Aakash ("sky"), an Inexpensive Electronic Android Tablet for the Masses Launched by DataWind: Students in India to Benefit: Sanskrit Sumerian Link

2011-10-07T00:43:00.001+02:00

John Terauds -- Terauds means "steel" in Latvian -- at TheStar.com reports at Montreal firm launches world's cheapest tablet: $48 that DataWind is launching an electronic tablet for the masses, at a price almost anyone can afford, writing:

"On Wednesday, Indian Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal introduced the device, developed by DataWind, a Montreal firm founded by brothers Raja and Suneet Singh Tuli.
DataWind CEO Suneet Singh Tuli expects to sell 1 million tablets per month once the Android-powered device goes on sale to the general public later this year.
The first run of 100,000 Aakash tablets (meaning “sky” in Hindi and Gujarati) has been purchased by the Indian government for $48 each. They will be resold to university students for $25....
The commercial version of the tablet is called UbiSlate."

Read the whole article.
___________________________________

The name of the tablet in India as Aakash "sky" has an interesting unintended but potential Sanskrit and Sumerian connection to a posting I made recently at the Ancient World Blog on an ancient symbol from Sumer acknowledged by Sumerologists to depict the sky. Here is an excerpt of my posting about that in Sumer: Land of Light and Red vs. Black: Sumerologists Erred in Calling Sumerians "the Black-Headed People":

"Patrick C. Ryan in discussing Sumerian archaic sign #770 says that according to Jaritz that sign allegedly shows the dome of the sky and "falling rain", but it could of course also be the sections of stars of a night sky underneath the firmament of heaven and their rays of light. In any case, "firmament" it is.

Sometimes the sign is read GIG2, or GI6 viz. GE6 ) according to Ryan and Jaritz. That allegedly is then to be read as giggi [BLACK] V/i (191x) . wr. giggi; gi₆-gi₆; gig₂-ge; gig₂-ga; gi-gi "(to be) black" (see the ePSD Sumerian Glossary) which in turn is allegedly comparable to Akkadian ṣalmu "black".
But salmi here does not necessarily mean "black".

There are alternative readings in Akkadian, so that sāmu is read as "red" and šamu is read as "sky".
Hence, a reading of the sign as GIG "black" is not required. Here is the answer to this Sumerology reading problem.
The Sumerian archaic signs 501 (458+648) and 770 in combination are currently read gissu in Sumerian, allegedly meaning "black".
Archaic sign 770, as suggested above and as seen below, shows the firmament of heaven and is a determinative for "sky" and not for "black", so that we must take the meaning from sign 501.
501 is made up of signs 458+648 ....
One alternative reading of Sumerian archaic signs 501 (458+648) and 770 in combination is thus ga2 ("gai" ?) for Jaritz #458 and samag5 for archaic sign #648 which gives the word gai-sma i.e. gaisma, which in ancient proto-European e.g. Latvian means "light", which is why it is combined with the "firmament" sign #770 as the determinative for "sky" to give this meaning.
Patrick Ryan in ProtoLanguage Monosyllables says that Jaritz #648 is the seeing "eyeball with optic nerve" in the reading sa7" ("sweet" ?), whereas of course this is correctly "ACS" (eye") so that the reading in such a case would be gai-š which in ancient proto-European e.g. Latvian gaišs means "bright".
Sumerian gissu (Latvian gaiss "air", i.e the outdoors in that sense) therefore should be read as gaisma viz. gaišs ("light, "bright") and thus instead of "black" should rather be read "light"."

As we see from the name "Aakash" for the DataWind tablets (meaning “sky” in Hindi and Gujarati), the Sumerian symbol clearly means "sky". Indeed, in Sanskrit AKASH आकाश m Indian means "open space, sky" and aakash means sky in Urdu as well. As noted in the Wikipedia article about the Milky Way:

"In Sanskrit and several other Indo-Aryan languages, the Milky Way is called Akash Ganga (आकाशगंगा, Ganges of the heavens).^[84] The milky way is held to be sacred in the Hindu scriptures known as the Puranas, and the Ganges and the Milky Way are considered to be terrestrial-celestial analogs of each other.^[84]^[85] However, the term Kshira (क्षीर, milk) is also used as an alternative name for the milky way in Hindu texts.^[86]".

Hence, the sky of Akash refers to the bright stars and not to blackness. And so we see the ancient Indian Sanskrit connection to even the more ancient Sumerian archaic signs and also to the modern DataWind tablet.