4 ms·

I think you may be underrating the mastery required to write verses like this. Sure, Sanskrit was (and still is!) spoken as a language. But just because you can

• asveikau 6y ago
  No need to compare to programming. I speak English as a native language but I'm not great at writing poetry. There are poets who will vastly outperform me at the task. But I speak pretty similarly to the poetry, gramatically, lexically, phonetically, and in a few hundred or thousand years' time nobody will comprehend those written works the same way I do, just as many Shakespearian puns and jokes don't work well with current accents even though we are all speaking "Modern English". Also, tangentially, I don't know Sanskrit or the modern languages of South Asia at all. However, given what I know about linguistics and other old languages I can guarantee you that no modern speaker of Sanksrit understands it in exactly the same way as the dead authors of those old written works.
  • svat 6y ago
    I think we're just using different definitions of “closer” or “similar” to “people would have spoken like this poem in daily life”. :-) To me, “grammatically, lexically, phonetically” is the trivial part. Learning English is achievable, and many do it. But no one in the course of their daily speech accidentally starts speaking in palindromes, or single-consonant verses — the distance to it seems much greater. I do see it's just a matter of definitions though, something like measuring lexicographic distance of strings versus measuring K-L divergence of the probability distributions on strings. My point is that it would be staggering if at any point in history people spoke such a verse in daily life, and your point is that they were speaking the same language, so it's “closer” in some sense. Both are valid perspectives, I guess. Anyway, about the tangent: both modern speakers and the dead author of this old written work are from centuries after something like Sanskrit was the spoken language of the street, and both learned Sanskrit by reading many of the same authors and aspiring to adhere to the same (very comprehensive) grammar, so the difference is not as much as one may think: I cannot enumerate any point of difference as far as the language goes (grammatically, phonetically, etc), except for things like quotations from later centuries being more familiar to later authors. This is like: Gauss was writing in Latin about three centuries after Copernicus (say), but both of them understood Latin in pretty much the same way AFAIK. (In the case of Latin the phonology was questionable maybe, but with Sanskrit such things were better documented.) No two people ever understand a language in exactly the same way of course, but when learning a fixed version of a classical language, the differences are relatively minor.
    • asveikau 6y ago
      Latin was a dead language when both Gauss and Copernicus were alive. Even within the time of the Roman empire, it went through crazy amounts of changes. For example it's pretty common to find people who can read Latin well but pretty rare to find people who understand in what time period and circumstance an /m/ would have nasalized the vowel before it. Could they "speak Latin"? It wouldn't really be the same. It's a bit like learning Esperanto. I think it's quite likely that modern communities speaking Sanskrit are a little blinded to this sort of thing by pride in the cultural heritage and identity that Sanskrit represents. My larger point is we don't really know what kind of utterance a casual street speaker of Latin or Sanksrit was capable of. It's very possible that something like a palindromic poem is impressive to modern eyes and ears in part because native speakers no longer exist. Another example in English. You might be surprised at how people without much education can improvise a freestyle rap. How will that look to somebody studying current English in 1000 years? Will someone make comments like yours about the astounding difficulty of execution? I mean, yes, people doing this are clever. Not everyone can pull it off. But it is derived from existing casual speech patterns and recognizable as such.
      • svat 6y ago
        > Latin was a dead language when both Gauss and Copernicus were alive. That was exactly my point, and the reason I picked those examples; I guess I could have been clearer in my previous comment. The author of the poem being discussed in this thread, whose name was Māgha, lived in the 7th century. It is hard to be sure exactly when Sanskrit stopped evolving as a spoken language and became "frozen" into its classical form (or rather, the naturally evolving language stopped being called Sanskrit), but one date conventionally taken is that of Pāṇini, who lived in possibly the 4th or 5th century BCE. So at the time Māgha was born, Sanskrit was a “dead” language (in that sense) for about a thousand years, give or take a few centuries. He would have learned the language not as his primary spoken tongue of everyday life, but more as the language of education and scholarship, somewhat similar to the way Gauss or Copernicus would have learned Latin, and the way we learn Sanskrit today. That's what I meant in my previous comment by: > both modern speakers and [Māgha] are from centuries after [Sanskrit] was the spoken language of the street […] when learning a fixed version of a classical language, the differences are relatively minor. Now, we can be very certain that the kinds of constrained poetry we see here are the result of arduous (and masterly) construction and not a product of casual speech patterns, because: 1. On general linguistic grounds: constraints like two-dimensional palindromes and the cakrabandha (where every third syllable of the fourth line matches a specific syllable of the first three lines, and certain annuli spell out something meaningful), are not discernible to the ear (unlike say, rhyme or assonance). We never see something like it produced in daily speech (in English or any language), and when it is done (see Oulipo and similar), it is with much effort (and the resulting language—e.g. the “Pilish” of Mike Keith, or “A Void” by Adair—can sound slightly stilted, which is the case with several of Māgha's poems too). In Sanskrit, no one produced such stuff in the centuries when it was a language of daily speech. 2. Even in the centuries before and after Māgha, only very few authors have managed it. Looking at modern speakers (which is a reasonable proxy; see above), it takes a rare skill, and the distance between not speaking Sanskrit and fluently speaking idiomatic Sanskrit is still smaller than the distance between the latter and being able to compose like this. You have a great point though, which applies to many situations other than this one: for example, I might hear someone today rapping in Old English (the language of Beowulf) and be impressed, but for someone living back then, it may have been (like the "an ordinary job" comment that started this thread) just natural and requiring only slightly above-average competence.