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Comment by slaxman | Hacker News Reader

I am a ployglot and know several indian and foreign languages. My favourite is Sanskrit. Why? Once I learnt Sanskrit, esp. the grammar, learning other languages was really easy. You easy almost all languages have their roots from Sanskrit. The grammar rules for German and Finnish, for example, are a subset of Sanskrit.

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> You easy almost all languages have their roots from Sanskrit. The grammar rules for German and Finnish, for example, are a subset of Sanskrit.

Your claims are a subset of the “everything comes from India” school of BSology.[1]

German is related to Sanskrit but does not descend from it.[2] Finnish belongs to a different language family entirely.[3]

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ln5QgeCL1fs

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IndoEuropeanTree.svg

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uralic_languages

How do you practice or make yourself not forget the several languages you know? I find it really hard to be proficient in a language unless you live among native speakers?

There is a small village in India which still speaks Sanskrit

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mattur

Could you please elaborate on this a little more? How did German and Finnish derive from Sanskrit? Could you give examples?

Derived from Sanskrit is probably wrong, but German, Finnish and Sanskrit belong to the Indo-European language family (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-european). Sanskrit is a very old language in this family tree (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_language) and thus very close to the common ancestor. Being close to the ancestor probably means that it shares many traits with it that were inherited by other Indo-European languages.

Kinda like how knowing Latin makes it easier to learn Romanic languages (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanic_languages), but Romanic languages were really derived from Latin.

Finnish is Uralic, not Indo-European.

Oops, thanks. For a possible relationship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Uralic_languages

Russian too.

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