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(Greater) China atleast has mandarin. If you're to get anywhere in India, you're stuck with the old imperial tongue: English. Hindi, Tamil, Sanskrit and many ot

(Greater) China atleast has mandarin. If you're to get anywhere in India, you're stuck with the old imperial tongue: English. Hindi, Tamil, Sanskrit and many others have roads that lead to little other than penury. Some independence this has been; it's not surprising that it took mindless brown-sepoys to fulfil the mandate of the colonial government. Sigh.

tpyi123 8y ago
change in india is slow but in the case of sanskrit revival is happening partly due to recent western desire to claim ownership of it and partly due to realization that it was once as widespread as syria to vietnam and gobi to bali actually even the the volga river name is considered to be derived from sanskrit
- selimthegrim 8y ago
  I’m gonna need a source for that Syria claim
  - tpyi123 8y ago
    you can look up the mitanni kingdom who worshipped vedic deities mentioned in treaties with pharaohs of egypt also the first known horse training manual by kikkuli of mitanni used sanskrit terms even though written in another language
  - jcranmer 8y ago
    This looks to be a standard Indian/Hindu nationalist historian revision practice. As conventional historians and anthropologists agree, Indo-Europeans originate as a nomadic pastoralist population from somewhere on the steppes around Ukraine and Kazakhstan. The major European branches of Celtic, Germanic, Italic, Balto-Slavic, Hellenic, and Anatolian (e.g. Hittite) spread into Europe, virtually extinguishing all the other existing languages (Basque is the only one to survive to the modern day). It's thought that this spread didn't involve any sort of violence of conquest. The Indo-Iranian (and Indo-Aryan subbranch underneath it) is generally understood to originate from Indo-European migrations across the steppes, which would eventually come to dominate the settled regions of modern Iran through modern India as the language of the rulers and, much more slowly, eventually the language of the commoners as well. The similarities between Vedic texts and Zoroastrianism also allows us to trace the development of Zoroastrianism and Hinduism from a common set of Indo-Iranian religious beliefs. The revisionism comes from those who do not want to believe that Hinduism arose from non-native Indian traditions. For these people, Indo-Aryans are indigenous Indian people, perhaps a continuation of the Harappan civilization. And so Indo-Aryan is Sanskrit is Vedic is Hindu is Indian, and the discovery of a culture in Syria that may have a ruling Indo-Aryan population (I should note that recent scholarship tends to believe that it did not) is therefore evidence of a commonality of culture as distant as Syria that originated in India.
    - tpyi123 8y ago
      europeans do not even know the meaning of the word europe since the current suggested etymologies are all just pleasant nonsense anyone who studies sanskrit and knows a bit of history will be able to figure it out so western claims of ownership of sanskrit via these steppe theories seem laughable no doubt it helps some people sleep better at night but you really should strive for the truth instead
      - jcranmer 8y ago
        If you're going to object to the standard PIE hypothesis, you need a much, much stronger argument than "my folk etymology of one word supports my hypothesis better." I have a decent knowledge of the history of the steppe regions, and their interactions with settled, urban populations; of the development of early civilizations within the Near East; and of the comparisons between Zoroastrianism and the Vedic pre-Hindu religion. All of that evidence very strongly supports the classic Proto-Indo-European hypothesis and very strongly counsels against Indigenous Aryan hypotheses, so you are going to need provide very compelling evidence if you want to convince anybody.
        selimthegrim 8y ago
        Discover magazine had a nice article recently about the pastoralist/settled interactions at Lepenski Vir in Serbia
        selimthegrim 8y ago
        Until running into folks like these I never understood why Ahmed Hasan Dani couldn't get a job after getting a gold medal in Sanskrit at Benares Hindu University. Now I see it wasn't just because he was the wrong kind of Kashmiri - apparently it's only worth teaching people Sanskrit if they follow the party line.
_jgdh 8y ago
This is wrong. Your argument is incoherent so it's not clear if you're arguing for a common language other than English or no common language at all. If it's the first one, that's a road that will lead to certain disaster. Requiring knowledge of a specific Indian language will automatically grant native speakers of that language advantage over other Indians. If tomorrow Gujarati or Bengali was chosen as the "national" language and every book was published in Gujarati, every movie and show was dubbed in it, every textbook was rewritten in it, every government form was written in it, wouldn't Gujaratis have an advantage over everyone else? Wouldn't everyone else implicitly become second class citizens? That's not even hypothetical. This experiment of forcing a "national" language on population that never spoke it or understood has been tried before. It was a spectacular failure. Bangla speakers in East Pakistan didn't want to speak Urdu and didn't want to be treated as second class citizens because they couldn't. So they seceded. East Pakistan doesn't exist anymore. No doubt you're thinking "no, not Gujarati/Bengali. Let's choose Hindi as the national language". Now understand this -> Hindi is a foreign language to me, though I am Indian. I studied it for 10 years so I'm reasonably fluent in it, but it is still a foreign language, as foreign as English. For that reason, states such as Tamil Nadu and Kerala will not accept the imposition of Hindi. This battle started in the 60s and continues today. Of course, you might be arguing for no common language at all. Let's root out English and in it's place let's have ... nothing. I'm not sure what that would buy us, but sure. English is a foreign language, but it is the only language is foreign to all Indians. That is why it is fair for it to remain an official language of the Indian Union. FYI, you and I wouldn't be having this conversation if we didn't have English as common language.

tpyi123 8y ago

change in india is slow but in the case of sanskrit revival is happening partly due to recent western desire to claim ownership of it and partly due to realization that it was once as widespread as syria to vietnam and gobi to bali actually even the the volga river name is considered to be derived from sanskrit

selimthegrim 8y ago
I’m gonna need a source for that Syria claim
- tpyi123 8y ago
  you can look up the mitanni kingdom who worshipped vedic deities mentioned in treaties with pharaohs of egypt also the first known horse training manual by kikkuli of mitanni used sanskrit terms even though written in another language
- jcranmer 8y ago
  This looks to be a standard Indian/Hindu nationalist historian revision practice. As conventional historians and anthropologists agree, Indo-Europeans originate as a nomadic pastoralist population from somewhere on the steppes around Ukraine and Kazakhstan. The major European branches of Celtic, Germanic, Italic, Balto-Slavic, Hellenic, and Anatolian (e.g. Hittite) spread into Europe, virtually extinguishing all the other existing languages (Basque is the only one to survive to the modern day). It's thought that this spread didn't involve any sort of violence of conquest. The Indo-Iranian (and Indo-Aryan subbranch underneath it) is generally understood to originate from Indo-European migrations across the steppes, which would eventually come to dominate the settled regions of modern Iran through modern India as the language of the rulers and, much more slowly, eventually the language of the commoners as well. The similarities between Vedic texts and Zoroastrianism also allows us to trace the development of Zoroastrianism and Hinduism from a common set of Indo-Iranian religious beliefs. The revisionism comes from those who do not want to believe that Hinduism arose from non-native Indian traditions. For these people, Indo-Aryans are indigenous Indian people, perhaps a continuation of the Harappan civilization. And so Indo-Aryan is Sanskrit is Vedic is Hindu is Indian, and the discovery of a culture in Syria that may have a ruling Indo-Aryan population (I should note that recent scholarship tends to believe that it did not) is therefore evidence of a commonality of culture as distant as Syria that originated in India.
  - tpyi123 8y ago
    europeans do not even know the meaning of the word europe since the current suggested etymologies are all just pleasant nonsense anyone who studies sanskrit and knows a bit of history will be able to figure it out so western claims of ownership of sanskrit via these steppe theories seem laughable no doubt it helps some people sleep better at night but you really should strive for the truth instead
    - jcranmer 8y ago
      If you're going to object to the standard PIE hypothesis, you need a much, much stronger argument than "my folk etymology of one word supports my hypothesis better." I have a decent knowledge of the history of the steppe regions, and their interactions with settled, urban populations; of the development of early civilizations within the Near East; and of the comparisons between Zoroastrianism and the Vedic pre-Hindu religion. All of that evidence very strongly supports the classic Proto-Indo-European hypothesis and very strongly counsels against Indigenous Aryan hypotheses, so you are going to need provide very compelling evidence if you want to convince anybody.
      - selimthegrim 8y ago
        Discover magazine had a nice article recently about the pastoralist/settled interactions at Lepenski Vir in Serbia
      - selimthegrim 8y ago
        Until running into folks like these I never understood why Ahmed Hasan Dani couldn't get a job after getting a gold medal in Sanskrit at Benares Hindu University. Now I see it wasn't just because he was the wrong kind of Kashmiri - apparently it's only worth teaching people Sanskrit if they follow the party line.

_jgdh 8y ago

This is wrong. Your argument is incoherent so it's not clear if you're arguing for a common language other than English or no common language at all. If it's the first one, that's a road that will lead to certain disaster. Requiring knowledge of a specific Indian language will automatically grant native speakers of that language advantage over other Indians. If tomorrow Gujarati or Bengali was chosen as the "national" language and every book was published in Gujarati, every movie and show was dubbed in it, every textbook was rewritten in it, every government form was written in it, wouldn't Gujaratis have an advantage over everyone else? Wouldn't everyone else implicitly become second class citizens? That's not even hypothetical. This experiment of forcing a "national" language on population that never spoke it or understood has been tried before. It was a spectacular failure. Bangla speakers in East Pakistan didn't want to speak Urdu and didn't want to be treated as second class citizens because they couldn't. So they seceded. East Pakistan doesn't exist anymore. No doubt you're thinking "no, not Gujarati/Bengali. Let's choose Hindi as the national language". Now understand this -> Hindi is a foreign language to me, though I am Indian. I studied it for 10 years so I'm reasonably fluent in it, but it is still a foreign language, as foreign as English. For that reason, states such as Tamil Nadu and Kerala will not accept the imposition of Hindi. This battle started in the 60s and continues today. Of course, you might be arguing for no common language at all. Let's root out English and in it's place let's have ... nothing. I'm not sure what that would buy us, but sure. English is a foreign language, but it is the only language is foreign to all Indians. That is why it is fair for it to remain an official language of the Indian Union. FYI, you and I wouldn't be having this conversation if we didn't have English as common language.