Poetic form
How a wording travels
How do fixed phrases move between the four collections?
Some phrases in this corpus are not written once. They are set down, extended, adapted and set down again, in collections that were compiled for different purposes. A formula family is one such phrase plus everything that contains or nearly repeats it, and counting how many collections a family reaches is the cheapest honest measure of how far a wording travelled.
How far a family reaches
All 720 families in this build, grouped by how many of the four collections each one occurs in. The census is complete over the layer rather than a sample of it.
107families reach all fourof 720 families occur in every one of the four collections.
| Reach | Bar | Families |
|---|---|---|
| All four collections2,655 occurrences across 401 memberships | 107 | |
| Three collections4,360 occurrences across 814 memberships | 296 | |
| Two collections3,095 occurrences across 541 memberships | 212 | |
| One collection only2,062 occurrences across 281 memberships | 105 |
A membership is one formula belonging to one family; an occurrence is one verse carrying one of those formulas. A family with many memberships and few occurrences is a phrase with many recorded variants and few actual appearances.
Twelve families, and where they land
The 12 families with the most members, each drawn as one bar split into the collections its occurrences fall in. The bar shows composition, not size; the counts beneath it are the sizes.
viśvā bhuvanā
14 members · 1 core, 13 expansions, 0 variants · 4 of 4 collections
indra girvaṇaḥ
12 members · 5 core, 7 expansions, 0 variants · 4 of 4 collections
asya bhuvanasya
10 members · 3 core, 6 expansions, 1 variant · 4 of 4 collections
somam indrāya
10 members · 5 core, 5 expansions, 0 variants · 4 of 4 collections
āditya mahām̐ asi
8 members · 5 core, 3 expansions, 0 variants · 4 of 4 collections
stotṛbhya ā bhara
7 members · 3 core, 4 expansions, 0 variants · 4 of 4 collections
brahmaṇas pate
7 members · 3 core, 4 expansions, 0 variants · 4 of 4 collections
devaṃ devatrā
7 members · 4 core, 3 expansions, 0 variants · 4 of 4 collections
pūrve pitaraḥ
7 members · 2 core, 5 expansions, 0 variants · 4 of 4 collections
pra va indrāya
7 members · 3 core, 4 expansions, 0 variants · 4 of 4 collections
pāta svastibhiḥ sadā naḥ
6 members · 1 core, 5 expansions, 0 variants · 4 of 4 collections
viśvābhir ūtibhiḥ
6 members · 3 core, 3 expansions, 0 variants · 4 of 4 collections
Cores are the shared wording itself, expansions contain it inside a longer line, and variants differ from it slightly. The three are counted separately because a family of thirteen expansions and one core is a different object from a family of fourteen cores.
What the figures show
107 of 720 families occur in all four collections. Most are narrower than that, and a wide family is not the same thing as an evenly spread one: viśvā bhuvanā has 14 members across 4 collections, and 26% of its occurrences fall in one of them.
One way to read it
A phrase that turns up in all four collections may be a quotation, or it may be a piece of common poetic stock that no collection had to borrow from another. These counts cannot distinguish the two, and the families most likely to be common stock are exactly the ones that reach furthest — which is why reach is presented here as reach and not as influence.
How to read this plate
- What is measured
- Formula families, and how many of the four collections each one occurs in. Within a family, members are counted as cores, expansions or variants.
- What one mark is
- In the span ladder, one block is the number of families reaching that many collections. In the family strips, one segment is one collection's share of that family's occurrences.
- What is in scope
- All 720 families in this build, complete — the census is a count over the whole layer, not a sample.
- What is excluded
- Wording shared by meaning rather than by letters. No semantic resemblance measure exists in this graph.
- What this does not show
- That a family crossing four collections proves one borrowed from another. The census records co-occurrence of a wording; direction is established separately and only for some corpus pairs.
Reads Formula layer, formula-family membership, family span census