Hacker News Reader

Comment by wbl | Hacker News Reader

Sanskrit is not an ancestor of English. Sanskrit is a satem language English centum. Proto Indo Iranian diverged long ago.

View on HN

> Sanskrit is not an ancestor of English

Sanskrit entered into Greek, Greek into Latin, Latin into English.

Edit: downvoter, express yourself clearly. I cannot see how the above sentence could be considered false, apart from gross interpretations of the chosen terms.

Again: you have a relation with "jñāna, gnō̃́sis, gnosco, knowledge"; then you have relations in other dimensions (jña, jñāti, gnṓmōn, gnṓmōn...): the awareness of those details enriches the awareness of the language. That is through the relation between Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, post-Latin - it is just there. What is contended is not clear.

That still does not make Sanskrit an ancestor language of English, though both English and Sanskrit do share a common ancestry several thousand years ago.

English has borrowed words from many languages, as all but the most isolated languages have.

> That still does not make Sanskrit an ancestor language of English

You are taking 'ancestor' in a strict technical sense, which was clearly not my intention.

> though both English and Sanskrit do share a common ancestry several thousand years ago

And those roots can be found and recognized in the subsequent languages, and there lies the value.

> which was clearly not my intention.

You did not express that clearly enough then.

My bad :)

It's just that I cannot allocate the safest amount of effort in composing. I thought it was clear enough.

Except the rest of your arguments fall apart if your point is just "Sanskrit and English shared a common ancestor thousands of years ago and English (and some actual ancestor languages to English) pulled in some Sanskrit loan words". As other commenters mentioned, lots of languages (and languages with long and robust literary traditions) fit this bill, so from an English speaker's perspective there is nothing special about studying Sanskrit. If anything there are a host of more direct ancestors.

The perspective in your post is rationalistic and not empiricist. There was no theorematic argument intending to prove the importance of Sanskrit (and Greek, and Latin) for the understanding of English based on historical notions: it was a witnessing of the importance of Sanskrit (and Greek, and Latin) for the understanding of English based on experience.

It is basically confusing an uncle with a grandfather, or an aunt with a grandmother.

These languages are indeed relatives, literally part of the same family, but we usually distinguish whether they are lineal ancestors or not. If you said "Julia is your grandmother" when Julia was actually the person's aunt, that person might get very confused about your claim!

People's aunts do often have a cultural effect on them, but we can still be more specific and distinguish them from their grandmothers.

No, the succession (Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, post-Latin) was given mainly in terms of the apogee - one peak follows the other in time. When I wrote «Sanskrit entered into Greek, Greek into Latin, Latin into English» I described the phenomenon, not the fact.

The literal matter (of direct inheritance) was meaningless to me in the composition, because the whole point was not and is not "what took from what": the whole point is the contribution that those languages give in the understanding of the current languages they informed.

I don't really understand what you mean by "entered into" here, unless you mean loanwords.

> what you mean by

Only, simply, non technically, that Sanskrit literature happened, then (non-committal irrelevant sketchy for-purpose-of-representation "then") Greek literature happened and you can find the Sanskrit terms modified (not literally them Sanskrit terms, more crisply the presence of the roots) into the Greek terms, and then (again) Latin literature happened, and you can find the Sanskrit and Greek terms modified into the Latin ones, etc.

Phenomenon: "one [as-if] entered into the other"; reality: "a common Language is revealed in their terminology"; the important part: "we can better define the terminology of current languages that share that property through the consideration of the languages that _substantially_ constitute their roots".

> You are taking 'ancestor' in a strict technical sense, which was clearly not my intention.

Blutly, this was not obvious, and what you suggested would have been equally true if you'd said:

  Learn Lithuanian. You were writing in a descendant language just now. If you learnt the roots, you would understand the descendants better.

Because Lithuanian has about as much in common with PIE as Sanskrit does.

Does Lithuanian have a comparable corpus of important literature? Is Lithuanian equally giving when reconstructing the networks of meaning? Is it comparably enlightening in the suggestion of the original common language?

That wasn’t clear to me. Yes, they share similar roots because they have a common ancestor language. Just like any pair of extinct or extant languages descended from PIE.

Both Vedic Sanskrit and Mycenaean Greek are the same age. Of course there may have been mutual influences as languages take cognates from each other.

But the point is in the strength of said relations in view of understanding the underlying roots in current languages.

Is that the point? Seems like Greek or Latin are more useful to an English speaker for familiarity, and Sinitic ones for foreign-ness. Sanskrit occupies a space that is less useful for a Western audience as a sibling language to English in a valley of novelty and similarity.

> Seems like Greek or Latin are more useful to an English speaker for familiarity

It is that consideration of the several implementations (so, include Sanskrit - it augments the material importantly) clarifies the cones of meanings in the roots.

There was extremely limited contact between them until thousands of years later, and no real cultural exchange until the era of exploration.

Sanskrit is no older than Kurdish; English Greek etc have the same relation to it as to Kurdish — they are all alike of Indo European descent.

Like Greek and Latin, Sanskrit is an anciently written language associated with major states and ‘civilizations’ - and, crucially, is like Greek and Latin in that it is still remembered if only by some thin intellectual or priestly stratum of societies.

So by use of those three, Indo European unity could be especially well validated by pure textual scholarship (especially if the scholar was British or German and thus on another branch). It is surprising as the result is intuitively scientific — how could I arrive at it if all I do is read and write?! - and was indeed of massive importance to the framing of Darwin’s quite different scientific enterprise, which needed different evidence .

If an awareness of Kurdish would help understanding Greek, than Latin, than our post-Latin languages in use, then such awareness would be surely welcome,

but "the thing with" Sanskrit is also about the prominence of its literature. The wealth of relations between the terms in those languages is enlightening, and there is an important literary corpus behind it.

(I am not quite prepared about Kurdish literature.)

Edit:

> still remembered if only by some thin intellectual or priestly stratum of societies

You are "setting the bar" so incredibly low...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com