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