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The Second Life of Sanskrit

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Re: The Second Life of Sanskrit

#31

Post by lioeters »

DiscourseFan wrote: post #22
lioeters wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I see, very interesting, thanks! I've been curious about Sanskrit "indirectly" from learning about root words in Slavic (and other) languages, as they call it proto-Indo-European roots. Similarly with ancient Greek or Latin, I enjoy learning the etymology of many of the words in modern languages like Spanish, French, etc.

Re: The Second Life of Sanskrit

#32

Post by busymom0 »

FlyingSnake wrote: post #11
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 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?

I grew up in India and till grade 8 (or 9? Can't remember), it was mandatory for me to take Sanskrit lessons along with English and Hindi.

Re: The Second Life of Sanskrit

#33

Post by neomantra »

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…

Yesterday in HN "what are you working on", dr_dshiv presented SourceLibrary [1] which has tons of machine translation of beautiful texts.

Here's my "Let Me SourceLibrary That For You" using their Librarian search which presents the "The Yoga Vāsiṣṭha (The Expanded Mokṣopāya)" [2]

ETA: My apologies, I went deeper and the links therein are scans/ocr of English translations of that text. The library does have other Sanskrit translations, but not of that?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48889335

[2] https://sourcelibrary.org/librarian?thread=6a56c578a50845441...

Re: The Second Life of Sanskrit

#34

Post by iamshs »

Look at the IIT Bombay photo, in the background is the colonial era copy of Lady Britannia - "Bharat Mata". The fact article is hosted on Open Magazine, I was already a bit suspect. So the full context missing from headline is - "Under Hindu Nationalism".

What the article misses is what some of these accounts post. SanskritSparrow channels his followers on stories to some kooky post which claims to have decoded Indus Valley Script as Sanskrit. Learned persons better be careful about the intent here, the rider that is riding the "ancient" horse into the present is as much trying to invade intellectual spaces, as the actual Rishis were trying with the lands. Besides, the appeal is only among upper caste Hindus. What else is a Dalit going to do with Sanskrit? No literature is written for them in Sanskrit. They're not even allowed learning it, it is an exclusive domain of Brahmins. What will Dalits get from reading Vedas and finding out how they are termed as devils and filed under a degraded caste pyramid? It's an article borne out of very rosy lens. A Dalit Ambedkarite writer should research the accounts mentioned and tell us what the subsurface vibe looks like here, is it the same old wine in new glass?

Re: The Second Life of Sanskrit

#35

Post by iamshs »

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…

Let's go a bit back and try to understand what happened with Buddhists of India. A whole religion exterminated from such a vast land.

Re: The Second Life of Sanskrit

#36

Post by thesmtsolver2 »

tecoholic wrote: post #30
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.

Look forward to Tamil being used in mosques and the Adan being in Tamil instead of Arabic.

Re: The Second Life of Sanskrit

#37

Post by thesmtsolver2 »

iamshs wrote: post #35
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…

Let's go a bit back and try to understand what happened with Buddhists of India. A whole religion exterminated from such a vast land.

Buddhism wasn’t exterminated due to violence like Zoroastrianism from Iran.

https://www.reddit.com/r/IndianHistory/comments/18rdfjx/hist...

Re: The Second Life of Sanskrit

#38

Post by senderista »

cyberax wrote: post #17
ralfd wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Context?

It's a small language that has everything: a complicated case system, genders, a unique vocabulary, and even freaking tones.

A famous example (similar to the ones you can find between West Frisian and modern English):

Vedic Sanskrit: Devas adadat datas; Devas dat dhanas.

Lithuanian: Dievas davė dantis; Dievas duos duonos.

English Translation: God gave teeth; God will give bread.

Re: The Second Life of Sanskrit

#39

Post by senderista »

thesmtsolver2 wrote: post #37
iamshs wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's go a bit back and try to understand what happened with Buddhists of India. A whole religion exterminated from such a vast land.

Buddhism wasn’t exterminated due to violence like Zoroastrianism from Iran. https://www.reddit.com/r/IndianHistory/comments/18rdfjx/hist...

Really just a tribute to the syncretic capacity of Hinduism.

Re: The Second Life of Sanskrit

#40

Post by senderista »

senderista wrote: post #38
cyberax wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a small language that has everything: a complicated case system, genders, a unique vocabulary, and even freaking tones.

A famous example (similar to the ones you can find between West Frisian and modern English): Vedic Sanskrit: Devas adadat datas; Devas dat dhanas. Lithuanian: Dievas davė dantis; Dievas duos duonos. English Translation: God gave teeth; God will give bread.

Just to save anyone the trouble of a web search:

West Frisian: Bûter, brea, en griene tsiis is goed Ingelsk en goed Frysk.

Modern English: Butter, bread, and green cheese is good English and good Frisian.

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