Saind ? Hindi -> English Translation Needed

What is 'saind' in English? It is a type of stone, I believe. Thanks in advance!

Member Aarosh recently came up with this handy-looking link: http://www.shabdkosh.com/. However, it doesn't seem to feature this word. Perhaps if you know of any alternative renderings for it?

Saind.

It's what people in the sarf of Ingerland call that stuff on the beach.

Thanks Mach, I actually tried that link first. The reference is in an 120 year old journal - and refers to a purplish, blueish stone mined in India, primarily for the pigments that it produces. I've found that in old British Indian journals, Hindi words when converted for English text are often spelt differently then they might be today. With that in mind, I've tried to alter some letters and thus spellings for various google searches .... but nothing positive has popped up yet. Saind rhymes with rained?

Y'r welcome. Yes, Roman renderings of Indic scripts... there just doesn't seem to be any system for it. Unhandy, and one wonders why not, given colonial history. Oh well. (Or if and to any extent there are, they certainly don't seem to be universally followed. Wikipedia does mention one Hunterian transliteration system, "the one officially adopted by the Government of India," but apparently and unsurprisingly not without its critics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunterian_transliteration. More at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devanagari_transliteration.)

I guess we'll just have to wait for some experts to be around, perhaps Golghar or someone. I was gonna say Hobson-Jobson, but am aware I don't need to tell you that --> And/but on a swift check all the same, find nothing there no on this spelling, nor on anything immediately close that I can think of. I'm sure you had indeed already checked.

Of course it could easily be a Farsi, Urdu or Arabic word ... that now has & over-the-years been slowly mothballed & replaced with the Hindi or even English equivalent.

Could it be 'Saindhava Lavana'/ Rock Salt?

Also:
http://www.sahaysreesolutions.com/rocksalt.html

Good work, Hyderabadi! It most definitely could be a blue or purple form of halite(rock salt) deposit that is being described here.

Although, on the otherhand, saind means sindh and they are referring to a 'blue stone' deposit from the central provinces.

There may yet be a better fit .....

Kala namak (black salt) looks like purple crystal rock.

It could be Saindha namak. Which is a kind of crystalised salt. White to pink in colour.

There is also Saindh lagana. Which is making a hole in a wall to steal.

The only stone I can think of that fits this description is Lapis lazuli.

@Dave
I tried a search for "saind" and was directed to this post on Indiamike.

Thanks for your comments/thoughts/suggestions, folks. I did originally think of Lapis lazuli. What is it know as casually, scientifically, geologically in Hindi/Urdu?

It was suggested on another forum that I check J T Platt's Dictionary of Urdu, Classical Hindi and English (1884). Luckily, this publication is currently online at the UChicago.edu . I found 6 references for saind & three for rock salt. Perhaps Hindi/Urdu readers could take a look at the results and play around with some various phonetically similar spellings & to see what comes up in a search.

Platt's publication is significant because it is at or around the same time as the reference to 'saind' that I found in the 'Journal of Indian Art'.

Here is a partial response that I received on another forum. The purple emphasis is significant because in the footnotes of the original article it makes reference to the color as 'baijni'.


My gut feeling, at this point, is that the 'stone' they were describing was indeed halite and that the 'saind' terminology in, this case, may have been just the local slang vernacular &/or an attempt to privatize, slightly mystify/cloud - the true source of this lesser known hue's source to those often overly inquisitive imperial minds.......

Lapis lazuli is known as lājvard in Hindi/Urdu. The Wiki article writes it in Urdu but without a transliteration in Roman script. If the article is correct on this point Arabic, Persian and Urdu have different second consonants in the name. Arabic has a "z"-sound, Persian "s" (as in pleasure) and Urdu a "j"-sound.

My issue with lapis lazuli would be I don't think it would give off any color, as in Peak's original description ("the pigments that it produces").

But if we allow for some confusion along the way, it sounds like a candidate. I'd been thinking of turquoise, for that matter.

That rock salt could well be it, though I'm unaware of its properties. You would of course most likely be looking for some sort of mineral; I may well be missing something here since am really unknowledgeable in the field, but I'm not aware of much of any stones/rock that give off color, i.e., produce pigments.

Peak, to get to the bottom of this, drop these folks a line: http://hum.leiden.edu/. I know if you approach them right, they'll love a question like this. Hit their English button, currently at top right. (Oh, I guess this link is already in English.)

I know me and some folks were once working on a text and dropped them a line about some obscure Tibetan questions -- and were promptly answered, really in a matter of hours, and in the most helpful and friendly of fashions, by some man who was right on the spot where we were talking about! Was a very nice and most pleasant interaction