Talk:Adhika-masa

Language and transliteration
The article for Hindu calendar has "adhika māsa" (glossed as "extra month") and "puruśottama māsa", where this article has "adhik maas" and "purushottam maas", with redirects from Adhik Maas and Adhik Mass.

I'm guessing that the difference between adhika / adhik, puruśottama / purushottam / purshottam, and maasa / maas is because of Sanskrit versus Hindi? If that is the case, could somebody knowledgeable in the language please add that information in Devanagari and Latin script? E.g. "The other names for Purshottam maas (Sanskrit ...., puruśottama; Hindi ..., purushottam, purshottam) are Adhik Maas (Sanskrit: ..., adhika; Hindi: ..., adhik; "extra month"), ..."

Note that the example above is rough, the proper way would be to find the correct template and use that.

Could we also get a translation for purushottam, please? (Translation and/or language for mala, malimmacha would also be good.)

It would be nice if en-Wikipedia could have a standard for transliterating Indian languages (ā versus aa, ṣ / ś versus sh); but in lieu of that, I might add a sentence about spelling of maas and mās.

Pelagic (talk) 20:05, 29 December 2016 (UTC)


 * Some potentially useful templates I have found:
 * E.g.  → मआस.
 * E.g.  → मआसअ
 * . E.g.  →
 * . E.g.  → maas;   → māsa. These don't usually look different, but they can do if the user has custom CSS (see the template description).
 * . E.g.  → maas;   → māsa. These don't usually look different, but they can do if the user has custom CSS (see the template description).


 * [Apologies, I don't know if that is how to properly spell maas in Devanagari ; I just copy-pasted the letters from a character table.]


 * Pelagic (talk) 20:58, 29 December 2016 (UTC)


 * My bad, I gather now that the spelling should be ( म ma - अ a - स sa ), or representing the -a as a combining glyph ( म ma - ा a - स sa ), resulting in मास ?
 * So if I have this right, I could put "adhik maas (अधिक मास)". To leave out the Devanagari, this works as a placeholder for someone else to add it, but looks bad with the dangling comma: "".  So otherwise I'd be stuck with writing it out explicitly   → (translit. adhika māsa, 'extra month').
 * The MOS-Arabic folks recommend giving a strict transliteration when a term is first introduced, then using a loose transliteration without diacritics for subsequent occurrences.
 * I'm leaning toward "purushottam maas" (per article title) and "adhik maas" as the loose rendering, leaving off the silent final -a from ma, ka, sa.
 * Pelagic (talk) 03:47, 31 December 2016 (UTC)


 * After reading Devanagari, I'm starting to wonder whether elision of -u- in purshottam is related to elision of schwa that would occur in the same position. Or is it just a regional variant in pronunciation &/or spelling?
 * The opening sentence of the Devanagari article approaches the distinction by using IPA to emphasise that it's the pronunciation of the spoken form: "; देवनागरी devanāgarī". But the spelling devanagari is well-established in English, as opposed to devanāgarī, devanaagarii, or devnagri, so there is no difficulty choosing the common term for the article title and running text.
 * This Google Ngram has "purshottam" as the common spelling, and would indicate "Purushottam" or "Purushottama" as a preferred spelling.  (Off-topic, it's also interesting to note the peak in use during 1960s–1970s: possibly a lot of New Age publications during this time?)  Unfortunately Ngram doesn't like it when I try combinations like "purushottam maas" or "adhika maas".
 * I notice in the history that this page was moved relatively recently in Aug 2015 from Purshottam maas to Purushottam Maas.
 * Pelagic (talk) 00:01, 2 January 2017 (UTC)

Capitalization and italics
Wikipedia has a stylistic preference to avoid initial capitals for Special Terms. And since we're dealing with foreign language here, the words can and should be marked with italics instead. Proper nouns such as book titles and names of gods are of course still capitalised. So we would write "ghati" rather than "Ghati".

But where I feel unsure is with months. English capitalises month and day names (e.g. "October", "Monday"), unlike say French (octobre, lundi). So an adhik maas between Ashvin and Kartika would be "Adhik Kartika" rather than "adhik Kartika"? But what do we do when talking about the extra month as Adhik Maas or Purshottam Maas? We don't nomrmally distinguish between "next October" versus "every october". I guess it's proper to capitalise (and not italicise, same as foreign-language place names), though it looks little inelegant to my eyes when used frequently.

The effect is like "A month-long fair is held during Extra Month" as opposed to "A month-long fair is held during an extra month". Does anyone have a view about best usage here?

Pelagic (talk) 21:46, 30 December 2016 (UTC)

Copied sections?
Portions of this article appear to be heavily similar to http://www.hinduism.co.za/adhik.htm (the similarity will be seen more clearly if you look at the version before I copyedited, e.g. use of "06" rather than "6"). So who is lifting from whom?

Pelagic (talk) 00:42, 31 December 2016 (UTC)

Actually, our text also had similarities to http://www.astrospeak.com/slide-show/12-important-facts-about-adhik-mass-you-must-know

Compare:

"It is a fact that the solar year is made up of 365 days and about 06 minutes and the lunar year is made up of 354 days. Thus both the solar and the lunar years have gaps of 11 days, 1 hour, 31 minutes and 12 seconds. As this gap increases each year, it approximates in three years to one month. [Hinduism ZA]"

"The solar year consists of 365 days and 06 hours approx. whereas the lunar year is of 354 days. Thus, the gap between solar and the lunar year is of around 11 days. The gap increases to approximate 1 month in three Lunar years. [Astrospeak]"

"The solar year is made up of 365 days and about 06 hours and the lunar year is made up of 354 days. Thus both the solar and the lunar years have gaps of 11 days, 1 hour, 31 minutes and 12 seconds. [Wikipedia oldid 752459582]"

And this part about Vasiṣṭha-siddhānta:

"Vasishtha Siddhanta (the treatise of Vasishtha) mentions that Adhik Maas or the extra lunar month occurs after every 32 months, 16 days and 8 Ghadis (a Ghadi is a period of 24 minutes and 60 Ghadis equal 24 hours). [Hinduism ZA]"

"According to Vasishtha Siddhanta (the treatise of Vasishtha) Adhik Maas or the extra lunar month occurs after every 32 months, 16 days and 8 Ghatis (a Ghati is a period of 24 minutes and 60 Ghadts equal 24 hours). In this reference the concept of Adhika Maas is unique to the traditional Hindu lunar calendars. [Astrospeak]"

"According to Vasishtha Siddhanta (the treatise of Vasishtha) Purshottam maas or the extra lunar month occurs after every 32 months, 16 days and 8 Ghatis (a Ghati is a period of 24 minutes and 60 Ghadts equal 24 hours). In this reference the concept of Adhik Maas is unique to the traditional Hindu lunar calendars. [Wikipedia]"

Pelagic (talk) 21:25, 1 January 2017 (UTC)

Fifteen days, fifteen deities
"In this month, the fifteen days in Shukla paksha are dedicated to fifteen deities. Each day of the month is dedicated to a different god." Followed by table of tithi (days) in the fortnight.

This exact same assertion appears for Chaitra and possibly other months. But the days linked from the table don't say anything about a particular god for that day in the month concerned. The article on tithi does list "this day is ruled by such-and-such", but that seems to be more astrological than religious, e.g. "favourable for administering medicine".

It would be like putting a statement in February saying that each day of the first week is dedicated to a different god: Sol, Luna, Tiw, Odin...

Also, providing a table of days in the month that is the same for every month is unnecessary. It belongs in Hindu calendar or in Tithi. There is a navbox for use elsewhere.

I shall remove that section and amend my summary of it in the lead paragraph. Please explain below if you think that I am incorrect in this.

Pelagic (talk) 01:15, 2 January 2017 (UTC)

There is a nice story behind Purushottama...
The last paragraph of the "Religious significance" section begins, "There is nice story behind Purushottama Maasa". Aside from that not reading like an encyclopedia, it appears to be directly lifted from the 2nd of the two references for this story, which is http://satyahopes.org/Article/AdheekMaas4.html which says:

"Mal Maas or Adhik Maas is also known as Purushottama Maas. There is a nice story about this. According to the lunar year, there were only 12 months. Each of the twelve months was assigned to 12 gods. So that the lunar and the solar years do not get out of step with days and seasons, the far-sighted Rishi-Munis calculated and facilitated Adhik Maas (extra month) and showed its importance. But one problem still remained. Each of the 12 months was assigned to 12 different gods. But the 13th extra month was not assigned to any god. Adhik Maas felt sad and approached Lord Vishnu and said that no god was assigned to him (Adhik Maas) and for that reason he was called Mal Maas (Unclean month). Adhik Maas further prayed to Lord Vishnu..."

So, as with the "Copied sections?" concern above, this section may just be copied from the site that it references. And, this satyahopes.org site does not appear to meet WP's criteria for referenced sources. Further, the 1st reference, to http://www.vamtantra.com/purushottam-maas-special-puja-month does not mention this nice story at all. It'd be great if a valid source could be found for this account. Until then, any thoughts on how to handle this? Bob Enyart, Denver KGOV radio host (talk) 14:53, 20 March 2017 (UTC)

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Renaming scientific calculation to astronomical calculation
The word scientific does not add any meaningful information and should be renamed to astronomical since the section is talking about the calculation of time periods based on celestial bodies. 49.37.34.115 (talk) 12:06, 23 October 2022 (UTC)

Moved article to Adhika-masa
This article has been moved from the modern Indo-Aryan and schwa-deleted rendering of Adhik Maas to its original and more concise Sanskrit rendering of Adhika-masa (adhika-māsa or adhikamāsa). Chronikhiles (talk) 17:11, 17 February 2023 (UTC)