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Comment by factorialboy | Hacker News Reader

Bhavana does mean a palace. Mandira and vimana do not mean palace. Nivasa means residence and does not indicate the nature of residence.

I am appalled by this comment. These Sanskrit / Pali words you quoted, these are not obscure words. Infact they are used today in most of North India.

Your translations and assertions are completely wrong. I would expect a higher level of scholarship before one makes such a matter of fact comment.

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Is it not possible for a word to change in meaning over time? For example "mansion" in English means a big and expensive house befitting nobility, but in the original Latin it just means a dwelling.

Unlike English, the Sanskrit words do not change over time. Because in Sanskrit what you speak is what you write and what you write is what you speak.

> Sanskrit words do not change over time.

That is amazing. I've only used english and a touch of spanish, and those words are so slippery. Even latin has a drift over time. i've poked at Aramaic, but never more than a week or two of half hearted effort.

I'm really interested in Sanskrit now. Perhaps 5 years of concentrated effort to access thousands of years of writing sounds amazing. I have a hard time with Twain, much less Chaucer. English slips so much, so quickly.

I suppose there really aren't puns or double entendres though. I can't imagine how semantics would survive the abuse of irony for thousands of years.

> > Sanskrit words do not change over time.

> That is amazing.

GP is simply incorrect here. Sanskrit dictionaries list multiple meanings per word sometimes with the period during which a meaning was prevalent.

Puns and double entendres are particularly common in classical Sanskrit literature.

http://murthygss.tripod.com/some_characteristics_of_sanskrit...

Not so quick! The thresholds between "hot" and "warm", or between "house" and "palace" are not defined in the grammar.

Unless you can find Sanskrit dictionaries from 2500 years ago giving exact measures of houses and palaces...

Having a phonemic orthography does not stop changes in meaning.

As an aside, if the language is living rather than dead a phonemic orthography doesn't prevent change to spelling and pronunciation either, you just get extra alternative spellings and pronunciations, rather than divergent spelling and pronunciation.

That’s nonsense and magical thinking. Sanskrit is a language like any other. Latin meanings haven’t changed for a long time because it’s a dead language but they certainly changed while it was being actively used. Sanskrit is certainly similar.

> what you speak is what you write and what you write is what you speak

I am not a Sanskrit scholar by any means, but IMO, being phonetic is not necessarily the reason for that. It is more so because Sanskrit words are often derived from a small set of root words. In other words, the words are actually descriptions of things using smaller components. In this case, the root is Bha which means "to be" or "to exist", from which there are words derived such as Bhavatu - "so be it", Bhavita - "existed", Bhavana - "place of existence/dwelling".

Simply not true. Vedic Sanskrit is quite different from classical Sanskrit. If you track the meaning of individual terms across texts from different eras - even famous ones like 'Dharma'- you'll notice that Sanskrit words are polysemic and have changed in meaning.

In modern Indian context, Bhavan still means a palace, e.g. Vidhan Bhavan ⁽¹⁾⁽²⁾

(1): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vidhan_Bhavan,_Nagpur (2): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vidhan_Bhavan,_Lucknow

The person to whom you replied meant that it now means palace but used to refer to other dwellings.

I am a native Hindi speaker with good background in Sanskirit and yes, Bhavana means huge palace may or may not be a king's palace though.

Anything is possible. Please provide credible sources to prove your assertion of a change of meaning.

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