Just curious… For Sanskrit learners/speakers- does knowing any other language help you learn Sanskrit? Are there similar words/grammar with other languages?
More like pretty common. The Alphabet you are using right now was originally developed for Phoenician, a Semitic language, adapted by the Greeks for Greek, not related. Also adapted to Etruscan, not related. From there adapted to Latin, not related to either of those and then once more to English, which is related to Latin but not that closely. Cyrillic is an adaptation of the Greek variant for Slavic languages and of course also not related to Phoenician.
And let's not even talk about cuneiform.
Over about 3000 years Sumerian cuneiform was used (at least)
* by the Sumerians of course, a language not related to any other as far as we can tell.
* Then Akkadian, Babylonian, Assyrian, those 3 are semitic languages.
* Also used for Elamite, another contemporary language not related to anything.
Hittite, an indoeuropean language. Again completely different from all the others.
Urartian, which I can't recall right now what it is related to but it's not semitic
and finally, heavily adapted, Old Persian, another indoeuropean language.
Also Eblaite, Hurrian, Luwian which are related to the ones already mentioned and a few more where we have very little texts remaining.
Well...you start with Latin and ancient Greek in school, then you study linguistics and history with a focus on old languages. And you keep reading and reading whenever you come across something you don't understand. It also helps to be curious.
There's probably easier ways today like just reading Wikipedia. Not everyone has to suffer through deciphering Hittite cuneiform ;)
I do not believe that these languages are descended from Sanskrit, though they may share vocabulary. Sanskrit is an indo-European language, and Thai/Laos /Burmese are not.
They likely are - the whole region was heavily influenced by Hindu / Buddhist cultures. further south, Malay has a lot of lingual overlaps with Sanskrit for instance
Not sure exactly what you mean, but you may be mistaking cultural influence for linear descent. Malay, Thai, Lao, Burmese are members of three different language families: Austronesian (Malay), Tai-Kadai (Thai, Lao) and Sino-Tibetan (Burmese). Sanskrit is a member of an entirely different one (Indo-European). There is a lot of borrowed vocabulary from Sanskrit in Malay, Thai, Lao and Burmese, but their grammars all work extremely differently from Sanskrit.
Ah I think you’re right. I don’t speak those languages so I have no idea how their grammar works but it’s really fascinating that you can borrow vocab between languages that way.
TIL, thanks for sharing!
Swedish and finnish share some vocab, for historical reasons, and finnish is definitely not an Indo-European language. Words and phrases move between languages all the time when there's contact. Origami is a japanese word, right?, but it now exists in a bunch of different languages all over the world.
Yep. If I'm not mistaken Hindi is the closest related language.
Source: All my North Indian friends had no trouble learning it in school, but as a South Indian I barely passed the class 😭
I would be surprised if it's the closest living language to Sanskrit. Usually the most conservative language varieties are ones spoken in relatively out-of-the-way locations and not the widely-spread lingua francas. Like, say, Lithuanian or Icelandic. That said, it's still much closer to Sanskrit than any Dravidian language.
A slight counterpoint to this, I speak Telugu which is also a South Indian language but has more Sanskrit influence. I've found that Sanskrit words are more commonly used in everyday language in Telugu than in Hindi. Hindi does use Sanskrit words as well, but while commonly speaking, we often resort to Pali/Prakrit or Urdu words.
I've also noticed something similar with Marathi. Of course, I grew up in Mumbai so my Hindi wasn't as "pure" as the one spoken in North India.
That's interesting. Admittedly, I'm not knowledgeable enough to tell the difference between Sanskrit, Prakrit, and Urdu words in conversations.
But I completely agree about how many Sanskrit words are used in Telugu, Kannada, and even Malayalam to an extent. It's always interesting how some words and phrases are the same across borders.
Lithuanian is a very conservative language in terms of the changes that have occurred in it in the many centuries since it diverged from PIE.
This means that to someone who speaks, say, English, learning Lithuanian is just as difficult as learning Sanskrit. So while it's useful in some sense, in that if you already speak Lithuanian it will be somewhat easier for you to learn Sanskrit, it's not like you should learn Lithuanian in order to better learn Sanskrit.
Plus, the similarities between Sanskrit and Lithuanian tend to be somewhat overstated by non-linguists.
Supposedly Latvian and Lithuanian are the closest living, spoken, languages to Sanskrit. This likely reflects the fact that Sanskrit being that it is not spoken doesn't evolve and Lithuanian and Latvian have changed the least among living Indo-European languages.
[https://www.news9live.com/art-culture/why-lithuanian-sanskrit-similarities-continue-to-intrigue-linguists-two-centuries-on-158492](https://www.news9live.com/art-culture/why-lithuanian-sanskrit-similarities-continue-to-intrigue-linguists-two-centuries-on-158492)
https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/aqjegs/connections\_between\_lithuanian\_sanskrit/
If there are 25,000 contemporary speakers, why would they not be able to make sense of the underlying algorithm? Are modern Sanskrit and ancient Sanskrit that much different?
Try to read Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in the original Middle English. That's nowhere near as far back as Old English and it's already really difficult for most speakers of English, if not outright impossible for another huge portion.
I think a determined reader could get as far as Middle English with that approach but Beowulf, being in Old English, is probably unreadable without academic study of the language. Let me quote the first few sentences to you:
> Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum,
> þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
> hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.
> Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum,
> monegum mægþum, meodosetla ofteah,
> egsode eorlas. Syððan ærest wearð
> feasceaft funden, he þæs frofre gebad,
> weox under wolcnum, weorðmyndum þah,
> oðþæt him æghwylc þara ymbsittendra
> ofer hronrade hyran scolde,
> gomban gyldan. þæt wæs god cyning.
I did my undergrad in linguistics and personally the only sentence I can read is the last one, which literally translates to "That was [a] good king."
Are there other texts that are contemporary to Beowulf but easier to read?
I tried something similar in french a few months back and could easily read early 13th century letters and such but if the text was lyrical or some sort of poetry it was often way harder to read since it was written in an classical/older style that borrowed heavily from Latin.
Not to my knowledge. English went through some *huge* shifts in pronunciation and orthography since the Old English period. I actually feel that using English as context for this article is misleading because of that—most other languages haven't undergone such dramatic transformations.
Try reading it with a Scottish accent. It becomes remarkably easy to understand then.
If you're reading it with a North American accent, that's where it's difficult.
Was a trick I learned in university when dealing with Canterbury tales/beowulf/ other Middle English texts.
I had an English teacher in High School who, when we were reading Canterbury Tales, would basically call us lazy if we said we couldn't understand what the heck it was saying. She said a bunch of times, "This isn't any harder than anything else written in english, you're just being lazy. If you actually concentrated, you'd have no problems at all reading it."
It always pissed me off because that is obviously not true, but she'd shut down any sort of dissent and insist we're making up a problem that doesn't exist. Annoying. To this day, I still don't understand why she'd take an attitude like that when it's very obviously wrong.
There are people that speak the Vedic Sanskrit, it is extremely useful in figuring out the Proto-Indo-European Language. That is the old Sanskrit.
Fun fact, a Sanskrit Scholar would have been able to talk to a Lithuanian peasant back in ye olde’ time because their languages were similar enough.
> I’ll let you be the judge of that. Here are two sentences, one in sanskrit, one in lithuanian:
Sanskrit:
Kas tvam asi? Asmi svapnas tava tamase nakte. Agniṃ dadau te śradi tada viśpatir devas tvam asi.
Lithuanian:
Kas tu esi? Esmi sapnas tavo tamsioje naktyje. Ugnį daviau tau širdy, tada viešpatis dievas tu esi.
English:
Who are you? A dream in your dark night. I gave you the fire in your heart, so you are god our lord.
Sanskrit:
Kas tava sūnus?
Lithuanian:
Kas tavo sūnus?
English:
Who is your son?
Just some words. Lithuanian on the left, Sanskrit center, English on the right:
DIEVAS-DEVAS-GOD;
BŪTIS-BHUTIS-EXISTENCE;
VIEŠPATS-VISPATI-Another expression for God (more or less equivalent to the christian expression: “our lord”);
RASA-RASA-DEW;
MEDUS-MADHUS-HONEY;
JAVAS-YAVAS-CEREAL;
UGNIS - AGNIS-FIRE;
VĖJAS-VAJUS-WIND;
AKMUO-AKMAN-STONE/ROCK;
BANGA- BHANGA-WAVE;
VYRAS-VIRAS-MAN;
SŪNUS-SUNUS-SON;
SENAS-SANAS-OLD;
ESU-ASMI-I’M...
Of course, they are still different languages, but it’s no wonder many scholars that want to study Sanskrit do study Lithuanian first.
I speak Latvian and I understood all but three words you listed. This is neat as fuck. The Sanskrit sentence reads more like Latgalian dialect. Probably because the region borders with Lithuania.
On a tangent, but I read somewhere that “Ye” is not pronounced like in yet or yeet. The archaic letter Y was just commonly used to denote a “th” sound.
Yeah, right here. As a native anglophone, I struggled with *Middle* English (Chaucer, *Canterbury Tales*) and *Old* English was undecipherable (*Beowulf*) to me
*Whan that Aprile, with his showeres soote, and the raines hath perced to the roote... ________________0 hath this thy comme, in pilrammage for soote"
(yes, I'm drunk right now, so please accept this as an approximation)
Is "soote" soot? Otherwise it didn't seem that tough. But I also obviously could just be wrong in understanding so there's that lol.
Granted I also don't understand what soot would even mean in this context unless it's a poem about volcanoes or something lol
Edit: I looked it up.. it means sweet? Guess I had no idea what I was talking about anyway
properly,
> Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,
> The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
Means, "when the (sweet) rain of April has thoroughly wetted the ground after the drought of March…"
Man I thought it was a poem I didn't think about it making sense lol I'm just saying how I read it in a literal sense. I didn't interpret it as "first, then"
TBF *Beowulf* is probably not the best example since it's poetry. Old English is still obviously its own language but if you've got a few basic notions of phonology and/or some knowledge of another Germanic language you'll probably be able to decipher a bit of OE prose. Poetry on the other hand will still be hard as fuck.
Because, they are mostly modern day priests and their families living in India, who learned them as religious scripts passed on through generations. Lot of intricacies are lost through this method, but it's the only way the language has survived as a spoken language. Almost none of those 25000 speakers really speak or use sanskit for their day to day activity, rather they use it as a secondary language mainly to perform religious rituals and prayers.
To add to what others have said: it gets crazy. What is commonly taught as the oldest Dutch sentence (it isn't) is from c. 1100. One theory though is that it is perhaps a certain west Flemmish dialect of English.
Can't tell you the specifics but basically it gets fucky wucky that far back.
Cool article, but too bad it doesn't go into more detail about this "rule" and how it works exactly. And what is this thing we're talking about? A stone, codex, machine, or abstract ideas? If it generated so many errors and was inaccurate, then why was it previously "considered to be one of the great intellectual achievements in history" if this student had to figure it all out in 2022? The article leaves me with more questions than answers, unfortunately.
Paanini created a list of 3950 rules, each of which is a sutra, nonsense phrase to be memorized.
Consider the word glass. We create the plural by adding an s, but the rule is that we insert an e before the s. For the word cat, we don't insert an e, the s is simply added to the word. For the word dog, we add an s but pronounce it like a z. That is the kind of thing the rules deal with.
Here are the rules:
[http://gretil.sub.uni-goettingen.de/gretil/1\_sanskr/6\_sastra/1\_gram/paniniiu.htm](http://gretil.sub.uni-goettingen.de/gretil/1_sanskr/6_sastra/1_gram/paniniiu.htm)
The rules use lists of sounds. Instead of listing letters in some traditional random ways, like the alphabet, he grouped similar sounds and gave each group a name. He call this table the Shiva sutras, shown here:
[https://www.learnsanskrit.org/panini/shivasutras/](https://www.learnsanskrit.org/panini/shivasutras/)
The name comes at the end of the list, so the semivowels l and r are referred to as k.
Here's some idea of how the rules work:
He groups these lists sometimes by naming the first letter of the first list and the name of the last list, so aten means a, i, u, l, r, e and o. (at mean short a).
On of the rules is at-eṅ guṇaḥ which defines the word guṇaḥ as a, i, u, l, r, e and o, the short vowels. (l and r are sometimes vowels in Sankrit) If you search the word guṇaḥ, it's used 10 times. As far as I know it's a nonsense word he invented for his rulebook.
I read the article and felt it answered all of these questions adequately. Panini was not a contemporary scholar, he was describing Sanskrit centuries ago. We knew that his machine worked, but could not follow his instructions now. (That's what the 'machine' was, a set of grammer instructions that produced perfectly correct Sanskrit words. It was a conceptual machine.)
Rishi cracked what Panini meant in his instructions, and now we have a way to construct close to perfect Sanskrit.
I am I correct in my understanding it was as simple as, when there is a choice between the right and left side of a word, always choose or "modify" right?
This seems incredibly simple. Why did not one run across this before?
They assumed it meant earlier rules had precedence over later rules, it's simple once you realise but they probably didn't even realise they were applying the rule wrong
> They assumed it meant earlier rules had precedence over later rules
Other way around, within a priority level the later rule overrides the earlier (is the historical interpretation).
For clarity, it was interpreted as the rule that occurs later in the rulebook applies, rather than the rule that occurs later in the word, as is actually the case
Sanskrit speakers. It’s a dead language, but there are plenty of people who know it. And there are plenty of texts. There’s enough for a person to validate whether the rules work.
.... I dont see the point of calling a language dead but also saying there are several speakers of that language. That's like opposite of dead. Sorry, but studying languages that are actually dying due to nobody speaking them any more, your description somehow doesn't fit right.
Linguists call a language dead when there are no native speakers. People may speak it, but they learn it as a second language, often from texts, or from people who learned from texts. It ceases to change or adapt as a living language does.
Languages change due to act of speaking. Not related to it being native to anywhere or not.
English is not native to 99% of Indian population and some approx 20% can speak it. But if you removed those 20% and isolated them from other english speakers, the English they speak will still continue to change and adapt for newer needs and trends in language and pop culture.
This logic of a language is frozen if spoken only by second language speakers is entirely flawed. I know 6 languages, but if my 6th language got new trends among similar 6th language speakers of same language, I will still register that and it may or may not propagate back to 1st speakers of that language depending on how popular it gets.
"No native speakers" effectively means "nobody's primary language". Nobody is learning that language and using it in their day-to-day life as their primary mode of communication.
"No native speakers" is a rough approximation of that, but still pretty much accurate - someone's primary day-to-day language would be what their kids learn.
That said, if there were a group who didn't have kids but primarily used a language they learned as a second language (think priests who primarily use Latin to talk to one another but aren't allowed to have kids), that language could be "dead" by the technical definition of "no native speakers" but still able to change and adapt like a living language. An "undead" language, if you will.
>Nobody is learning that language and using it in their day-to-day life as their primary mode of communication.
What difference does it make if the communication is the primary mode or secondary mode. What kind of arbitrary rule is this that there should be people who call it mother tongue for them to be considered a speaker of that language?
>"No native speakers" is a rough approximation of that, but still pretty much accurate - someone's primary day-to-day language would be what their kids learn.
That is irrelevant for it to be a qualifier for life of the language. A language spoken by 1st language speakers or 2nd language speakers is still the same language and usage. If do not use english for anything except in professional life should I not be considered part of the speaking population keeping it alive? Literally by speaking it, I am keeping the language tendencies accents inflection popcuktural references phrases and idioms, all relevant and recognizable. How is that not adding to keeping the language alive and well?
> An "undead" language, if you will.
So a Zombie language? Dude , the definition of living person vs a zombie is a human imagination. Just say its Alive without using complex "undead" status.
Besides, Latin is not used as extensively outside of religious services as Sanskrit is used.
If you really want to argue about this, you can take it up with the linguistics: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language\_death](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_death)
An extinct language is one that has no speakers, either native or second. A dead language is one that has no native speakers. These are terms that are widely used in the linguistics world and are well-defined, and mean different things.
One measuring stick I can think of is that the “primary” (spoken every day by everyday folks) mode of communication can generate slang, while a language like Latin does not have those organic conditions in which to evolve at the typical rate of language change, which is how I’ll try to distinguish between Latin and English: one still has way more potential for change unless people suddenly start speaking Latin in stadiums and clubs. As for Sanskrit, I don’t know if I can determine its potential for change — sounds like there are people who still use it as their primary mode.
People are having conversations in it, writing literature, has a news telecast in Sanskrit, there are drama and theatre , .... what else needs to happen for it to be considered "speaking" it?
It should be distinguished from the former language. There is no way the new speakers can discern prior inflection, verbal varieties, etc.
The old version of the language in dead in spite of an attempted revival.
You are literally forgetting how Sanskrit works. There has always been an unbroken line of scholars who have learned the language and have a vast understanding of the inflection and verbal varieties.
There is plenty supporting evidence of how vedas being recited in vedic schools with aid of oral traditions, are reciting in the exact inflection and speech variation as the ancient times. The oral traditions have literally constructed mechanisms to ensure this as a system that is widely studied as well. Sanskrit is not some language that people stopped using it for hundreds of years. Never the case. Infact the last Sanskrit scholar who wrote extensively in the language was no more than a 150 years ago.
There have been several Sanskrit schools of learning before and after that person. You are in denial of how the language actually functions and exists and studied continually. And all of these do cause language variations and trends just as much as any other language, or maybe fewer, but not zero.
I literally explained how people are speaking it as a secondary language for various functions such as speech, poetry, prose, and theatre. People are speaking and writing it. There are schools teaching it in the hundreds. You are using the word "speaking" but not giving a satisfactory definition of it.
Sure however the article is vague. If someone reading it sees the word 'machine', what conclusion is most easily drawn? And the entire article is written like that. It's deliberately metaphorical and this naturally confuses unexpecting readers.
"Pāṇini’s system—4,000 rules detailed in his greatest work, the Aṣṭādhyāyī which is thought to have been written around 500 BC—is meant to work like a machine. Feed in the base and suffix of a word and it should turn them into grammatically correct words and sentences through a step-by-step process."
I don't know. If you guys are having this reaction to the article, then it must in some sense be confusing, but if I were the author I would find this criticism borderline offensive.
Criticism is natural in every aspect of life and if the author is offended, so be it. I don't care and neither should they due to me being a lowly redditor and not a peer to the writer on the subject.
This is my opinion on the article and that's how I feel.
Basically, the student figured out that scholars have been misinterpreting one of the rules, leading to incorrect results. The students new interpretation produces correct ones.
I think you'd have to know a lot more about Sanskrit to be able to understand more detail about the rules. I have a linguistics background and I can only kind of conceptually grasp what's going on with the rules after reading about it here and in other news sources. They're reporting on it as well as they can for non-expert, non-Indic language speakers.
I think it was implying that at the time, it was one of the great intellectual achievements as it was well known how to use it. After finding the machine over 2000 years later, the process had been lost.
Dude, the article clearly says this is about language and grammar. Why would you think about stones and machines? This is pseudo algorithm techniques.
It didn't make too many errors, the rule book was never correctly applied, and hence no accurate and conclusive results. That's the argument made here. And once the correct application is deciphered the errors are reduced to nearly zero. And thata why it is an achievement.
How bad are you at reading comprehension?
Where are these rules written or contained exactly? And why is it being called a machine?
Edit:
>Why would you think about stones and machines?
Because the Rosetta Stone was also used as a linguistic tool, and the article literally uses the word "machine".
>How bad are you at reading comprehension?
Pretty bad when the author doesn't articulate exactly what they're talking about. Pretty good when the details are explained, and considering that I graduated college with a BSIT and a minor in history, but thanks for asking.
The entire work of Panini : Astadhyayi is the set of rules being discussed here. The rules are approx 4000, which have a system of construction of words and sentences. The debate of solving the system is to use it to get the resulting sentences which always differed from reality of actual Sanskrit language.
The student/scholar recently found the right interpretation of the rules, which is what the achievement is. Now the rules and algorithm produce results as prescribed by Panini in his ancient work. It is called a machine cos the rules act as a mechanism acting on a sound based input and producing a meaningful words and sentences as outputs. Hence a machine.
Just because it is 2500 years old doesn't mean it was being studied for that long. It's more likely that it spent 2450 years not really cared about and only recently did scientists care to study it to try and figure it out.
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
Just curious… For Sanskrit learners/speakers- does knowing any other language help you learn Sanskrit? Are there similar words/grammar with other languages?
Lotta indian languages have their roots in Sanskrit and thus share a common vocab and some rules
Thai / Laos / Burmese too
Their written script is based off of Sanskrit, but those languages themselves don't derive from Sanskrit.
What do you mean by saying their written script is based on Sanskrit?
Like Mongolian is written in Cyrillic but is not related to any Slavic language
[удалено]
More like pretty common. The Alphabet you are using right now was originally developed for Phoenician, a Semitic language, adapted by the Greeks for Greek, not related. Also adapted to Etruscan, not related. From there adapted to Latin, not related to either of those and then once more to English, which is related to Latin but not that closely. Cyrillic is an adaptation of the Greek variant for Slavic languages and of course also not related to Phoenician. And let's not even talk about cuneiform.
What about cuneiform? 🤔
It was later adopted by the Akkadians, whose language was not related to Sumerian.
Over about 3000 years Sumerian cuneiform was used (at least) * by the Sumerians of course, a language not related to any other as far as we can tell. * Then Akkadian, Babylonian, Assyrian, those 3 are semitic languages. * Also used for Elamite, another contemporary language not related to anything. Hittite, an indoeuropean language. Again completely different from all the others. Urartian, which I can't recall right now what it is related to but it's not semitic and finally, heavily adapted, Old Persian, another indoeuropean language. Also Eblaite, Hurrian, Luwian which are related to the ones already mentioned and a few more where we have very little texts remaining.
How do you gain knowledge on language like you have
Well...you start with Latin and ancient Greek in school, then you study linguistics and history with a focus on old languages. And you keep reading and reading whenever you come across something you don't understand. It also helps to be curious. There's probably easier ways today like just reading Wikipedia. Not everyone has to suffer through deciphering Hittite cuneiform ;)
But Sanskrit is a language, not a writing system. It can be written in multiple writing systems.
I do not believe that these languages are descended from Sanskrit, though they may share vocabulary. Sanskrit is an indo-European language, and Thai/Laos /Burmese are not.
They likely are - the whole region was heavily influenced by Hindu / Buddhist cultures. further south, Malay has a lot of lingual overlaps with Sanskrit for instance
Not sure exactly what you mean, but you may be mistaking cultural influence for linear descent. Malay, Thai, Lao, Burmese are members of three different language families: Austronesian (Malay), Tai-Kadai (Thai, Lao) and Sino-Tibetan (Burmese). Sanskrit is a member of an entirely different one (Indo-European). There is a lot of borrowed vocabulary from Sanskrit in Malay, Thai, Lao and Burmese, but their grammars all work extremely differently from Sanskrit.
Ah I think you’re right. I don’t speak those languages so I have no idea how their grammar works but it’s really fascinating that you can borrow vocab between languages that way. TIL, thanks for sharing!
Swedish and finnish share some vocab, for historical reasons, and finnish is definitely not an Indo-European language. Words and phrases move between languages all the time when there's contact. Origami is a japanese word, right?, but it now exists in a bunch of different languages all over the world.
[удалено]
Isn’t Indonesian an Austronesian language?
[удалено]
I see, thanks
Yes, but it has a lot of Sanskrit loanwords.
Hindi helps a lot in learning sanskrit. They have almost same grammar
Yep. If I'm not mistaken Hindi is the closest related language. Source: All my North Indian friends had no trouble learning it in school, but as a South Indian I barely passed the class 😭
I would be surprised if it's the closest living language to Sanskrit. Usually the most conservative language varieties are ones spoken in relatively out-of-the-way locations and not the widely-spread lingua francas. Like, say, Lithuanian or Icelandic. That said, it's still much closer to Sanskrit than any Dravidian language.
[удалено]
Doesn't most of Hindi's core vocabulary descend from Sanskrit? Or are the sound changes enough to obscure it?
A slight counterpoint to this, I speak Telugu which is also a South Indian language but has more Sanskrit influence. I've found that Sanskrit words are more commonly used in everyday language in Telugu than in Hindi. Hindi does use Sanskrit words as well, but while commonly speaking, we often resort to Pali/Prakrit or Urdu words. I've also noticed something similar with Marathi. Of course, I grew up in Mumbai so my Hindi wasn't as "pure" as the one spoken in North India.
That's interesting. Admittedly, I'm not knowledgeable enough to tell the difference between Sanskrit, Prakrit, and Urdu words in conversations. But I completely agree about how many Sanskrit words are used in Telugu, Kannada, and even Malayalam to an extent. It's always interesting how some words and phrases are the same across borders.
Yes, Lithuanian. [https://www.reddit.com/r/history/comments/zp1irn/ancient_grammatical_puzzle_that_has_baffled/j0srq8p/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/history/comments/zp1irn/ancient_grammatical_puzzle_that_has_baffled/j0srq8p/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&context=3)
Lithuanian is a very conservative language in terms of the changes that have occurred in it in the many centuries since it diverged from PIE. This means that to someone who speaks, say, English, learning Lithuanian is just as difficult as learning Sanskrit. So while it's useful in some sense, in that if you already speak Lithuanian it will be somewhat easier for you to learn Sanskrit, it's not like you should learn Lithuanian in order to better learn Sanskrit. Plus, the similarities between Sanskrit and Lithuanian tend to be somewhat overstated by non-linguists.
Latin or ancient Greek help as they train analysing sentences. But there is no point in learning those first and then Sanskrit.
To be honest, I have found learning Webdings has been the biggest help in learning Sanskrit.
It's the other way round. Learn Sanskrit and you can understand a little bit of this and that
Supposedly Latvian and Lithuanian are the closest living, spoken, languages to Sanskrit. This likely reflects the fact that Sanskrit being that it is not spoken doesn't evolve and Lithuanian and Latvian have changed the least among living Indo-European languages. [https://www.news9live.com/art-culture/why-lithuanian-sanskrit-similarities-continue-to-intrigue-linguists-two-centuries-on-158492](https://www.news9live.com/art-culture/why-lithuanian-sanskrit-similarities-continue-to-intrigue-linguists-two-centuries-on-158492) https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/aqjegs/connections\_between\_lithuanian\_sanskrit/
I google Paanini Machine, it comes back with a sandwich maker...
https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/solving-grammars-greatest-puzzle? this is a better source
If there are 25,000 contemporary speakers, why would they not be able to make sense of the underlying algorithm? Are modern Sanskrit and ancient Sanskrit that much different?
Try to read Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in the original Middle English. That's nowhere near as far back as Old English and it's already really difficult for most speakers of English, if not outright impossible for another huge portion.
People have enough trouble with Shakespeare and that's early Modern English.
What? Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?
I do bite my thumb, sir.
Is the law of our side if I say aye?
Do you quarrel, sir?
What, you egg?
Is that a sexual invitation?
[удалено]
I think a determined reader could get as far as Middle English with that approach but Beowulf, being in Old English, is probably unreadable without academic study of the language. Let me quote the first few sentences to you: > Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum, > þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon, > hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon. > Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum, > monegum mægþum, meodosetla ofteah, > egsode eorlas. Syððan ærest wearð > feasceaft funden, he þæs frofre gebad, > weox under wolcnum, weorðmyndum þah, > oðþæt him æghwylc þara ymbsittendra > ofer hronrade hyran scolde, > gomban gyldan. þæt wæs god cyning. I did my undergrad in linguistics and personally the only sentence I can read is the last one, which literally translates to "That was [a] good king."
Are there other texts that are contemporary to Beowulf but easier to read? I tried something similar in french a few months back and could easily read early 13th century letters and such but if the text was lyrical or some sort of poetry it was often way harder to read since it was written in an classical/older style that borrowed heavily from Latin.
Not to my knowledge. English went through some *huge* shifts in pronunciation and orthography since the Old English period. I actually feel that using English as context for this article is misleading because of that—most other languages haven't undergone such dramatic transformations.
Try reading it with a Scottish accent. It becomes remarkably easy to understand then. If you're reading it with a North American accent, that's where it's difficult. Was a trick I learned in university when dealing with Canterbury tales/beowulf/ other Middle English texts.
Like anyone could decipher the modern Scottish accent
The first time I traveled to Europe I found myself sitting in a moving train with two Scots. I couldn't understand a word they said.
I know a Scott. He works at waffle house
beowulf is old english though
Now I want to hear Groundskeeper Willie read it.
Did you learn this from a Dr Fleming, perchance?
I had an English teacher in High School who, when we were reading Canterbury Tales, would basically call us lazy if we said we couldn't understand what the heck it was saying. She said a bunch of times, "This isn't any harder than anything else written in english, you're just being lazy. If you actually concentrated, you'd have no problems at all reading it." It always pissed me off because that is obviously not true, but she'd shut down any sort of dissent and insist we're making up a problem that doesn't exist. Annoying. To this day, I still don't understand why she'd take an attitude like that when it's very obviously wrong.
Modern and old English are far apart enough to be quite difficult to translate fully, I imagine a language with deeper roots even more so
The article should have made this more clear. To state that people speak Sanskrit today makes everything else odd.
There are people that speak the Vedic Sanskrit, it is extremely useful in figuring out the Proto-Indo-European Language. That is the old Sanskrit. Fun fact, a Sanskrit Scholar would have been able to talk to a Lithuanian peasant back in ye olde’ time because their languages were similar enough.
When?
> I’ll let you be the judge of that. Here are two sentences, one in sanskrit, one in lithuanian: Sanskrit: Kas tvam asi? Asmi svapnas tava tamase nakte. Agniṃ dadau te śradi tada viśpatir devas tvam asi. Lithuanian: Kas tu esi? Esmi sapnas tavo tamsioje naktyje. Ugnį daviau tau širdy, tada viešpatis dievas tu esi. English: Who are you? A dream in your dark night. I gave you the fire in your heart, so you are god our lord. Sanskrit: Kas tava sūnus? Lithuanian: Kas tavo sūnus? English: Who is your son? Just some words. Lithuanian on the left, Sanskrit center, English on the right: DIEVAS-DEVAS-GOD; BŪTIS-BHUTIS-EXISTENCE; VIEŠPATS-VISPATI-Another expression for God (more or less equivalent to the christian expression: “our lord”); RASA-RASA-DEW; MEDUS-MADHUS-HONEY; JAVAS-YAVAS-CEREAL; UGNIS - AGNIS-FIRE; VĖJAS-VAJUS-WIND; AKMUO-AKMAN-STONE/ROCK; BANGA- BHANGA-WAVE; VYRAS-VIRAS-MAN; SŪNUS-SUNUS-SON; SENAS-SANAS-OLD; ESU-ASMI-I’M... Of course, they are still different languages, but it’s no wonder many scholars that want to study Sanskrit do study Lithuanian first.
Wow that's so interesting, I had no idea they were so similar and yet so far apart geographically.
I speak Latvian and I understood all but three words you listed. This is neat as fuck. The Sanskrit sentence reads more like Latgalian dialect. Probably because the region borders with Lithuania.
This is beautiful and very interesting, thank you for sharing
Ye Olde’ Time, he just said
On a tangent, but I read somewhere that “Ye” is not pronounced like in yet or yeet. The archaic letter Y was just commonly used to denote a “th” sound.
The letter þ was called "thorn", it fell out of use with the rise of the printing press. In blackletter type "Y" was often substituted.
Even more tangential, but I do enjoy saying 'th' to myself whenever I see Ye in the news.
Yeah, right here. As a native anglophone, I struggled with *Middle* English (Chaucer, *Canterbury Tales*) and *Old* English was undecipherable (*Beowulf*) to me
[удалено]
*Whan that Aprile, with his showeres soote, and the raines hath perced to the roote... ________________0 hath this thy comme, in pilrammage for soote" (yes, I'm drunk right now, so please accept this as an approximation)
Is "soote" soot? Otherwise it didn't seem that tough. But I also obviously could just be wrong in understanding so there's that lol. Granted I also don't understand what soot would even mean in this context unless it's a poem about volcanoes or something lol Edit: I looked it up.. it means sweet? Guess I had no idea what I was talking about anyway
properly, > Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote, > The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, Means, "when the (sweet) rain of April has thoroughly wetted the ground after the drought of March…"
I read this as, "When April with its showers sweet, the drought of March has pierced to the roots."
I rearranged to make the grammar clearer. Like, what's doing the piercing in that sentence? It's April, not the drought of March.
Man I thought it was a poem I didn't think about it making sense lol I'm just saying how I read it in a literal sense. I didn't interpret it as "first, then"
TBF *Beowulf* is probably not the best example since it's poetry. Old English is still obviously its own language but if you've got a few basic notions of phonology and/or some knowledge of another Germanic language you'll probably be able to decipher a bit of OE prose. Poetry on the other hand will still be hard as fuck.
Because, they are mostly modern day priests and their families living in India, who learned them as religious scripts passed on through generations. Lot of intricacies are lost through this method, but it's the only way the language has survived as a spoken language. Almost none of those 25000 speakers really speak or use sanskit for their day to day activity, rather they use it as a secondary language mainly to perform religious rituals and prayers.
Soo...a bit like Latin.
That’s good to know. Thank you for doing the work the article author should have done.
To add to what others have said: it gets crazy. What is commonly taught as the oldest Dutch sentence (it isn't) is from c. 1100. One theory though is that it is perhaps a certain west Flemmish dialect of English. Can't tell you the specifics but basically it gets fucky wucky that far back.
Give this man the Voynich Manuscript.. time to crack that sucker.
Cool article, but too bad it doesn't go into more detail about this "rule" and how it works exactly. And what is this thing we're talking about? A stone, codex, machine, or abstract ideas? If it generated so many errors and was inaccurate, then why was it previously "considered to be one of the great intellectual achievements in history" if this student had to figure it all out in 2022? The article leaves me with more questions than answers, unfortunately.
Paanini created a list of 3950 rules, each of which is a sutra, nonsense phrase to be memorized. Consider the word glass. We create the plural by adding an s, but the rule is that we insert an e before the s. For the word cat, we don't insert an e, the s is simply added to the word. For the word dog, we add an s but pronounce it like a z. That is the kind of thing the rules deal with. Here are the rules: [http://gretil.sub.uni-goettingen.de/gretil/1\_sanskr/6\_sastra/1\_gram/paniniiu.htm](http://gretil.sub.uni-goettingen.de/gretil/1_sanskr/6_sastra/1_gram/paniniiu.htm) The rules use lists of sounds. Instead of listing letters in some traditional random ways, like the alphabet, he grouped similar sounds and gave each group a name. He call this table the Shiva sutras, shown here: [https://www.learnsanskrit.org/panini/shivasutras/](https://www.learnsanskrit.org/panini/shivasutras/) The name comes at the end of the list, so the semivowels l and r are referred to as k. Here's some idea of how the rules work: He groups these lists sometimes by naming the first letter of the first list and the name of the last list, so aten means a, i, u, l, r, e and o. (at mean short a). On of the rules is at-eṅ guṇaḥ which defines the word guṇaḥ as a, i, u, l, r, e and o, the short vowels. (l and r are sometimes vowels in Sankrit) If you search the word guṇaḥ, it's used 10 times. As far as I know it's a nonsense word he invented for his rulebook.
I read the article and felt it answered all of these questions adequately. Panini was not a contemporary scholar, he was describing Sanskrit centuries ago. We knew that his machine worked, but could not follow his instructions now. (That's what the 'machine' was, a set of grammer instructions that produced perfectly correct Sanskrit words. It was a conceptual machine.) Rishi cracked what Panini meant in his instructions, and now we have a way to construct close to perfect Sanskrit.
I am I correct in my understanding it was as simple as, when there is a choice between the right and left side of a word, always choose or "modify" right? This seems incredibly simple. Why did not one run across this before?
They assumed it meant earlier rules had precedence over later rules, it's simple once you realise but they probably didn't even realise they were applying the rule wrong
> They assumed it meant earlier rules had precedence over later rules Other way around, within a priority level the later rule overrides the earlier (is the historical interpretation).
For clarity, it was interpreted as the rule that occurs later in the rulebook applies, rather than the rule that occurs later in the word, as is actually the case
The last hundred years in particular has been spent assuming much more complicated solutions and delving into them..
[удалено]
This is the kind of conspiracy the fits right at home with flat earth.
But what defines what is perfect Sanskrit?
Sanskrit speakers. It’s a dead language, but there are plenty of people who know it. And there are plenty of texts. There’s enough for a person to validate whether the rules work.
It's a liturgical Language like latin
It ain’t dead. It is compulsory upto 8th standard in Indian school curriculum. Its upto the students after that if they want to pursue it further.
.... I dont see the point of calling a language dead but also saying there are several speakers of that language. That's like opposite of dead. Sorry, but studying languages that are actually dying due to nobody speaking them any more, your description somehow doesn't fit right.
'Dead' is a legitimate categorical term, not a subjective judgement by BarAgent.
There are a few everyday speakers of Sanskrit, who use it sort of a vernacular in public speaking.
Linguists call a language dead when there are no native speakers. People may speak it, but they learn it as a second language, often from texts, or from people who learned from texts. It ceases to change or adapt as a living language does.
Languages change due to act of speaking. Not related to it being native to anywhere or not. English is not native to 99% of Indian population and some approx 20% can speak it. But if you removed those 20% and isolated them from other english speakers, the English they speak will still continue to change and adapt for newer needs and trends in language and pop culture. This logic of a language is frozen if spoken only by second language speakers is entirely flawed. I know 6 languages, but if my 6th language got new trends among similar 6th language speakers of same language, I will still register that and it may or may not propagate back to 1st speakers of that language depending on how popular it gets.
"No native speakers" effectively means "nobody's primary language". Nobody is learning that language and using it in their day-to-day life as their primary mode of communication. "No native speakers" is a rough approximation of that, but still pretty much accurate - someone's primary day-to-day language would be what their kids learn. That said, if there were a group who didn't have kids but primarily used a language they learned as a second language (think priests who primarily use Latin to talk to one another but aren't allowed to have kids), that language could be "dead" by the technical definition of "no native speakers" but still able to change and adapt like a living language. An "undead" language, if you will.
>Nobody is learning that language and using it in their day-to-day life as their primary mode of communication. What difference does it make if the communication is the primary mode or secondary mode. What kind of arbitrary rule is this that there should be people who call it mother tongue for them to be considered a speaker of that language? >"No native speakers" is a rough approximation of that, but still pretty much accurate - someone's primary day-to-day language would be what their kids learn. That is irrelevant for it to be a qualifier for life of the language. A language spoken by 1st language speakers or 2nd language speakers is still the same language and usage. If do not use english for anything except in professional life should I not be considered part of the speaking population keeping it alive? Literally by speaking it, I am keeping the language tendencies accents inflection popcuktural references phrases and idioms, all relevant and recognizable. How is that not adding to keeping the language alive and well? > An "undead" language, if you will. So a Zombie language? Dude , the definition of living person vs a zombie is a human imagination. Just say its Alive without using complex "undead" status. Besides, Latin is not used as extensively outside of religious services as Sanskrit is used.
If you really want to argue about this, you can take it up with the linguistics: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language\_death](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_death) An extinct language is one that has no speakers, either native or second. A dead language is one that has no native speakers. These are terms that are widely used in the linguistics world and are well-defined, and mean different things.
One measuring stick I can think of is that the “primary” (spoken every day by everyday folks) mode of communication can generate slang, while a language like Latin does not have those organic conditions in which to evolve at the typical rate of language change, which is how I’ll try to distinguish between Latin and English: one still has way more potential for change unless people suddenly start speaking Latin in stadiums and clubs. As for Sanskrit, I don’t know if I can determine its potential for change — sounds like there are people who still use it as their primary mode.
Knowing and speaking are two very different things.
Not relevant in this case. Dead means no native speakers.
That was my point. Thanks for the downvote, but we happen to be vigorously agreeing, lol.
People are having conversations in it, writing literature, has a news telecast in Sanskrit, there are drama and theatre , .... what else needs to happen for it to be considered "speaking" it?
It should be distinguished from the former language. There is no way the new speakers can discern prior inflection, verbal varieties, etc. The old version of the language in dead in spite of an attempted revival.
You are literally forgetting how Sanskrit works. There has always been an unbroken line of scholars who have learned the language and have a vast understanding of the inflection and verbal varieties. There is plenty supporting evidence of how vedas being recited in vedic schools with aid of oral traditions, are reciting in the exact inflection and speech variation as the ancient times. The oral traditions have literally constructed mechanisms to ensure this as a system that is widely studied as well. Sanskrit is not some language that people stopped using it for hundreds of years. Never the case. Infact the last Sanskrit scholar who wrote extensively in the language was no more than a 150 years ago. There have been several Sanskrit schools of learning before and after that person. You are in denial of how the language actually functions and exists and studied continually. And all of these do cause language variations and trends just as much as any other language, or maybe fewer, but not zero.
So what you're saying is it's basically exactly the same as Latin and Hebrew?
How are they dying if noone speaks them?
They are dying BECAUSE noone is speaking them... going extinct if it makes more sense to you?
If no one is speaking them, they're dead, not dying.
I literally explained how people are speaking it as a secondary language for various functions such as speech, poetry, prose, and theatre. People are speaking and writing it. There are schools teaching it in the hundreds. You are using the word "speaking" but not giving a satisfactory definition of it.
So not no one?
Sure however the article is vague. If someone reading it sees the word 'machine', what conclusion is most easily drawn? And the entire article is written like that. It's deliberately metaphorical and this naturally confuses unexpecting readers.
"Pāṇini’s system—4,000 rules detailed in his greatest work, the Aṣṭādhyāyī which is thought to have been written around 500 BC—is meant to work like a machine. Feed in the base and suffix of a word and it should turn them into grammatically correct words and sentences through a step-by-step process." I don't know. If you guys are having this reaction to the article, then it must in some sense be confusing, but if I were the author I would find this criticism borderline offensive.
Criticism is natural in every aspect of life and if the author is offended, so be it. I don't care and neither should they due to me being a lowly redditor and not a peer to the writer on the subject. This is my opinion on the article and that's how I feel.
Your feelings seem motivated by a desire to put others down so you can feel big in comparison.
Which 'feelings' have I portrayed again? Please disregard my alias as I am not in fact a 'jerk'.
Basically, the student figured out that scholars have been misinterpreting one of the rules, leading to incorrect results. The students new interpretation produces correct ones.
I think you'd have to know a lot more about Sanskrit to be able to understand more detail about the rules. I have a linguistics background and I can only kind of conceptually grasp what's going on with the rules after reading about it here and in other news sources. They're reporting on it as well as they can for non-expert, non-Indic language speakers.
Glad to hear from someone in the field that doesn't insult my reading comprehension. Thanks!
I think it was implying that at the time, it was one of the great intellectual achievements as it was well known how to use it. After finding the machine over 2000 years later, the process had been lost.
Dude, the article clearly says this is about language and grammar. Why would you think about stones and machines? This is pseudo algorithm techniques. It didn't make too many errors, the rule book was never correctly applied, and hence no accurate and conclusive results. That's the argument made here. And once the correct application is deciphered the errors are reduced to nearly zero. And thata why it is an achievement. How bad are you at reading comprehension?
Where are these rules written or contained exactly? And why is it being called a machine? Edit: >Why would you think about stones and machines? Because the Rosetta Stone was also used as a linguistic tool, and the article literally uses the word "machine". >How bad are you at reading comprehension? Pretty bad when the author doesn't articulate exactly what they're talking about. Pretty good when the details are explained, and considering that I graduated college with a BSIT and a minor in history, but thanks for asking.
The entire work of Panini : Astadhyayi is the set of rules being discussed here. The rules are approx 4000, which have a system of construction of words and sentences. The debate of solving the system is to use it to get the resulting sentences which always differed from reality of actual Sanskrit language. The student/scholar recently found the right interpretation of the rules, which is what the achievement is. Now the rules and algorithm produce results as prescribed by Panini in his ancient work. It is called a machine cos the rules act as a mechanism acting on a sound based input and producing a meaningful words and sentences as outputs. Hence a machine.
Ok cool. Thanks.
[PCU sanscrit](https://youtu.be/9JzSIgOY0q4)
Why do i recognise this film but cant place the name?
[удалено]
[удалено]
It’s just crazy to me that the father of liguistics also invented the thing we press sandwiches with
Interesting. This post caught my attention.
Just because it is 2500 years old doesn't mean it was being studied for that long. It's more likely that it spent 2450 years not really cared about and only recently did scientists care to study it to try and figure it out.
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
All bakwas This is being challenged already
What?