: It's great that you found some more meaning behind its inclusion in the
: journal! :)

Happy New Year, Stephen! Glad to hear from you again :) I have no idea if you'll return to one of your grand Halo projects, but if you do, I'd be glad to be enlightened again.

To be clear, I can't fault Seeraj for not picking up the additional bits of interpretation or the reverse 117 reference. She couldn't have translated it herself since she used a pre-existing translation, and that's necessary since the Sanskrit of the Rigveda ceased to be common speech over 3,000 years ago and uses words not found in present-day Sanskrit. For example, the word "Atharyum" for "fire" or "flame" in that particular verse appears to be a hapax legomenon since it's a word for fire found in the related Avestan language, but not Sanskrit.

Long story short, it took me multiple searches on internet Sanskrit dictionaries to come up with a straightforward literal translation that sounded meaningful. Sanskrit is a highly inflected language to the point that word order can be essentially randomized, so rendering ancient poetic Sanskrit in a sensible form in English is not easy! It really makes me wonder how much research went into the inclusion of this brief half-verse.

I'm happy that this was a constructive addition, especially since ancient languages are one of my areas of interest. I think this more meaningful than the wild speculation I took part in half a lifetime ago. :)

P.S. Happy New Year to Snipe and thanks for the heads-up!