Sanskrit As A Language Of Science
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Sanskrit As A Language Of Science
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Re: Sanskrit As A Language Of Science
#2There are several very controversial ideas here about the prehistory and history of India. And the history of India is such a controversial subject within India that many thoughtful writers who live in India pass up the opportunity to dig into the sources and write thorough histories of their own country.
http://www.historytoday.com/mihir-bose/india%E2%80%99s-missi...
Readers from India who read widely are probably already well aware of the controversy about many of these issues (which have considerable influence on domestic politics in India and on foreign relations between India and neighboring countries). I point this out for the benefit of readers of HN who haven't read much about the history of India and who may not be aware that not all statements in the 2009 speech kindly submitted here enjoy agreement even within India.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_India#Historiography
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aryan_Invasion_Theory_(history_...
In particular, the person who gave the speech
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markandey_Katju
has wide-ranging interests but has no specialized training as a linguist or any kind of scientist, but rather is a former judge and political commentator
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/ten-ways-of-being-foolish/...
from a long family line of lawyers and politicians. The speech is not really about language, nor is it about science, but it is about politics, and I am aware that some readers of Hacker News take great care to keep discussions of politics off Hacker News, in the interest of finding more articles about the core subjects of Hacker News here.
Re: Sanskrit As A Language Of Science
#3There are several very controversial ideas here about the prehistory and history of India. And the history of India is such a controversial subject within India that many thoughtful writers who live in India pass up the opportunity to dig into the sources and write thorough histories of their own country. http://www.historytoday.com/mihir-bose/india%E2%80%99s-missi... Readers from India who read widely are probably a…
It would be nice if you could expand on what the actual controversies are.
Re: Sanskrit As A Language Of Science
#4There are several very controversial ideas here about the prehistory and history of India. And the history of India is such a controversial subject within India that many thoughtful writers who live in India pass up the opportunity to dig into the sources and write thorough histories of their own country. http://www.historytoday.com/mihir-bose/india%E2%80%99s-missi... Readers from India who read widely are probably a…
It would be nice if you could expand on what the actual controversies are.
for one, the language of Tamil did not even get a passing mention in that article, even though it is a classical language just like Sanskrit, and its influence on ancient India, especially developments in South India.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamil_language#cite_note-riches...
Re: Sanskrit As A Language Of Science
#5i found this http://www.vedicsciences.net/articles/sanskrit-nasa.html to be pretty interesting.
Re: Sanskrit As A Language Of Science
#6There are several very controversial ideas here about the prehistory and history of India. And the history of India is such a controversial subject within India that many thoughtful writers who live in India pass up the opportunity to dig into the sources and write thorough histories of their own country. http://www.historytoday.com/mihir-bose/india%E2%80%99s-missi... Readers from India who read widely are probably a…
It would be nice if you could expand on what the actual controversies are.
At a meta level, he's saying that Sanskrit has a legitimate claim of Universalism. The linked speech states that "the foundation of India culture is based on the Sanskrit language." If you speak an Indian language that is not descended from Sanskrit, you might disagree with that statement!
India is a very diverse country with many languages and complicated ethnic politics. English would be a convenient national language, but is untenable for obvious historical political reasons. Some people in India feel the same way about Hindi. This person is arguing for Sanskrit as a neutral alternative, but language is political in India. (By contrast, Latin and Ancient Greek aren't things anyone argues about in Europe today.)
Re: Sanskrit As A Language Of Science
#7Ah, the glorification of your old, dead language. This reads very much like an Oxford don extolling the virtues of Latin or Ancient Greek. Many of his claims are sheer nonsense, such as his digression on the ordering of alphabets. Sanskrit didn't use a fixed alphabet until the 19th century, and there are certainly other writing systems with collation orders just as sensible.
Everyone likes to claim that their old sophisticates were scientists before the scientific revolution in Europe. The basic insistence on repeatability, independent of any individual, and trumping any logical system, wasn't there, though. Thus mathematics flourished throughout the world for thousands of years, and philosophy, too, but not science. Vaisheshika had atomic theory? So did Democritus, several centuries earlier. Nyaya was doing logical syllogism? Yeah, Aristotle was doing that, again a couple centuries earlier. We don't think of Aristotle or Democritus as scientists, though, because they wouldn't test their ideas.
The whole thing is the ill informed cant of a bigot who wants to ensconce his particular folk tale that glorifies his heritage and denigrates all others.
Re: Sanskrit As A Language Of Science
#8There are several very controversial ideas here about the prehistory and history of India. And the history of India is such a controversial subject within India that many thoughtful writers who live in India pass up the opportunity to dig into the sources and write thorough histories of their own country. http://www.historytoday.com/mihir-bose/india%E2%80%99s-missi... Readers from India who read widely are probably a…
It would be nice if you could expand on what the actual controversies are.
There is broad idealogical/political movement in India along the following lines:
"India" was an extremely advanced civilization that suffered under the Mughals and the British. Before these "foreign invaders" arrived, there existed a body of knowledge that remains unsurpassed.
--
This is a revisionist version of history based on cultural supremacy. It has become a compelling political argument, since it contains truisms that are either difficult to test, or jingoism that's hard to resist.
The controversy stems from the truisms, many of which are repeated in Justice Katju's speech. At it's heart however is this idea of India as an ancient nation.
The modern nation state as we know it today was stitched together from multiple nations by the British. Before them, the Mughals also ruled a vast area, but the ruling classes were completely separate (culturally, linguistically etc.) from the people they ruled. And the Mughals never ruled the south, where the Tamils continue to represent one of the last surviving classic (comparable to the Greek etc.) civilizations in the world.
There are those who choose to pick a particular culture as the dominant culture and present that as "India". However, that isn't necessarily true.
Re: Sanskrit As A Language Of Science
#9A very interesting discussion, I think, even if its promoting some strange ideas. But I don't think enough was done to explain the success of English as the dominant scientific language, as a basis for comparison. The subtext is that it is due to various geopolitical factors, which is likely not far from the truth. But I think one important feature of scientific English (I am a scientist, and so often write in this dialect) is the lexicon. I think the upper bounds on the number of words are around a million and a significant fraction (5 percent?) is used in science writing. Having this large pool of words, mostly co-opted from other languages, allows one to make precise technical statements in a simple way. This is not an elegant grammatical solution, as the author discusses in his analysis of Sanskrit. It is a practical solution. It is scalable inasmuch as scientific communication is specialized, so that I don't have to be familiar with the technical subset of the scientific lexicon outside my field. I feel as if the argument I am making here is not original, but I don't think I know the references. Any suggestions?
Re: Sanskrit As A Language Of Science
#10There are several very controversial ideas here about the prehistory and history of India. And the history of India is such a controversial subject within India that many thoughtful writers who live in India pass up the opportunity to dig into the sources and write thorough histories of their own country. http://www.historytoday.com/mihir-bose/india%E2%80%99s-missi... Readers from India who read widely are probably a…
It often surprises me that in discussions of Indian History (including that article by Mihir Bose that you site), one of the best historians of ancient India is conveniently forgotten. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romila_Thapar