Prajnaparamitamahamantram: Sanskrit
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- David_Poulson
- biogardener
- rkhen
- biogardener
- rkhen
- pseudoerasmus
- pseudoerasmus
- pseudoerasmus
- pseudoerasmus
- andresgomez
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» David_Poulson - Only intellectuals?
"Esperanto was created to meet a perceived need. It therefore never found acceptance except by intellectuals."Well, Traute, from my perspective you have written both a non sequitur and a sweeping generalization in the same sentence.
With respect, I must disagree with you.
-- posted by David_Poulson
» biogardener - depends on your definition
Whether you agree with me or not would depend on your definition of "intellectual." It was not meant to be derogatory, because I consider myself to be one. I merely meant to point out that Esperanto, unlike High German, was not embraced as the language of the people. I suggest that you read my article on the creation of the High German language, and you will understand what I am trying to say.What I would like to find out from Robert is whether Sanskrit ever became the language of the entire country, or whether it remained a language of literature and a language of study, as Latin was in European universities.
High German became the language of the country because it was the language of the German Bible which everyone wanted to read. So everyone had to learn that language. This phenomenon is not unique in the world, but I have so far believed that this was the first occurrence. It has since that time happened on a smaller scale in the 20th century.
If it happened with Sanskrit as well, I certainly want to know about it. Robert knows that I am intensely interested in this subject, and that I have done considerable research on it.
-- posted by biogardener
» rkhen - Hi Traute,
Hi Traute,Insofar as Esperanto is concerned, I think two points are germane. As a brand new language (just 100 years), Esperanto still has plenty of time to prove itself. In fact, by that measure it's a raging success. While I wouldn't care to make any grandiose predictions about its future, I'd say it stands at least an even chance of becoming a very important language in the centuries to come. For the second, I'm not sure Esperanto's use by the people (if you mean in daily conversations between neighbours) is relevant. Esperanto is by definition an auxiliary; it's to fall back on when you encounter strangers. In fact, I think I join with the vast majority of Esperantists when I say that if Esperanto ever replaced (as in killed) any natural language, I would be deeply chagrined.
As a standard synthesised from naturally-evolved languages, Sanskrit is very much like High German, but not very much like Esperanto. It's tough to answer your question about its daily use in succinct terms, because its history (which parallels the history of India) is incredibly complex. However, Sanskrit definitely was the working, daily language of certain classes of Indian society for quite some time. Even that statement isn't entirely accurate, though, since there is evidence that even among the Sanskrit-speaking classes, women were required to speak Prakrit during at least one period in Indian history. And of course, certain classes were forbidden from learning or speaking Sanskrit at all.
With those caveats, the short answer is yes, Sanskrit was in daily use throughout most of the Indian subcontinent. The comparison with High German is quite good. They're both purposely-synthesised standards that supplement but do not displace local languages.
I hope I've answered your question in some helpful fashion. I'm reluctant enough to generalise about languages; in this case we're also talking about India, where generalisations are dangerous indeed.
Thanks again for your thought-provoking post, Traute.
-- posted by rkhen
» biogardener - More like Latin
From what you say here, it sounds more as though Sanskrit was the language of a certain class of people, like Latin used to be the language of the clergy and of scholars. It transcended the barriers of the various European languages. Anyone who wanted to study simply switched to Latin. And that Latin, too, was in part a man-made language. Although it was based on the Latin of the Roman Empire, it underwent drastic changes to meet the requirements of the church and of universities.The story of High German is totally different. As the reading of the Bible spread throughout Europe, the High German language replaced the church Latin, because it was understood by everyone, not just the clergy. It has indeed replaced the native languages of the various regions, at least in Germany, in Austria, and in Switzerland. If you want to hear the native languages, you have to German settlements all over the world. We have some really good examples here in southern Manitoba, where English, High German, and Tyrolian are the three languages spoken on Hutterite colonies. Similarly, English, High German, and Low German are the languages spoken by Mennonites.
In Germany, High German is the only language spoken by the every person in the country, the only language heard in church, on the media, the only language read in books and newspapers. The youngest people who actually communicate in their native tongues, now called dialects, are in their seventies, and all of them lived all their lives in small villages. People like me who grew up in cities, never got to hear a dialect except when visiting, and then I didn't understand a word.
Unless Germany starts to teach these dialects in schools as options, they will die out within 20 years. They are not likely ever going to be revived for daily usage.
In 20 years time, Germans may have to come to Southern Manitoba to study German dialects, just as Ukrainians have to go to Munich, to Winnipeg, and to Edmonton to study their native tongue, because in their own country it has been replaced by Russian. Munich has the only Ukrainian university, and many of my friends in Winnipeg got their PhD there.
Mind you, that is another story. Ukrainian was deliberately stamped out by the state. That might make another interesting topic for you to write about.
-- posted by biogardener
» rkhen - Funny you should bring up Ukrainian, Traute.
Funny you should bring up Ukrainian, Traute. In fact, I am planning to write about it some time, and have an ongoing file for information that I find online. Few Canadians today realise that Ukrainians were rounded up wholesale and stuffed into prison camps during WWI, just like Japanese Canadians were in the next war. However, unlike the Japanese Canadian prisoners, the Ukrainians were never compensated; no-one ever even apologised. Not Canada's best moment, to say the least.The Ukraine is kind of like the Alsace, in that it's smack in the middle of an invasion route and the peoples on both sides hate its inhabitants because they aren't enough like either of them to be easily categorised. I've always been fascinated by peoples in that predicament. Their history makes interesting reading, but is no fun to live.
-- posted by rkhen
» pseudoerasmus - re Sanskrit
Henderson:Your article on Sanskrit was bland and boring and left out many interesting things about this language.
(1) Would you write an article on Latin without mentioning the fact that it is the ancestor of French, Portuguese, Romanian, etc.? Would you write an article on Latin neglecting to cite its influence on non-Romance languages such as English and German?
(Aside: I wonder if Biogardener knows that the German word Käse [cheese] is a Latin loanword and is cognate to the Spanish word for cheese, queso.)
You've written an article on Sanskrit which mentions in passing that Hindi/Urdu is descended from the language, but leaves out how many other descendants? Punjabi, Bengali, Kashmiri, Gujarati, Nepali, Sinhalese (of Sri Lanka), etc. etc. Not to mention the massive number of Sanskrit loanwords in the Dravidian languages such as Tamil. If you add up the number of speakers of languages descended from Sanskrit or whose lexicon is substantially Sanskritic, we're talking about over 1,3 billion! That's more than the population of all the other Indo-European languages combined!
Yet a reader of your article comes away not knowing this rather important fact about Sanskrit.
(2) Couldn't you have devoted at least one paragraph to the politics & sociolinguistics of Sanskrit in modern India?
In a mirror image of French efforts to find native words for foreign ones, the Indian government used to try to purge Hindi of its Persian, Arabic and English elements and increase the proportion of Sanskritic words. At the time of independence, "aeroplane" in Hindi was, well, just plane or aeroplane. But today it has become "havaj jahaj" ("flying ship"). The word for "train station" continues to be "tren stashen", but at one point the Indian ministry of culture was promoting some Sanskrit phrase which might be translated as "house for the dragon that runs on rails". A tie? "Loincloth for the neck".
(3) You barely talk about the script used in Sanskrit -- the brilliant Devanagari system of writing. You don't mention that it operates not on an alphabetic principle like Arabic or Cyrillic or Roman, but on a syllabic principle, very much like the Japanese kana system. It's hard to imagine a more perfect system for Sanskrit and its descendants than the Devanagari. To wit, all of India's official languages save Urdu use either the Devanagari script or a derivative.
Often called “the Latin of the East,” Sanskrit once had auxiliary value throughout Asia...
Where did Sanskrit have ‘auxilliary value’ outside India? You put in some links which related how some Buddhist scholars outside India learnt Sanskrit, but that doesn’t mean it was an ‘auxilliary’. The fact is, it never was an ‘auxilliary’ outside historical Bharat. This claim has the same odour as your previous one that Greek was once a lingua franca in Eastern Europe, a claim you persisted in making for months.
Sanskrit has also been written in several other alphabets in the course of its long reign, including Brahmi, Arabic, and Roman.
What body of works in Sanskrit were written using Arabic or Roman script? I mean less to dispute you than to have my curiosity satisfied.
Uploading blocks of text as graphics is the simplest tactic, but a pain for anyone who wants to search or manipulate the text. Various Roman transliteration schemes have been developed, such as Harvard-Kyoto, but Sanskrit’s unique diacritical demands complicate this already anaemic solution. Diacriticals are not the only challenge for software developers, either. Devanagari characters hang from an incorporated upper line, rather than resting on an invisible lower line as European alphabets do.
You persist in having this strange incapacity for understanding that there are no technical barriers to developing fonts for non-Roman scripts for use on the Web. None at all.
As I tried to explain to you a little while ago with respect to the Arabic script, the problem with non-Roman fonts on the Web has nothing to do with the representation of characters on the screen and everything to do with the lack of uniform encoding standards on the Web. That is, people can't agree on them. That's it. Full stop.
Do you really think it's more of a challenge for software developers to develop fonts for Arabic or Devanagari than, say, Kanji?
Of course not. Yet the vast majority of websites in Japanese use, not blocs of graphics, but text. For example,
And Russian too:
Anyone who possesses, or are willing to spend five minutes downloading, the appropriate non-Roman text display support files from Microsoft can view the above websites without the slightest problem. (If you have Macintosh and/or Netscape, you must go get your text support files elsewhere.)
The difference is that Japanese (and Greek, Russian, Chinese and other) sites now use standard encoding techniques, whereas such don't exist for languages using the Arabic or Devanagari script.
Those aspects of the Devanagari script that you think are so formidable -- diacritical marks, character conjuncts (not "ligatures", a term more appropriate to Arabic), and the fact that Devanagari characters hang from a line rather than rest on it -- pose no problems at all for word processors. The Devanagari diacritics -- vowel signs, anusvara, visarga, etc. -- that you think are so problematic, are easily handled by text editors. For example, a $150 multiple script editor called Global Writer handles dozens of non-Roman scripts, including Devanagari, like a seasoned virtuoso. Some of its output in other scripts: Farsi and Japanese.
-- posted by pseudoerasmus
» pseudoerasmus - re synthetic languages
Biogardener said:I have certainly come across many references to its impact on western European languages.
What impact did Sanskrit have on western European languages???
It is because my mother tongue, High German, the official language of all German speaking countries, is also a language which was created from various languages when Martin Luther needed a widely accepted and understood language for his Bible translation.
This is far from unique.
The classical Latin taught at schools was also a synthetic language. Certainly no one spoke Latin the way Cicero wrote it. In my opinion it could not have been possible for a human being to speak spontaneously the kind of syntactically mind-boggling language Cicero wrote. (People whingeing about German syntax should be condemned to study Latin, ancient Greek or Sanskrit.)
The same with ancient Greek. In fact, the divide between Classical Athenian Greek and the spoken koine became so pronounced by the time of Alexander the Great, that the authors of the New Testament had to make a conscious decision to write in the koine, lest they not be understood by the masses. To this day, modern Greek maintains this diglossia -- there is a synthetic literary "katharevusa" so radically different from the spoken "demotiki" that they must be learnt separately.
Modern Standard Arabic is also a synthetic language, albeit one closely modelled on classical Koranic Arabic, which itself was a synthetic language cobbled together from the various dialects of 7th century Arabia.
But there is a big difference between HG and MSA. No matter its origins as an invented lingua franca, today High German is a naturally acquired language for the overwhelming majority of Germans (if not for the Swiss or the Austrians). By contrast, nobody speaks Modern Standard Arabic naturally. It is a language acquired entirely at the school or the mosque.
The different "dialects" of Arab countries are even more mutually unintelligible with one another than the various German "dialects". Without the Modern Standard Arabic that is taught at school in all Arab countries, a Moroccan and an Iraqi couldn't communicate with each other (although people from nearer countries, such as Lebanon and Syria, still could).
High German was created to meet a real need.
What's truly fascinating and baffling about High German is that it got accepted as a standard language by the elites in most of the historical German cultural area from the Rhine to the present-day borders of Belarus and from the Baltic Sea to the southern Alps -- despite the absence of a unified, centralising political entity to impose the standard on everyone. Standard English, Russian, French, Mandarin, Latin, Turkish, Italian, etc. all emerged along with the state. Yet, two centuries before German unification, writers in Vienna and Prussia and Frankfurt were writing in exactly the same language, something you couldn't say with Mittelhochdeutsch. I wonder if you appreciate how strange and rare this is in history.
But surely it is an historical accident that Luther's High German got accepted throughout most of the German cultural area; by which I mean that it was not inevitable. If history had been even slightly different, you wouldn't have a standard German language or culture. Rather you would have several different German-like languages. Just as an accidental and peculiar turn of events created Danish, Norwegian and Swedish instead of one standard Scandinavian language, or just as a particular turn of events created Russian, Ukrainian and (sort of) Belorussian, so if Luther had never been born or had Napoleon not ended the office of the Holy Roman Emperor, we might very well be talking about different standard languages for Austrian, German and Swiss, each synthesised from different dialectical bases.
-- posted by pseudoerasmus
» pseudoerasmus - More responses to Biogardener
like Latin used to be the language of the clergy and of scholars. It transcended the barriers of the various European languages. Anyone who wanted to study simply switched to Latin. And that Latin, too, was in part a man-made language. Although it was based on the Latin of the Roman Empire, it underwent drastic changes to meet the requirements of the church and of universities.
No, no, no.
The Latin as written during the Golden & Silver Ages -- from the fall of the Roman Republic to the demise of the Julio-Claudian imperial line -- this was the man-made language used in writing and in formal speaking.
By contrast, Medieval Latin -- the ecclesiastical & learned language of Western Europe from the late Roman period till the Renaissance -- was a much more natural language, in that it reflected the simpler syntax of the vernacular languages and more freedom with declensions.
So the drastic changes you speak of in Medieval Latin were in fact simplifications of the classical grammar (as well as the heavy borrowings from Biblical Greek). Elaboration provided upon request.
[The High German language] has indeed replaced the native languages of the various regions, at least in Germany, in Austria, and in Switzerland.
The substratum Germanic languages of Austria and Switzerland have not been replaced by High German! Your claim is egregiously untrue. Having grown up in Switzerland I know some Schwitzertütschi and it is alive and well, spoken colloquially not only at home but vividly used in all informal situations in the German cantons. Of Austria I only know Vienna but when they are not required to speak High German, the Viennese quickly default to speaking in their incomprehensible language. Many times have I sat in a Strassenbahnwagen in Vienna and listened frustratingly to that Viennese babbling by those seated beside me. But if you ask them a question in Standard German they leap out of their Viennese speech and make themselves perfectly comprehensible.
...in their own country [Ukrainian] has been replaced by Russian.
If Ukrainian is not spoken why is this Kiev newspaper written in Ukrainian?
Your statement is greatly exaggerated. In Eastern Ukraine and Crimea, where both the Czars and the Soviets settled many Russians, Uke is indeed unknown.
In Central Ukraine, Ukrainian is definitely spoken in the countryside; in Kiev, people mix Ukrainian and Russian.
If you go to Western Ukraine around Odessa and Lvov (Lviv in Uke), a region traditionally part of the Hapsburg empire and thus only subject to Russification in the 20th century, Uke isn't just alive, it is the primary language. There is also the Rusyn language which claims to be separate from Uke, but I consider it the same.
You are right, however, that advanced studies in Uke are not possible in Ukraine, because Soviet & Russian academic infrastructure still intact has not accomodated those aspiring to study Ukrainian language.
Your claim about the Ukrainian language is better applied to Belarussian, a language which today exists only theoretically despite its official status in Belarus. Even the president of Belarus, a sleezy man by the name of Lukaschenko, has pronounced (in Russian) that Belarussian is not fit for expressing elevated thoughts. I would be surprised if there is such a being as a native Belarussian speaker.
-- posted by pseudoerasmus
» andresgomez - Spanish , a romance language
Romance languagehttp://www.iespana.es/latine/latine.inde...
I 've a question , anybody know where latin got the terms caseus and vinum?
regards
-- posted by andresgomez
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