Prajnaparamitamahamantram: Sanskrit : re synthetic languages

» pseudoerasmus - re synthetic languages

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