Hacker News Reader

Comment by profsummergig | Hacker News Reader

Taleb says that some languages are only meant for ritual.

IMHO, Sanskrit quotes sound cool to those who know Prakrit languages just like Latin and Greek quotations sound cool to those who know Romance languages (and even to those who know English, like myself).

Yes, there is a revival, and an interest. But Sanskrit has always been known to the "priestly" class even though they never conversed in it. This new revival is not going to lead to actual communication, just a lot of visual art based on the script and quotations. IMHO.

View on HN

The majority of surviving Sanskrit literature is actually secular like Poems, Dramas, science and mathematics.

Sanskrit was widely spoken and understood just like Latin or Avestan, in its heyday. Otherwise it wouldn’t be part of the liturgical traditions of Buddhism, Jainism and Nastika traditions.

Why would Sudraka,Vatsayana, Brhathari write in Sanskrit if no one spoke it?

> Sanskrit was widely spoken and understood just like Latin or Avestan, in its heyday. Otherwise it wouldn’t be part of the liturgical traditions of Buddhism, Jainism and Nastika traditions.

I think, and it is just my speculation, that for most of Indian History, Sanskrit was the link language.

Just like "Latin" in the USA and Europe of the early 17th and 18th centuries, when all academic instructions were carried out in Latin!

So, nobody used Sanskrit as the primary language, but everyone could or knew someone who could convert Sanskrit to the local dialect.

It is almost like how Chinese and Colombian traders might sign a contract for coffee purchase in English. Neither might use English in most of their daily operations.

Yes this makes a lot of sense, if I recall correctly the first grammar of Telegu was written in Sanskrit, and many South India languages use a lot of Sanskrit words, but of course they are not intelligible if you don't know the grammar.

Not sure why you are speculating or what your background would be to do so, when the info is easy to find. Yes it was a link language given its prominence, but also

> Sanskrit was a spoken language in the educated and the elite classes, but it was also a language that must have been understood in a wider circle of society because the widely popular folk epics and stories such as the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Bhagavata Purana, the Panchatantra and many other texts are all in the Sanskrit language, while many Sanskrit dramas indicate that the language coexisted with the vernacular Prakrits.[115] Thus, Classical Sanskrit with its exacting grammar was the language of the Indian scholars and the educated classes, while others communicated with approximate or ungrammatical variants along with other natural Indian languages,[114] with the cities of Varanasi, Paithan, Pune and Kanchipuram being centres of Sanskrit learning and debate until the arrival of the colonial era

(Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanskrit )

> I think, and it is just my speculation, that for most of Indian History, Sanskrit was the link language.

> Just like "Latin" in the USA and Europe of the early 17th and 18th centuries, when all academic instructions were carried out in Latin!

You're suggesting that Sanskrit became a scholarly language, which no one was disputing. You're even using as a metaphor Latin, which started out as a vulgate tongue - which is the argument you are doubting.

Edit: It also applies to your English comparison. English IS spoken by millions, just not by the people you are referring to. Are you actually claiming English isn't a mother tongue to anyone?

> Are you actually claiming English isn't a mother tongue to anyone?

I gave a specific example where neither the coffee wholesaler nor the buyer probably operates day to day in English. But they would still use English for the official agreement.

That does not take away from other benefits of English like being spoken by millions as a primary language and probably billions as a second language

Comparing Sanskrit to the status of Latin in 17th CE is bit disingenuous and a sign of presentism.

Sanskrit enjoyed scholarship since 6th BCE and it was prevalent and commonly used for more than a millennia after that.

The various inscriptions found across the subcontinent, and meant for common people are in Sanskrit which disproves this idea that it was not widely used.

I grew up in India and till grade 8 (or 9? Can't remember), it was mandatory for me to take Sanskrit lessons along with English and Hindi.

Our state only had Sanskrit in 10, 11 and 12 and it was not taught properly.

> Sanskrit was widely spoken and understood just like Latin or Avestan

Is that so ? I am not knowledgeable myself but some of my family members are (professor s in Sanskrit) and from what I have absorbed from their conversation is in direct contradiction to your claim.

The language of interpersonal communication were vulgarised forms, aka the vernacular languages. Sanskrit was used were a need for formality, respect, speciality was felt.

Regarding your claims about secularity, you are very correct.

With all due respect, are they historians of Sanskrit linguistics or professors of Sanskrit language? That makes a big difference.

Diglossia is very common in Indian culture and it is not far fetched to imagine Indians speaking Sanskrit and Prakrits fluently and switching them based on context.

You can find minor examples of it even today if you look at public announcements, which are done in Sanskrit inspired verbiage.

Prof of Sanskrit with dissertation on historical changes in Sanskrit used in the Vedas.

> not far fetched to imagine Indians speaking Sanskrit and Prakrits fluently and switching them based on context.

Any evidence in the form of records that this indeed happened. You are promoting a nonstandard position, so the burden of proof will be on you.

This isn’t a black and white case where “proofs” exist. Indian history is notoriously hard to study due to lack of primary sources.

> historical changes in Sanskrit used in the Vedas.

This is just one small corpus of Sanskrit linguistic traditions. It hardly gives them expertise over the rest of the traditions spanning few millennia.

Jains, Buddhists and various other Sramana movements were championed by lower varnas and they all used Sanskrit as a liturgical language.

I have already mentioned the widespread presence of edicts, danapatra, inscriptions, secular literature created for wider public which hints that Sanskrit was widely understood and Sanskrit/Prakrit Diglossia is not too far fetched.

> This is just one small corpus of Sanskrit linguistic traditions.

That was just what her dissertation was on, not the sum total of her expertise. I was responding to your question about familiarity with history in addition to linguistics of Sanskrit. In any case it's expert vetted piece of research, not claims about far-fetchednesd by someone on the internet.

Far fetchedness is hardly the the standard for wannabe scientific claims. If it was, there are many bridges that people can sell.

If proof free speculations are your thing, speculate away. There's a large population of similar proof-free quacks and hacks one can join. I have nothing more to add.

> If proof free speculations are your thing…

Funnily enough I’ve given enough examples and sources already in this thread. I think it’s better than “I know someone who knows” and “it’s expert vetted research”. I’ll stick to my theory about Sanskrit/Prakrit diglossia for now.

In the end we are two lay people arguing about a topic we’re not experts in and speculating how things would have been few millennia ago. It’s fine to have diverse perspectives! I’m not sure which quacks you deal with but I wish you all the best.

आ नो भद्राः क्रतवो यन्तु विश्वतः

My favorite use of Sankrit is the plant 'Ashwagandha'. Sounds fancy but it means 'Smell of a horse' as that is what it smells like.

The revival of Hebrew is a counter example, of a "ritual" language that managed to become a practical daily language for written and spoken communication.

Biblical Hebrew has no vowel markings (well it does, but they are an interpretation), so it cannot be used in daily speech. Modern Hebrew is distinct from Biblical Hebrew. Sanskrit itself does not have much use as an actual language because it lacks a lot of the features that, say, Hindi or English or Ancient Greek have, it has 7 past tenses that are basically identical and it does not make fine distinctions between moods, which it does not have enough of. Only Vedic Sanskrit could actually be used as a language, but similarly to Ancient Greek there are relatively few extant texts in Vedic Sanskrit and certainly the task of learning the language to fluency would be monstrous compared to studying a living language; and one that few, if any, would be willing to devote their life towards, especially considering that Classical Sanskrit already works fine enough as a literary language and is only so practical for that purpose because it has such a strictly defined grammar.

I see, very interesting, thanks! I've been curious about Sanskrit "indirectly" from learning about root words in Slavic (and other) languages, as they call it proto-Indo-European roots. Similarly with ancient Greek or Latin, I enjoy learning the etymology of many of the words in modern languages like Spanish, French, etc.

> Biblical Hebrew has no vowel markings (well it does, but they are an interpretation), so it cannot be used in daily speech. Modern Hebrew is distinct from Biblical Hebrew

The same can be said about Latin (of which we do not exactly know how they used to pronounce words), or any other language. How to pronounce letters or words is always "interpretation" (or more accurately, tradition).

Well the difference is that different vowels can signify not only different cases or declensions but even different words entirely in afroasiatic languages. So, yes, missing vowels means that the edition that does have vowels (developed in the 10th century I believe) is a particular interpretation of the work.

The mathematical study of the evolution of vowels in languages is quite well developed, and we can say with huge certainty that we know how classical Latin was pronounced. Yes, there absolutely were regional dialectal differences, but we do not rely on "tradition" to say that a long "i" sound (/i:/) was pronounced like the vowel in modern English "tree".

> This new revival is not going to lead to actual communication, just a lot of visual art based on the script and quotations

This, but also social sciences and interdisciplinary research (especially in the NLP, CompLing, and ML space).

There's always Lithuanian.

Or Koshur - it still retains archaic word forms, syntax, and roots that fell out of other Indo-Iranian languages.

Context?

It's a small language that has everything: a complicated case system, genders, a unique vocabulary, and even freaking tones.

A famous example (similar to the ones you can find between West Frisian and modern English):

Vedic Sanskrit: Devas adadat datas; Devas dat dhanas.

Lithuanian: Dievas davė dantis; Dievas duos duonos.

English Translation: God gave teeth; God will give bread.

Just to save anyone the trouble of a web search:

West Frisian: Bûter, brea, en griene tsiis is goed Ingelsk en goed Frysk.

Modern English: Butter, bread, and green cheese is good English and good Frisian.

Lithuanian underwent fewer changes than other European languages languages from the same root language that begat all the proto-Indo-European languages. So it shares a lot of similar words with Sanskrit which is extremely well preserved.

https://media.licdn.com/dms/image/v2/C4D22AQGncdnVV2H6Mg/fee...

Other languages like English mutated too much so it shares fewer similarities to Sanskrit.

It's kind of interesting that you contradict much of what the article concludes, even though the article gives a lot of examples. Maybe your prediction will be true.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com