3 ms·
This article only scratches the surface, I think. One thing that is worth clarifying IMO: There is nothing inherently “scientific” about Sanskrit as a language
by svat 9y ago
This article only scratches the surface, I think.
One thing that is worth clarifying IMO: There is nothing inherently “scientific” about Sanskrit as a language by itself: instead what's remarkable are
1. the Sanskrit grammatical tradition, as represented especially by Pāṇini. The Sanskrit grammarians paid special attention to language, and their careful study culminated in a grammar by Pāṇini that was centuries ahead of its time, and is still throwing up new insights. The last several generations of modern linguists have read their own ideas into Pāṇini: from William Jones at the start of historical linguistics to de Saussure to Chomsky to Kiparsky. (The last of whom is an expert in both Sanskrit and modern linguistics.) Panini occupies a place in Indian thought equivalent to that of Euclid in Greek, and explicit comparisons have been drawn between the two. (E.g. all students were expected to master them respectively, these were the sciences that all others sought to emulate, ...) (I remember reading somewhere something to the effect that: among achievements of civilizations, the Egyptians have their pyramids and India has Panini's grammar.)
2. the cultural fact that, Pāṇini's grammar having been so exhaustive/complete, it became regarded as the definition of correct Sanskrit, and culturally for centuries everyone who composes in Sanskrit has just chosen to stick to this grammar. This "froze" Sanskrit and gives it a timeless quality: Sanskrit poets composing today use the same language that would have been comprehensible centuries ago; learning this one language opens up literature spanning 2500 years. With other languages that evolve naturally, this is difficult: even Shakespeare's (early) modern English is difficult for many.
- Florin_Andrei 9y agoTLDR: Sanskrit was formalized very early on.
- svat 9y agoWell, yes. Thanks. What I was trying to say is that the formalization is actually great: - it is useful to linguists. (Modern linguistics borrows terms like sandhi and bahuvrihi for example.) - it is acceptable to language users. Poets have continued to compose in the same language, without finding the formalization artificial. - it is interesting even as an achievement of the human mind/culture. A somewhat trivial example, but possibly of interest to the HN audience: the grammar needs to refer to various sets of sounds (like "nasal consonants", "short vowels", "aspirated stops" and so on). To compactly encode these sets, it adopts a curious ordering of the sounds, so that each required set can be represented as a certain substring of that sequence. It turns out that this ordering can be shown to be optimal: see e.g. - Economy and the Construction of the Śivasūtras by Paul Kiparsky, Stanford University http://www.stanford.edu/~kiparsky/Papers/siva-t.pdf http://www.stanford.edu/~kiparsky/Papers/siva-t.pdf - A Mathematical Analysis of Pāṇini’s Śiva sūtras, by Wiebke Petersen, University of Düsseldorf http://user.phil-fak.uni-duesseldorf.de/~petersen/paper/petersen_jolli_proof.pdf http://user.phil-fak.uni-duesseldorf.de/~petersen/paper/pete...
- shas3 9y agoThanks for the link to Kiparsky's paper on mAheshvarasutraNi. Starting from the system of grouping and ordering, sandhi rules became straightforward to understand. When I first learned the sutras in school, we were presented with a lot of hand-waving and circular reasoning (sandhi rules- sutra grouping - sandhi rules) about why they were ordered in that seemingly arbitrary manner. It is cool that Kiparsky has solved the inverse problem of figuring out Panini's generative system for the grouping and ordering of syllables!