Talk:Dhyan-Sutra: Ek Apurva Abhiyan (ध्यान-सूत्र : एक अपूर्व अभियान)

The main event in this discussion page is the wording in Apurva's title. In fact, this book, or at least its 2004 Diamond edition, has set a new standard for muddying the waters of titles. Perhaps a later edition will clear it up.

We have had cases before where the title on the book's cover has been apparently botched, with some fairly bizarre compensations for that (see Talk:Kaha Kahun Us Des Ki (कहा कहूं उस देस की) for a splendid example). This may be the first case where there are two alternatives on one page to compensate for a botching. The details are:

The botched word in question is अपूर्वा. This can be transliterated only as Apurva or Apurv, depending on one's habits of dropping optional a's. In all the booksellers' pages where this book is offered, it is Apurav. This cannot be treated as a variant of letter 'a' included or not, since the very complicated Devanagari conventions of dealing with r's would not allow this.

The usual practice in this wiki, championed by no less than me, this writer, would normally be to use the version most commonly used around the net, to make any search for the book using that version for a search term as successful as possible. See Devanagari Transliteration for some expounding on that. In this case there is a spectacular reason for not doing that, and that is the "new standard" referred to above, found at the publisher's own page for this book.

On that page, the cover is shown, with अपूर्वा there in all its unalterable glory. Nothing to do about that. The URL for the page contains "apurav", likely the source of all the booksellers' usage. So why is the wiki not going along with that commonality, even if it's misguided? Because on that Diamond page, they have a Devanagari text version of the title which reads अपूर्ण, which transliterates as Apurna, an entirely new word and title version used nowhere else. What can all this mean?

Cover shows "अपूर्व", not अपूर्वा.--DhyanAntar 04:43, 17 March 2021 (UTC)

A clue can be found in considering the dictionary possibilities of these three "words", apurva, apurav and apurna. Of the three, only apurna appears, meaning "incomplete". Well, yes, something is certainly incomplete here. But the other two are not even words. Since only Diamond has ever used this title, created from splitting Dhyan Sutra into two books, there are no clues to be found in other editions, so we have to guess.

Best guess for the moment is that अपूर्ण / Apurna is what was intended, but when it came out अपूर्वा on the cover, they did their best to fudge the fact but still keep it on the market (possibly recall is not an option in Indian publishing), with "best" referring to the kind of childlike innocence in giving booksellers "apurav" to use while they revealed with "अपूर्ण" what it should have been.

Whatever. Back to wiki usage, we have chosen this time to go with a form of "correctness" that may not have much to say for itself. Though not a word, "Apurva" is correct, in that it is a valid transliteration of अपूर्वा,which apurav and apurna are not, and "correct" has this time been chosen over "common" to reflect consistency with the cover image and exasperation with the whole thing. A search for the book should just use dhyan + sutra + abhiyan.

And a sort of PS: "Purva" is a common word and "a-" is often used as a prefix to mean the opposite of something. Could this be sort of a "real" word but not in the dictionary on that basis? Here, no, since purva means east, previous, prior, sooner and stuff like that, and the would-be opposite, not-east, not-previous and so on would be too weird, so no cigar there. -- doofus-9 (talk) 17:05, 16 August 2015 (UTC)