You mean “What did ancient European languages sound like” perhaps? I would submit that Samskruta (NOT the anclicised Sanskrit) sounds exactly like how it did in ancient times. How come there is no discussion of that at all?
- S: sunus, L: sunus (son)
- S: avis, L: avis (sheep)
- S: padas, L: padas (foot)
- S: viras, L: vyras (man, also compare Latin vir [pronounced weer])
- S: dhumas, L: dumas (smoke)
- S: antaras, L: antras (other, second)
- S: vṛkas, L: vilkas (wolf)
- S: yuñje, L: jungiu (I join)
- S: jántis, L: gentys (tribes, also compare Latin gentes [a/the people])
- S: dantas, L: dantis (also compare Latin dentes)
- S: naktis, L: naktis (also compare Latin noctes)
I.e. a direct translation, word to word, works (with some style issues), but it's hard to recognize the sentence when pronounced.
This makes me wonder how sanscrit sounds...
Also, the language is quite complex, probably more complex than polish or russian, which is typical for archaic languages, afaik.
Ancient Sanskrit pronunciation was essentially similar to what we call the Prakrit language, which was a more colloquial version and spoken by most people. Bengali, Marathi and Gujarati are a bit closer to that pronunciation, but of course they have changed a fair bit too.
This has to be the most far-fetched and absurd claim I’ve heard so far. Sanskrit has been orally transmitted since several millennia and there’s no change in its pronunciation and grammar since days of Panini. That robust oral tradition is well researched and proven to be fool proof.
Your kind of hot take about Sanskrit is somewhat common.
Relatedly, I went to a spoken Latin event where I (an American) spoke Latin with an Italian man. His pronunciation and mine were wildly different, although we could understand each other. Neither was all that similar to the academic linguists' view of what our conversation would have sounded like thousands of years ago, though I guess his vowels were generally closer and my consonants were generally closer.
People retaining ancient languages for liturgical and scholarly uses are generally not that great at preventing the pronunciation from shifting, and I think that's true across the board. ("Atque memento, nulli adsunt Romanorum qui locutionem tuam corrigant." -- Henry Beard.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiva_Sutras#Arrangement
So while a present-day understanding of classical Sanskrit grammar could be derived fairly directly from his work, that's still not any guarantee that you would pronounce Sanskrit just as Panini would have.
A moderately imperfect analogy is that while Jews have been carefully learning to read, recite, and copy the Torah for thousands of years -- including reading commentaries, which, while nowhere near as systematic or thorough as Panini, elucidate lots of grammatical issues -- there still emerged huge, systematic regional differences in the pronunciation of particular Hebrew letters, even in liturgical use.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Hebrew
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sephardi_Hebrew
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mizrahi_Hebrew
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiberian_Hebrew
among several others. The people using each pronunciation were often incredibly sophisticated in their religious scholarship and incredibly familiar with the underlying material, but they definitely didn't (and don't) pronounce it the same way.
Modern linguistics has been able to find evidence for comparing these pronunciation variants and also understanding their histories, and I believe something similar is true for Sanskrit pronunciation.
Likewise, we have older information on pronunciation as well in the Pratishakhyas.
Ancient Indians cared a lot about accurate pronunciation, especially for mantras where the thinking was that without correct pronunciation, the mantra would not work. Picture the Harry Potter "wingardium leviosa" scene.
Modern don’t actually hew to the prescribed pronunciation for certain letters, but it’s certainly specified by Panini.
While it's very easy to pronounce Samskrta in a way similar to what was likely used in classical times, there have definitely been sound changes to an extent.
People are always going to speak how they want and eventually the 'correct' version isn't the majority. None of the many thousand people who have learnt Sanskrit in the eastern part of India would pronunce the name as 'Samskruta'. You could argue all day about how they are all wrong, that doesn't really change the fact.
No, that’s not true. there’s a bunch of varieties of Sanskrit, including Vedic Sanskrit, Classical Sanskrit, and various local dialects. Not all of these have been preserved in oral traditions.
Second, even within the preserved oral traditions, pronunciations vary across schools. For example, the “kru” part in your Samskruta is pronounced differently in different parts of India; some people do say “kri”
And your quibbling is indicative that there have been also been changes today as well - e.g. southern speakers tend to pronounce vowel r as “ru” while others say “ri” and at some point in time the pronunciation was likely more like American English r.
Leaving aside the linguistic debate in the comments here, there’s often no fair or truthful or representative discussion of the ancient East’s legacy (or others) for reasons relating to imperialism, colonialism, and supremacist thinking. I don’t mean that in the explicit “we’re taking over your country way” but in the more subtle or implicit ways. Western world views and Eurocentric histories are everywhere, from academia to Wikipedia, and due credit or consideration isn’t given elsewhere.
The problem persists even in the very countries we are talking about, like India, since their earlier “original” Hindu culture was changed by invasions (whether from the Islamic Middle East or Christian Europe). My understanding is that when the British finally left India, their academic culture still persisted in the form of Western education that replaced earlier forms of education, textbooks sourced from Western publishers, taxpayer funding into this system, and the adoption of languages like Hindi and English as the official languages (rather than say Sanskrit or Tamil).
So to answer your question in the broader sense beyond this article and discussion, there is no discussion of these things in part because of the power of Western spheres and in part because Eastern spheres themselves haven’t retained their own knowledge or promoted themselves adequately either domestically or internationally.
Lots of the original way people thought, lived their culture and worshipped in their religion has changed.
>The brahman was the reciter of hymns from the atharvaveda who was largely silent and observes the procedures and uses Atharvaveda mantras to 'heal' it when mistakes have been made.
Obvious example:
Arabic from at least the 7th century AD:
As an Arabic speaker, I can totally read a text the way it was pronounced 14 centuries ago and also perfectly understand it.
You cannot say the same thing for European languages.
Probably the same for sanskrit.
You probably cannot. Every region with a tradition of reciting the Qur'an has their own way of pronouncing it. It would be a strange coincidence if your tradition in particular happened to keep the pronunciation unchanged while all the others didn't.
E.g. do you pronounce ﺽ as a pharyngealized voiced alveolar lateral fricative? That's the most likely reconstruction of the sound: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E1%B8%8C%C4%81d
Indeed, that is why modern scientists believe that ﺽ must have represented some kind of lateral sound, like a lateral fricative (or maybe a lateral affricate or a stop with lateral release – the descriptions aren't detailed enough to distinguish between these options.) But most modern speakers nonetheless pronounce it as a plain stop or dental fricative instead of lateral.
Having a description of the pronunciation doesn't mean that someone reading the description will be able to follow it perfectly. Otherwise everyone learning a foreign language would be able to develop a native-like accent just by reading about the correct pronunciation.
Exactly my point.
You’re under the impression I cannot because of your limited knowledge of this topic: even if 1 letter was slightly different (which it is not), how does that discard the prononciation of 99% of the rest?
>> Every region with a tradition of reciting the Qur'an has their own way of pronouncing it
Plain wrong.
If you knew the topic, you would know that the various way to read the Holy Quran are so close that you could just say they are identical.
In my original post, I’m not even necessarily talking about the holy Quran.
What about the vast poetry written in Arabic in pre-Islamic times that anyone today can read the same way?
I will not get into the subject of whether I would understand it or not since you are still debating whether I would pronounce it the same way.
BTW, this is very different from : how does one pronounce Latin etc.
I may be able to do something similar in Spanish. I've read Emilianensian /Glosas/ in Navarrese-Aragonese and understand near the 95% of it. That being a close Romance to Castillian Spanish.
Scroll down and compare, you don't need to understand Spanish:
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glosas_Emilianenses
Also, I can perfectly read Don Quixote. My main issues would be the old Medieval slang with things that do not exist anymore or they changed a lot. But without the footer annotations, I had no issues at all to understand the 80% of it.
But, spelling it? Heck, it didn't change at all, our Spanish standards (Nebrija's grammar) date back to that era.
As a Finnish speaker, "Ganges" has the familiar form of a name borrowed from Greek or Latin, and it does not need further adaptation. "Ganga", on the other hand, sounds awkward in Finnish. Had ancient Finns been in contact with India, we would probably know the river as Kanka or Kankajoki ("Kanka river"). The latter in particular sounds like a proper Finnish river name.
Place names are notoriously tricky. The town I live in is now called Yeovil. It has well over sixty documented spellings since around 500CE. It started off as Gifle - bend in the river. G -> Y is a common Old English/Saxon to modern English thing (-gard and -yard, -burg and -bury, dag or tag and day.) If you squint really hard you can get the rest of the word OK. It was Ival, Givelle, Evil and all sorts of spellings on the way to today. There was also a vowel shift en-route and a generally open approach to spelling.
In Greek we have adopted many Turkish words and we always stick an "-i" at the end. For example, "passoumi" (a kind of footwear, "passoum" in Turkish), "briki" (for making coffee, "brik" in Turkish), "ati" (horse, "at" in Turkish) etc. I think we've also taken some Slavic words and treated them this way, for example "boureki" (borek, dumpling), kokoretsi ("kokorec") and probably others I can't think of now.
There is strong evidence that the ळ came from Substratum languages (Dravidian or Munda) and many Indo-Aryan languages still retain it e.g. Marathi, Gujarati.
And regular people didn't speak sanskrit in classical age. They spoke regional languages like Prakrit and Pali.
I also think this is so because the prevalent narrative is post colonial in nature and the (English) Internet is came out of Anglosphere. This is not a criticism of the prevalent order, it's just the way things have evolved naturally post WW2.