Sanskrit - Why is it called the mother of European Languages

Although Einstein was born in Germany, he fled the country in 1933 when Hitler came to power.

Actually, he was already here in the USA and wisely decided not to go back. He was Jewish (by ancestry although not particularly religious) and had no intention of going back to the antisemitism that was becoming the face of Germany. He was granted U.S. citizenship in 1940, and spent the last couple of decades of his life working in and for the USA.

Much of his great work, notably his later work, was performed in the USA. Therefore, many people simply regard him as American--especially since, at the end of his life, he certainly was.

Well duh? Deaf people all over the world use sign languages. Each culture tends to develop its own and today more than 100 are recognized.

Some African languages still incorporate bird calls and other sounds of the forest.

When Jean Auel began writing her "Clan of the Cave Bear" series of novels, the prevailing notion was that the Neanderthal brain did not have a speech center. So she invented a rich sign language for the Neanderthal characters in her books. Communication was the problem that kept the Neanderthals and the recently arrived Homo sapiens at odds with each other.

However, more sensitive instruments have been developed. It was recently determined that the Neanderthal skull did indeed have a place for a speech center, almost identical to ours.

 

That 500,000 word estimate for English is an underestimate that probably doesn't count some specialised technical terms and the like. Probably English has at least twice that many words.

If Sanskrit has 74 million words, one wonders what use they would be. Many of them would probably have to be single words for complex concepts, that could be broken down into a few simpler words. In fact, I'd like to know what is counted as a "word" in that count. For example, if we were counting English words, would "quick", "quicker", "quickly", "quickness", "quickest" be counted as separate words, or words all based on the same "root"?

No individual human being would ever have a working vocabulary remotely approaching even 100,000 words. Shakespeare, for example, may have had a working vocabulary of about 25,000 words.

The possible meanings expressible in English are practically infinite, but this is true in just about any natural language. When a language needs to express something new, writers or speakers invent new words as necessary. Often, they borrow from other languages, but in many cases (e.g. technological advanced) new words are coined.

No language has words that are completely determined by grammar, including Sanscrit. Meanings must be assigned to words. Prefixes, suffixes, word forms and the like can be used to indicate the grammatical role of a given word in context, but the "root" of any given word is essentially arbitrary (which is not necessarily to say random).

 

That is common but incorrect. The correct way to write and pronounce 10,036 is "one thousand thirty-six."

It is always wrong to include the word "and" in the construction of an integer in English. "And" is reserved for fractions, for example: The employees at my factory can manufacture six and a half tons of nylon every day.

This seems more like one of the language's idiosyncrasies than a principle to enshrine in its grammar books.

Numbers have always given humans problems as their civilizations grew to the point that they needed to express larger and larger numbers.

Just look at English: "eleven" is the remnant of a phrase meaning, in ancient Anglo-Saxon, something like "there's one remaining after we counted ten."

We managed to straighten out the construction of numbers greater than 20: twenty-one, thirty-four, ninety-eight, etc. But the numbers between ten and twenty are a mess. The origin of "eleven" and "twelve" can fill a book of its own, but the ones from 13 to 19 are simply backwards: "fourteen" and "fifteen" mean "four and ten" and "five and ten."

The Germans never got beyond this stage: 84 in German is vier und achtzig, "four and eighty." English retains an echo of that construction: we still sing a lullaby to our children with the line "four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie."

The French never got that far. In their language, 94 is "eighty-fourteen."

 

I don't know what the English and Americans do, but it is standard in Australian English to say (and write, if we're using words) "One thousand and thirty six". It would be exceedingly rare to ever hear "One thousand thirty-six" in Australia.

Thus, judging by Australian usage it is always correct to do that.

 

Interesting. No American editor would approve that construction.

Do you even name years that way? We read 1492 (the year of Columbus's landing in the Western Hemisphere) as "one thousand four hundred ninety-two"--although the colloquial reading "fourteen-ninety-two" is far more common, and approved in almost any context.

 

We'd normally say "fourteen ninety-two" for the year 1492. On the other hand, the number would be "One thousand, four hundred and ninety-two".

A year like the year 2007 is "Two thousand and seven" in Australia, never "Two thousand seven".

I suspect that things are the same in Britain, and the US is the odd one out on this, but I could be wrong.

 

Neither Dictionary.com nor Wikipedia list "first writing" as the meaning of the name "Sanskrit." They both cite it as "refined" or "adorned" speech. Neither the word "first" nor the word "writing" appears in these definitions.

This is the consensus of the community of linguists. The phonetic writing systems that sprang up after the immigrants who helped build the pyramids took the notion of writing home with them were (sometimes loosely) derived from the definitely NOT phonetic hieroglyphics. The Phoenician system came first, and the Hebrew, Arabic and other Mesopotamian writing systems are descended from Phoenician. And of course so is the Greek alphabet, which in turn is the ancestor of the Roman alphabet, which is now the most widely-used writing system on the planet.

Of course there are other writing systems that were developed independently, notably Chinese. It is most definitely not a phonetic system, but nonetheless it was adapted by the Japanese and the Koreans, although the former augmented it with a syllabary and the latter ultimately dumped it and now use a home-grown phonetic system. (They only write their names in the Chinese symbols, and this is permitted only in South Korea.)

The Olmecs also developed a written language, although several thousand years later than the Egyptians. It continued to be used by the Mayans who came after them, and by the Aztecs who came after the Mayans. It has not been in use since the Christian invasion, but plenty of examples have survived and it can still be understood.

The only other writing system I know of that was developed in the Western Hemisphere is the Cherokee syllabary, which was devised by Chief Sequoia in the 19th century. For several decades, the Native people of Oklahoma had a much higher rate of literacy than their English-speaking neighbors, and even published their own newspapers. The modern Cherokees, arguably the most prosperous of all the tribes because of their oil wells, are proud of their writing system and many of them dutifully study it in order to keep it alive, even though in modern times they all speak English. I have a textbook in my own library, although I haven't gotten very far into it.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

The Wikipedia article on Sanskrit makes it clear that the spelling and pronunciation "Sanskrit" is absolutely not the way the word was spelled or pronounced by its own native speakers. It's a simplification that makes it easier for us foreigners to spell and pronounce.

The original word in the language itself is saṃskṛtam (pronounced səmskr̩t̪əm), from saṃskṛtā vāk, which translates as "refined speech." Written this way, it's clear that the syllable "skrit," in the popular spelling and pronunciation "Sanskrit," is a coincidence. There is no relation to our word "script," which derives from Latin scribere, "to write."

Like all human languages, Sanskrit was spoken for many centuries before its speakers felt the need to develop a written version. In most cultures, this happened as they made the transition to the Bronze Age. The technology of metallurgy made it possible for communities to grow so large that everybody no longer knew everybody else personally, so they needed to keep records of transactions and obligations.

 

Much has happened in the science of linguistics in the last 85 years. I wouldn't base an argument on something that was written a century ago.

Moreover, we've put a lot more time and effort into analyzing the languages that are in current use. It is absolutely not true that all European languages use a writing system that is on the verge of obsolescence. Several important languages underwent spelling reform in the 19th century, including, notably, Italian, which was treated as one of the continent's most important because so much great literature was written there.

In addition, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Czech, Polish, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Finnish and at least some of the languages of the former Yugoslavia can also be recited with very few gaffes.

Well, some group of humans created the first spoken language about 70KYA, and since it had no ancestor it must be identified as "artificial," unless you're one of the folks who credit everything to an imaginary Supreme Being.