The Second Life of Sanskrit

bbookofjoe 3 days ago 19 commentsRead Article on openthemagazine.com

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profsummergig•about 2 hours ago

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.

lioeters•22 minutes ago

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.

FlyingSnake•about 1 hour ago

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?

ashishb•36 minutes ago

> 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.

smokeyfish•about 2 hours ago

There's always Lithuanian.

ralfd•37 minutes ago

Context?

cyberax•29 minutes ago

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

alephnerd•about 2 hours ago

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

alephnerd•about 2 hours ago

> 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).

Alien1Being•about 1 hour ago

This highly recommended, excellent school in Sydney offers Sanskrit.

"A third elective is chosen from Accelerated Classical Greek/Italian/German, Sanskrit, ..."

https://www.sydgram.nsw.edu.au/life-at-grammar/academic/

My children had a great time there.

selimthegrim•29 minutes ago

>According to Tripathi, the problem of Sanskrit being narrowed to religion is a colonial inheritance. British Orientalists, he argues, created an image of Sanskrit as the language of ritual and one religious community, ignoring its vast Buddhist, Jain, Carvaka, scientific, theatrical, poetic and philosophical corpus.

I don't understand how you can take what happened to AH Dani at BHU and say this with a straight face.

throwawayamzn1•about 2 hours ago

It is caused by the ability of LLM to translate it quite accurately

latchkey•about 1 hour ago

we named our dog "santosha", such a great word.

ashishb•43 minutes ago

Fun fact: the famous "Sentosa" island in Singapore is a spelling variation of the same word.

alephnerd•about 2 hours ago

Something that isn't called out but is playing a role as well is the rise of humanities and interdisciplinary research in India. 20-30 years ago, specializing in ancient languages and texts from a CompLing perspective or a humanities perspective just didn't occur.

As India grew richer, the newer generation of liberal arts colleges (eg. Ashoka) and humanities programs in public universities (eg. IIT Delhi, IIT Kanpur, IIT Hyderabad, JNU) started attracting and hiring Western educated faculty and researchers (Indian as well as Foreigners) to help revitalize interest in humanities and social sciences.

India also now has a new generation philanthropists who are starting to donate to this kind of research (eg. Murthy and the "Murty Classical Library of India" at Harvard).

There is a similar revitalization for older texts in Tamizh, Telugu, Koshur, Pahari, Tibetan, etc as well.

lioeters•15 minutes ago

That's fascinating to learn. I'm curious, is there a political angle to the revival of some of the languages? The posted article mentions "values and traditions" associated with Sanskrit, and I imagine some religions and cultures are motivated to bring back languages for..not to say "selfish", but for their own survival and spread of ideas.

selimthegrim•about 1 hour ago

What about Prakrit and Punjabi? I knew a guy at UCSB, Gurinder Singh Mann who taught me to read Punjabi. Nice guy (to me) but got himself in a lot of trouble for many different reasons.

ashishb•38 minutes ago

> What about Prakrit and Punjabi?

There is no official "Prakrit", by definition of the term itself. "Prakrit" just means "natural" and the way I understand it, was the term for all colloquial dialects/languages across India.

"Sanskrit", on the other hand, meant "cultured" and its grammar, at least for the last 2500 years, is strictly defined by Panini (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A%E1%B9%A3%E1%B9%AD%C4%81dhy%C...)

alephnerd•about 1 hour ago

Yes as well. My list of languages was non-exhaustive.