> 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

> 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.