Sanskrit

Discussion in 'Linguistics' started by skaught, Nov 30, 2009.

  1. skaught The field its covered in blood Valued Senior Member

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    I just watched a documentary about India. They briefly talked about Sanskrit and how it is very similar to Latin. A woman spoke some in the documentary and I was surprised to hear just how much like Latin it does sound! Does anybody know where I can find out more about this? What evidence is there for a common ancestor. What probably came first, Latin or Sanskrit?
     
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  3. draqon Banned Banned

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    Def. sanskrit came first.
     
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  5. skaught The field its covered in blood Valued Senior Member

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    Supporting info please!
     
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  7. draqon Banned Banned

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    sanskrit...

    and latin...

     
  8. draqon Banned Banned

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    Sanskrit and Latin share the same origin

     
    Last edited: Nov 30, 2009
  9. draqon Banned Banned

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  10. Dywyddyr Penguinaciously duckalicious. Valued Senior Member

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    Er your OWN quote states:
    "... no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source"

    I.e they developed more or less contemporaneously.

    And your posts previous to and after that particular one do nothing to show evidence either way.
     
  11. draqon Banned Banned

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    your right I meant to say that both Sanskrit and Latin came from one common source Indo-European origin.
     
  12. skaught The field its covered in blood Valued Senior Member

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    Where did Indo-European come from?
     
  13. draqon Banned Banned

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    no clue:m:
     
  14. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Sanskrit and Latin are both members of the Indo-European language family. We can trace this family back to a single hypothetical ancestral language spoken by a people in the vague vicinity of Anatolia and Georgia around 4000BCE. There is no evidence to link Indo-European to any of the dozens of other language families such as Afro-Asiatic (which includes Hebrew and Arabic), Mongolic (which includes Turkish), Sino-Tibetan (which includes Chinese), Malayo-Polynesian (which includes Hawaiian and Tagalog), etc. So we don't know whether the technology of spoken language was invented independently in many different places, or if it was invented once and spread out from there.

    The Indo-European tribe split into two migrations. One went north across the Caucasus and then spread out to the west and into Scandinavia, and the languages of the various groups evolved separately into proto-Germanic, Latin, Greek, Celtic and Albanian: these are the Western Indo-European language groups.

    The other migration went east into Asia and spread out from there, evolving the Eastern Indo-European language groups. Some of the people went north and their language evolved into proto-Balto-Slavic, now represented by Russian, Latvian, Polish, Serbian, etc. Others wandered off into isolated groups like the Armenians. But another group went southeast and their language group is called Indo-Iranian. It contains the largest number of modern languages of any Indo-European group, more than thirty. This includes Farsi ("Persian"), a number of Middle Eastern languages most of us have never heard of, and half of the languages of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh such as Hindi, Punjabi and Bengali. (The other half, such as Tamil, were brought by a different, unrelated ethnic group, the Dravidians.)

    Sanskrit is the ancestor of most of the Indic languages of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. (As opposed to the Dravidian languages as I noted above.) Sanskrit was spoken in India from around (roughly) 1500BCE to 400BCE. This was India's classical era so many of its most important cultural writings, including the sacred texts of Hinduism and Buddhism, are written in Sanskrit. Sanskrit is to the Indic people what Latin and Ancient Greek are to Europeans: the font of their culture. Today virtually all schoolchildren are taught Sanskrit in addition to Hindi (the primary language of government), English (the lingua franca of the whole region which they all speak among themselves), and their regional language (but only in some places).

    Sanskrit is approximately as old as Latin, give or take a few centuries. It is related to Latin, but only distantly. Sanskrit is in the Eastern group and Latin is in the Western group, which means they split off about four or five thousand years ago. SanskrIt is more closely related to Czech, Armenian, Pashto and Lithuanian than it is to Latin. And Latin is more closely related to English, Gaelic, Albanian and Greek than it is to Sanskrit.

    However, since Latin and Sanskrit are both ancient languages, they hadn't had as much time to diverge from proto-Indo-European as the modern languages have. It's easier to see the similarity between Latin and Sanskrit than it is between their modern descendants such as Romanian and Bengali, which have had more time to go off in their own directions.

    In addition, linguistics wasn't well established as a scholarly discipline in those days, so the scholars were surprised to discover the relationship between Latin and Sanskrit. A modern linguist could easily spot the relationship between Irish and Persian, but in those days they didn't have the charts of phonetic shifts and grammatical paradigms that we have today. The relationship they discovered between Latin and Sanskrit was their first clue to the fact that the modern languages of India share a common ancestor with the modern languages of Europe. (Most of Europe: Basque, Hungarian, Finnish and a few other languages are outsiders.)
     
  15. Gustav Banned Banned

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    oh dear
    sam? is that true?
    you guys are quadrilingual?

    /giggle
     
  16. S.A.M. uniquely dreadful Valued Senior Member

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    There is an active dialogue going on in India about how many languages is it fair to ask any child to learn. Not sure about Sanskrit [it is primarily a liturgical language although computer programmers and revitalised nationalists have become interested in it] but all of us learn at least three languages by the expedient of having a language of education, a national language and a state language, in addition to our own language. Sometimes two of these overlap. Many progressive Indians feel that English should become the primary form of communication in the country as it will create an instant access for all Indians to a global culture currently available only to the urban elite. Dalits are at the forefront of compulsory English education for all children to break the backbone of the casteist elitism that discriminates against them since they are forced, by economy and government policy of reserved seats to favour local public schools in the local state language. But yes all of us learn Hindi, the state language and the local language

    My own example. As an urban Mumbaikar from a middle class family, I was educated in English, Hindi and Marathi. My mother tongue is Urdu and my father's lingua Gujarati. I also had the option of learning three years of a foreign language and I picked French.

    Why Dalits want English
    http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/...hy-Dalits-Want-English/articleshow/372570.cms
     
    Last edited: Nov 30, 2009
  17. skaught The field its covered in blood Valued Senior Member

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    Why are computer programmers interested in Sanskrit?
     
  18. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Note: Mumbaikar is a person from Mumbai, the city we used to call Bombay.

    Am I correct that your parents, who are probably close to my age and therefore from an older and more traditional generation, were a harbinger of India's cosmopolitan future, and that in those days it was not as common for people from two different cultures to marry?

    With ninety million speakers, Marathi is the 14th most widely spoken language on Earth.

    With 46 million, Gujarati is #26. It was the first language of both Mohandas K. Gandhi, the "father of India", and Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the "father of Pakistan."

    They are both Indo-European languages and both have many more speakers than other languages with which we Westerners are more familiar, like Czech or Hungarian.
     
  19. S.A.M. uniquely dreadful Valued Senior Member

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    skaught:

    Its the most convenient language for software programming

    No idea why though, its not my field.

    FR:

    Yup, my parents [though you wouldn't think to look at them] were both radicals for their time and place. Besides being independent and liberal, they were also not given to much religiosity or convention. I would call them hippies but sadly, they are too traditional in their outlook to be that generous.
     
  20. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    My days of hands-on coding in Cobol and assembler language are long past, but it's said that Sanskrit is an object-oriented human language and therefore lends itself to object-oriented programming.

    In an object-oriented data structure, all the functions, rules and properties pertaining to a data element are grouped with it. This makes program code less complex and reduces the probability of defects.

    I'm sure most Americans would prefer to invest the effort in learning object-oriented programming in English, rather than studying a foreign language, which violates our cultural tabu.

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    But this may explain why Indians have (arguably) come to dominate the craft of programming.
     
  21. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Everyone looks like a hippie to his parents and like an old fogey to his children.

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  22. skaught The field its covered in blood Valued Senior Member

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    Can you explain to me what an object oriented language is?
     
  23. S.A.M. uniquely dreadful Valued Senior Member

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    Here is what I found:

    Words in Sanskrit are instances of pre-defined classes, a concept that drives object oriented programming [OOP] today. For example, in English 'cow' is a just a sound assigned to mean a particular animal. But if you drill down the word 'gau' --Sanskrit for 'cow'-- you will arrive at a broad class 'gam' which means 'to move. From these derive 'gamanam', 'gatih' etc which are variations of 'movement'. All words have this OOP approach, except that defined classes in Sanskrit are so exhaustive that they cover the material and abstract --indeed cosmic-- experiences known to man. So in Sanskrit the connection is more than etymological.

    It was Panini who formalised Sanskrit's grammer and usage about 2500 years ago. No new 'classes' have needed to be added to it since then. "Panini should be thought of as the forerunner of the modern formal language theory used to specify computer languages," say J J O'Connor and E F Robertson. Their article also quotes: "Sanskrit's potential for scientific use was greatly enhanced as a result of the thorough systemisation of its grammar by Panini. ... On the basis of just under 4000 sutras [rules expressed as aphorisms ], he built virtually the whole structure of the Sanskrit language, whose general 'shape' hardly changed for the next two thousand years."

    Every 'philosophy' in Sanskrit is in fact a 'theory of everything'. [The many strands are synthesised in Vedanta --Veda + anta--, which means the 'last word in Vedas'.] Mimamsa, which is a part of the Vedas, even ignores the God idea. The reality as we know was not created by anyone --it always was--, but may be shaped by everyone out of free will. Which is a way of saying --in OOP terms-- that you may not touch the mother or core classes but may create any variety of instances of them. It is significant that no new 'classes' have had to be created. Thathachar believes it is not a 'language' as we know the term but the only front-end to a huge, interlinked, analogue knowledge base. The current time in human history is ripe, he feels for India's young techno wizards to turn to researching Mimamsa and developing the ultimate programming language around it; nay, an operating system itself.

    http://www.libervis.com/topic/sanskrit_as_an_object_oriented_language
     

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