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Comment by fooker | Hacker News Reader

No Sanskrit absolutely doesn't sound like it did in ancient the ancient times. Modern (north Indian) Sanskrit pronunciation uses Hindi/Urdu style of pronouncing vowels which was significantly influenced by Arabic and Persian.

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.

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> Modern (north Indian) Sanskrit pronunciation uses Hindi/Urdu style of pronouncing vowels which was significantly influenced by Arabic and Persian.

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.

I mean, you could listen to samveda chants from different parts of India and see the pronunciations are very audibly different...

Your kind of hot take about Sanskrit is somewhat common.

I once went to a wedding involving academic linguists and Hindu prayers. A Hindu priest chanted a prayer in Sanskrit and then an academic linguist followed up by chanting the same prayer with his view of what it would have anciently sounded like. Notwithstanding the priest's own view of his Sanskrit as an ancient language, his pronunciation didn't match up with the academic linguist's view of the historical pronunciation.

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.)

I don't understand why an academic linguist is more qualified than a traditionally educated scholar in India, who has deep knowledge of the classics. I don't deny that there were likely some influences, but the care and precision with I was taught recitation is something I have not encountered in any other discipline. I am an engineer, but if I start from the Ashtadhyayi, I don't see how things could have changed much.

My understanding is that it's not clear to what extent Panini understood or attempted to explicitly treat articulatory phonetics. Addressing articulatory phonetics well in writing alone is still hard, and understanding it in detail was immensely hard before the creation of audio recording, spectrograms, and x-rays.

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.

"There are no more Romans to correct your speech"?

"And remember, there are no Romans around to correct your pronunciation."

Cheers. Yeah, I let the "remember" bit drop :)

That would make it the only language in the world to be passed down unmodified, which seems... unlikely.

I understand it comes across as jingoistic, but truly Sanskrit grammar and pronunciation hasn’t changed since Pānini. The word Sanskrit itself means “constructed” and there was a rigorous effort to prevent ambiguity.

there are no recordings from panini's times and panini's texts pertain to grammar. they don't prescribe pronunciation - like precise position of tongue lips etc...

What are you talking about? Panini did detail the pronunciation of each character. And the actual pronunciation (i.e. accounting for things like assimilation) is then encoded in the writing via Sandhi.

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.

That’s actually the first thing you learn and it’s quite rigorous where to vocalize and how.

Yeah, and it differs based on where you're from!

Grammar hasn't. Pronunciation has, a lot.

You are almost completely wrong. How do you account for the precision of Panini as the previous commenter pointed out? How do you know to postulate that? There is NO other formalized grammar akin to Panini, so don’t judge Samskruta by other so called Indo European standards!

It is NOT Sanskrit, which was foisted on the world by the british. Please be respectful and call it by it real name, given by Panini which literally codified and formalized it.

Maybe if more people learnt the language instead of crusading on about it's supposed heritage, it would have been the official language of India.

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