Original article (in Serbian) was published on 24/4/2024; Author: Marija Zemunović
A tweet claimed that the children’s counting-out rhyme “Eeny, meeny, miny, moe” (“En-ten-tini”) is actually of Vedic origin. “Is there any nation in the whole wide world, apart from the Serbian-Resan, whose children remember the ancient Vedic-Aryan counting-out rhyme, perhaps over 15,000 years old?”, explains the Twitter expert and adds that the words “eeny, meeny, miny, moe” (“en-ten-tini”) come from words in Sanskrit that mean: “she spreads the day the sun blushes the days the sun blushes the day gives fear trouble befalls.”
Searching further, we found a similar claim on the Serbian Wikipedia page: “Most people today think that such wording is without meaning, but there are also those who think that there is something far more serious and ancient about it. According to the theory advocated by a number of our researchers, words from Sanskrit, the ancient language of India, have been preserved in this children’s song. It celebrates the splendour of one God and a new day – the dawning morning.” Then it is stated that the song in Sanskrit features the following words: “An Tan Dini Sava Raga Dina Daka Bhiya Bhaya Bbum”, which translates as: “One’s Shine Is Rising The Bunch Sings The Dawn Gives Fear to the Troubled One”.
However, an issue arises here because the source of this text on Wikipedia is attributed to an article from the web portal Dnevno.rs, which does not cite any specific sources. To address this, we consulted our Sanskrit expert, Orsat Ligorio, who explained why the claim that our counting-out rhyme originates from Vedic tradition is incorrect.
He explains that it is important, to begin with, to understand that the “father” of the Serbian language is a proto-Slovenian language, the “grandfather” is a proto-Balto-Slavic language, and the “great-grandfather” is a proto-Indo-European language, while on the other hand, the “father” of the Vedic language is a proto-Indo-Aryan language, “grandfather” is Indo-Iranian protolanguage, and “great-grandfather” Indo-European protolanguage.
“Serbian and Vedic share the same great-grandfather; they are cousins. And to say that Serbian or some Serbian word originates from some Vedic word would be like someone saying that it originates from one of their relatives. Just as a cousin is not an ancestor of a cousin, neither is Vedic Serbian”, explains Ligorio.
He further explains what actually happened. “The person who translated this took the Vedic dictionary and searched for words that sound similar to “eeny, meeny, miny, moe”, etc. And found that: for “eeny” (“en”) Vedic is ena – ‘the one’, and attributed the meaning of she to the form en; for “tan” (“meeny”) Vedic is tan – ‘to spread’, and attributed the meaning of spreading to the form ten; “tini” (“miny”) Vedic is dina – ‘day’, and attributed the meaning of the day to the form tini; “sava” (“moe”) in Vedic is svar – ‘sun’, and attributed the meaning of the sun; the Vedic word for “raka” is rāga – ‘blush’, and attributed the meaning of blush; “tini” in Vedic is dina – ‘day’, and attributed the meaning of the day to the form “tini”.
Ligorio explains that some of the words from the Vedic dictionary are related to the mentioned meanings (e.g. in Vedic ‘dina’ means day), but notes that these words are relatives of each other, that is, none of them is the ancestor of the other, but they have a common ancestor, a certain Indo-European proto-form.
To further demonstrate how incorrect the internet quote is, Ligorio gives a graphic example: “In the same way, someone could ‘prove’ that ‘Rim tim tag dim’ (AN: Croatian entry to the Eurovision Song Contest in 2024) is in fact an ‘old Chinese song’. It is enough to open a Chinese dictionary and look for words that happen to resemble them. For the first two, this is how I find it: for rim in Chinese it is said that rèn is ‘blade’, which is why I attribute the meaning of ‘blade’ to the form rim; the Chinese word for tim is téng ‘to hurt’, which is why I attribute the meaning of ‘hurt’ to the form tim. So, Rim tim = the blade hurts. Who knows what the rest of the ‘old Chinese song’ would tell us in this way!”
