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The Second Life of Sanskrit

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Re: The Second Life of Sanskrit

#51

Post by anukin »

thesmtsolver2 wrote: post #36
tecoholic wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In Kerala most of mosque prayers are in Malayalam. I don’t know whether they do same in tamilnadu

Re: The Second Life of Sanskrit

#52

Post by leosanchez »

Alien1Being wrote: post #44

My South Indian Dravidian language Malayalam, is around 50% Sanskrit words. Technically any Sanskrit word is also a Malayalam word. Examples of Sanskrit words we would use daily in conversation with a fluent Malayalam speaker include: Pusthakam (Sanskrit: Pustakam) - Book Bhāryā - Wife Swapnam (Sanskrit: Swapnam) - Dream Agni (Sanskrit: Agni) - Fire Varṇam - Color Samayam (Sanskrit: Samayam) - Time Vidhyālaya (Sanskr…

Pusthakam (Sanskrit: Pustakam) - Book

Bhāryā - Wife

Swapnam (Sanskrit: Swapnam) - Dream

Agni (Sanskrit: Agni) - Fire

Varṇam - Color

Samayam (Sanskrit: Samayam) - Time

Vidhyālaya (Sanskrit: Vidyālaya) - School

all these are used in Telugu as well :) except maybe Varṇam for color as I never heard anyone use it

Re: The Second Life of Sanskrit

#53

Post by srean »

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?

> Sanskrit was widely spoken and understood just like Latin or Avestan

Is that so ? I am not knowledgeable myself but some of my family members are (professor s in Sanskrit) and from what I have absorbed from their conversation is in direct contradiction to your claim.

The language of interpersonal communication were vulgarised forms, aka the vernacular languages. Sanskrit was used were a need for formality, respect, speciality was felt.

Regarding your claims about secularity, you are very correct.

Re: The Second Life of Sanskrit

#54

Post by DiscourseFan »

dinkelberg wrote: post #43
DiscourseFan wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 The same can be said about Latin (of which we do not exactly know how they used to pronounce words), or any other language. How to pronounce letters or words is always "interpretation" (or more accurately, tradition).

Well the difference is that different vowels can signify not only different cases or declensions but even different words entirely in afroasiatic languages. So, yes, missing vowels means that the edition that does have vowels (developed in the 10th century I believe) is a particular interpretation of the work.

Re: The Second Life of Sanskrit

#55

Post by rraghur »

pianoben wrote: post #50

Sanskrit is an amazing language - it is so BIG! Because of its extensive case system (10 different cases, IIRC), word order is highly flexible. The formalized rules of how spelling changes based on word adjacency (sandhi), and the ambiguity of interpreting long compounds, combined with the free word order, are so rich with poetic possibility that English seems baby-talk in comparison. It's hard to describe just how c…

For anyone here, here is a great example of constrained writing in Sanskrit from 7th or 8th century

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shishupala_Vadha#Linguistic_in...

Just the verbal gymnastics, the wordplay and the ingenuity is mind boggling

Re: The Second Life of Sanskrit

#56

Post by goobatrooba »

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…

Not sure why you are speculating or what your background would be to do so, when the info is easy to find. Yes it was a link language given its prominence, but also

> Sanskrit was a spoken language in the educated and the elite classes, but it was also a language that must have been understood in a wider circle of society because the widely popular folk epics and stories such as the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Bhagavata Purana, the Panchatantra and many other texts are all in the Sanskrit language, while many Sanskrit dramas indicate that the language coexisted with the vernacular Prakrits.[115] Thus, Classical Sanskrit with its exacting grammar was the language of the Indian scholars and the educated classes, while others communicated with approximate or ungrammatical variants along with other natural Indian languages,[114] with the cities of Varanasi, Paithan, Pune and Kanchipuram being centres of Sanskrit learning and debate until the arrival of the colonial era

(Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanskrit )

Re: The Second Life of Sanskrit

#57

Post by leosanchez »

busymom0 wrote: post #32
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?

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.

Our state only had Sanskrit in 10, 11 and 12 and it was not taught properly.

Re: The Second Life of Sanskrit

#58

Post by WelkinFolk »

iamshs wrote: post #34

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…

Which Vedas call Dalits "devils"? In what context are these verses, if any? And why would a majority of the Hindu population not benefit from reading their sacred texts - Vedas and Gita and such? My literal Sanskrit teacher wasn't a Brahmin, what on earth are you on about?

Re: The Second Life of Sanskrit

#59

Post by IAmBroom »

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…

> 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 out in Latin!

You're suggesting that Sanskrit became a scholarly language, which no one was disputing. You're even using as a metaphor Latin, which started out as a vulgate tongue - which is the argument you are doubting.

Edit: It also applies to your English comparison. English IS spoken by millions, just not by the people you are referring to. Are you actually claiming English isn't a mother tongue to anyone?

Re: The Second Life of Sanskrit

#60

Post by IAmBroom »

dinkelberg wrote: post #43
DiscourseFan wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 The same can be said about Latin (of which we do not exactly know how they used to pronounce words), or any other language. How to pronounce letters or words is always "interpretation" (or more accurately, tradition).

The mathematical study of the evolution of vowels in languages is quite well developed, and we can say with huge certainty that we know how classical Latin was pronounced. Yes, there absolutely were regional dialectal differences, but we do not rely on "tradition" to say that a long "i" sound (/i:/) was pronounced like the vowel in modern English "tree".
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