".
Now, what does this say about the nature of my contributions to Wikipedia? ::grin::
That I'm wholly or partly responsible for: User:Kukkurovaca/Articles
That need creation and/or improvement: User:Kukkurovaca/Kartavya
That I find amusing:
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