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The Second Life of Sanskrit

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Re: The Second Life of Sanskrit

#21

Post by alephnerd »

lioeters wrote: post #20
alephnerd wrote: post #2

Something that isn't called out but is playing a role as well is the rise of humanities and interdisciplinary research in India. 20-30 years ago, specializing in ancient languages and texts from a CompLing perspective or a humanities perspective just didn't occur. As India grew richer, the newer generation of liberal arts colleges (eg. Ashoka) and humanities programs in public universities (eg. IIT Delhi, IIT Kanpur,…

That's fascinating to learn. I'm curious, is there a political angle to the revival of some of the languages? The posted article mentions "values and traditions" associated with Sanskrit, and I imagine some religions and cultures are motivated to bring back languages for..not to say "selfish", but for their own survival and spread of ideas.

There is a political aspect to it as well, but it's overstated to a certain extent.

Most of these humanities programs are being created via philanthropy from alumni or business families now thinking about their legacy.

Also, now that India isn't as poor as it was previously, it's unsurprising that a new generation of humanities and social sciences researchers are choosing to take roles in India versus abroad.

Re: The Second Life of Sanskrit

#22

Post by DiscourseFan »

lioeters wrote: post #19
profsummergig wrote: post #3

Taleb says that some languages are only meant for ritual. IMHO, Sanskrit quotes sound cool to those who know Prakrit languages just like Latin and Greek quotations sound cool to those who know Romance languages (and even to those who know English, like myself). Yes, there is a revival, and an interest. But Sanskrit has always been known to the "priestly" class even though they never conversed in it. This new revival…

The revival of Hebrew is a counter example, of a "ritual" language that managed to become a practical daily language for written and spoken communication.

Biblical Hebrew has no vowel markings (well it does, but they are an interpretation), so it cannot be used in daily speech. Modern Hebrew is distinct from Biblical Hebrew. Sanskrit itself does not have much use as an actual language because it lacks a lot of the features that, say, Hindi or English or Ancient Greek have, it has 7 past tenses that are basically identical and it does not make fine distinctions between moods, which it does not have enough of. Only Vedic Sanskrit could actually be used as a language, but similarly to Ancient Greek there are relatively few extant texts in Vedic Sanskrit and certainly the task of learning the language to fluency would be monstrous compared to studying a living language; and one that few, if any, would be willing to devote their life towards, especially considering that Classical Sanskrit already works fine enough as a literary language and is only so practical for that purpose because it has such a strictly defined grammar.

Re: The Second Life of Sanskrit

#23

Post by DiscourseFan »

ashishb wrote: post #16
FlyingSnake wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The majority of surviving Sanskrit literature is actually secular like Poems, Dramas, science and mathematics. Sanskrit was widely spoken and understood just like Latin or Avestan, in its heyday. Otherwise it wouldn’t be part of the liturgical traditions of Buddhism, Jainism and Nastika traditions. Why would Sudraka,Vatsayana, Brhathari write in Sanskrit if no one spoke it?

> Sanskrit was widely spoken and understood just like Latin or Avestan, in its heyday. Otherwise it wouldn’t be part of the liturgical traditions of Buddhism, Jainism and Nastika traditions. I think, and it is just my speculation, that for most of Indian History, Sanskrit was the link language. Just like "Latin" in the USA and Europe of the early 17th and 18th centuries, when all academic instructions were carried ou…

Yes this makes a lot of sense, if I recall correctly the first grammar of Telegu was written in Sanskrit, and many South India languages use a lot of Sanskrit words, but of course they are not intelligible if you don't know the grammar.

Re: The Second Life of Sanskrit

#25

Post by ColdStream »

profsummergig wrote: post #3

Taleb says that some languages are only meant for ritual. IMHO, Sanskrit quotes sound cool to those who know Prakrit languages just like Latin and Greek quotations sound cool to those who know Romance languages (and even to those who know English, like myself). Yes, there is a revival, and an interest. But Sanskrit has always been known to the "priestly" class even though they never conversed in it. This new revival…

My favorite use of Sankrit is the plant 'Ashwagandha'. Sounds fancy but it means 'Smell of a horse' as that is what it smells like.

Re: The Second Life of Sanskrit

#26

Post by an0malous »

There’s some Sanskrit texts that don’t have English translations that I’d really like to read so I was going to use an LLM to create translations. Does anyone know how well LLMs handle Sanskrit or have any suggestions? Are any particular models better than others? Especially because I know that ancient texts sometimes use different dialects of Sanskrit and have different challenges.

The one I’m mostly interested in translating is called the Moksopaya, here’s the Sanskrit on GRETIL: https://gretil.sub.uni-goettingen.de/gretil/1_sanskr/6_sastr...

Re: The Second Life of Sanskrit

#28

Post by orsenthil »

alephnerd wrote: post #21
lioeters wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fascinating to learn. I'm curious, is there a political angle to the revival of some of the languages? The posted article mentions "values and traditions" associated with Sanskrit, and I imagine some religions and cultures are motivated to bring back languages for..not to say "selfish", but for their own survival and spread of ideas.

There is a political aspect to it as well, but it's overstated to a certain extent. Most of these humanities programs are being created via philanthropy from alumni or business families now thinking about their legacy. Also, now that India isn't as poor as it was previously, it's unsurprising that a new generation of humanities and social sciences researchers are choosing to take roles in India versus abroad.

> India isn't as poor as it was previously

India 2020, did happen.

Re: The Second Life of Sanskrit

#29

Post by orsenthil »

an0malous wrote: post #26

There’s some Sanskrit texts that don’t have English translations that I’d really like to read so I was going to use an LLM to create translations. Does anyone know how well LLMs handle Sanskrit or have any suggestions? Are any particular models better than others? Especially because I know that ancient texts sometimes use different dialects of Sanskrit and have different challenges. The one I’m mostly interested in t…

No, LLMs do not handle low resource / low corpus languages, including Sanskrit well.

Re: The Second Life of Sanskrit

#30

Post by tecoholic »

selimthegrim wrote: post #18

>According to Tripathi, the problem of Sanskrit being nar­rowed to religion is a colonial inheritance. British Orientalists, he argues, created an image of Sanskrit as the language of ritual and one religious community, ignoring its vast Buddhist, Jain, Carvaka, scientific, theatrical, poetic and philosophical corpus. I don't understand how you can take what happened to AH Dani at BHU and say this with a straight fac…

From down south of India - the Proto Tamil language is the basis for modern Tamil, Malayalam and others. We still have Sanskrit being used by Temple priests. One of changes in the last decade is - Tamilnadu finally has temples with priests using Tamil for religious rituals. Sanskrit was gate kept by the priestly class. It’s not a colonial reframing.
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