4 ms·

How fossilized? While it is not used as an everyday language, there is a yet growing library of literature, and vigorous philosophical debate that happens in Sa

How fossilized? While it is not used as an everyday language, there is a yet growing library of literature, and vigorous philosophical debate that happens in Samskruta. BTW, an unrelated rant, the other thing that grinds on me is that the Ganga river is ALWAYS referred as Ganges (another anglicization)! Ganga is easier to pronounce, so why did that get anglicized, I wonder?

Causality1 5y ago
Ganges is what the Hellenic Greeks called it. Most English words for Indian things come from Greek.
hassancf 5y ago
I think it is really hard for speakers of European languages to believe that a language could have the same pronunciation that it had centuries ago. Obvious example: Arabic from at least the 7th century AD: As an Arabic speaker, I can totally read a text the way it was pronounced 14 centuries ago and also perfectly understand it. You cannot say the same thing for European languages. Probably the same for sanskrit.
- anthk 5y ago
  > As an Arabic speaker, I can totally read a text the way it was pronounced 14 centuries ago and also perfectly understand it. I may be able to do something similar in Spanish. I've read Emilianensian /Glosas/ in Navarrese-Aragonese and understand near the 95% of it. That being a close Romance to Castillian Spanish. Scroll down and compare, you don't need to understand Spanish: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glosas_Emilianenses https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glosas_Emilianenses Also, I can perfectly read Don Quixote. My main issues would be the old Medieval slang with things that do not exist anymore or they changed a lot. But without the footer annotations, I had no issues at all to understand the 80% of it. But, spelling it? Heck, it didn't change at all, our Spanish standards (Nebrija's grammar) date back to that era.
- yorwba 5y ago
  > As an Arabic speaker, I can totally read a text the way it was pronounced 14 centuries ago You probably cannot. Every region with a tradition of reciting the Qur'an has their own way of pronouncing it. It would be a strange coincidence if your tradition in particular happened to keep the pronunciation unchanged while all the others didn't. E.g. do you pronounce ﺽ as a pharyngealized voiced alveolar lateral fricative? That's the most likely reconstruction of the sound: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E1%B8%8C%C4%81d https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E1%B8%8C%C4%81d
  - hassancf 5y ago
    >> You probably cannot. Exactly my point. You’re under the impression I cannot because of your limited knowledge of this topic: even if 1 letter was slightly different (which it is not), how does that discard the prononciation of 99% of the rest? >> Every region with a tradition of reciting the Qur'an has their own way of pronouncing it Plain wrong. If you knew the topic, you would know that the various way to read the Holy Quran are so close that you could just say they are identical. In my original post, I’m not even necessarily talking about the holy Quran. What about the vast poetry written in Arabic in pre-Islamic times that anyone today can read the same way? I will not get into the subject of whether I would understand it or not since you are still debating whether I would pronounce it the same way. BTW, this is very different from : how does one pronounce Latin etc.
    - yorwba 5y ago
      It seems our disagreement is mostly about the semantics of what it means to pronounce something the same way.
  - ssr2020 5y ago
    Because it is necessary to read the Qur'an properly, and in order for it not to change or deteriorate over time, old scientists wrote in books how to read each letter and its rules. It is written in detail where each letter will come out of the mouth and what features(like the sibilants, the stressed letters, the soft letters, the labiolinguals, and tremolo etc. ) it will have. For us in Turkey it is different ve more difficult but we learn it to read the Qur'an properly. You can listen a surah from the Quran from a Turkish or Arabic reciter there is no big difference.
stan_rogers 5y ago
Certainly vocabulary has been added to, but the whole point of the work of Pāṇini and others was to prevent the Vedas from drifting over time. That freezing of the core of the language was deliberate and artificial. (The same thing applies to the Arabic of the 7th century. It exists nearly unchanged at its core for religious reasons, and a version with various additions functions as a lingua franca and language of academic discourse - rather as Latin or Greek did in other cultures - in the Islamic sphere.)
- Ar-Curunir 5y ago
  And Paninian/Classical Sanskrit is not even Vedic Sanskrit!
- prox 5y ago
  Not only that, but in Vedic ceremonies you have a priest who is just there so no mistakes are made. >The brahman was the reciter of hymns from the atharvaveda who was largely silent and observes the procedures and uses Atharvaveda mantras to 'heal' it when mistakes have been made.
  - gpraghu 5y ago
    It seems to me that you are proving my point.
jltsiren 5y ago
That's how foreign names work. People hear the name used in another language, and then they adapt the pronunciation and/or spelling to their own language. As a Finnish speaker, "Ganges" has the familiar form of a name borrowed from Greek or Latin, and it does not need further adaptation. "Ganga", on the other hand, sounds awkward in Finnish. Had ancient Finns been in contact with India, we would probably know the river as Kanka or Kankajoki ("Kanka river"). The latter in particular sounds like a proper Finnish river name.
- gerdesj 5y ago
  That's if we can even all agree on how to pronounce "Ganges"! Should it rhyme with cheese or oranges; are the g's hard or soft? In en_GB the first g is hard and the second one soft and the word rhymes with cheese. Oh, and the a is short. Place names are notoriously tricky. The town I live in is now called Yeovil. It has well over sixty documented spellings since around 500CE. It started off as Gifle - bend in the river. G -> Y is a common Old English/Saxon to modern English thing (-gard and -yard, -burg and -bury, dag or tag and day.) If you squint really hard you can get the rest of the word OK. It was Ival, Givelle, Evil and all sorts of spellings on the way to today. There was also a vowel shift en-route and a generally open approach to spelling.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
codesnik 5y ago
if that'd peace your mind, we call it "Gang" in Russia. But I wouldn't be surprised that it came from greek too, most greek words lost their endings when loaned to Russian
- YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
  Can you give some examples please? I'm Greek and I don't know any Russian. In Greek we have adopted many Turkish words and we always stick an "-i" at the end. For example, "passoumi" (a kind of footwear, "passoum" in Turkish), "briki" (for making coffee, "brik" in Turkish), "ati" (horse, "at" in Turkish) etc. I think we've also taken some Slavic words and treated them this way, for example "boureki" (borek, dumpling), kokoretsi ("kokorec") and probably others I can't think of now.
naveens 5y ago
it's tamil-ized as Kangai. Proper nouns are always absorbed according to the target language's own rules. Why quibble?

Causality1 5y ago

Ganges is what the Hellenic Greeks called it. Most English words for Indian things come from Greek.

hassancf 5y ago

I think it is really hard for speakers of European languages to believe that a language could have the same pronunciation that it had centuries ago. Obvious example: Arabic from at least the 7th century AD: As an Arabic speaker, I can totally read a text the way it was pronounced 14 centuries ago and also perfectly understand it. You cannot say the same thing for European languages. Probably the same for sanskrit.

anthk 5y ago
> As an Arabic speaker, I can totally read a text the way it was pronounced 14 centuries ago and also perfectly understand it. I may be able to do something similar in Spanish. I've read Emilianensian /Glosas/ in Navarrese-Aragonese and understand near the 95% of it. That being a close Romance to Castillian Spanish. Scroll down and compare, you don't need to understand Spanish: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glosas_Emilianenses https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glosas_Emilianenses Also, I can perfectly read Don Quixote. My main issues would be the old Medieval slang with things that do not exist anymore or they changed a lot. But without the footer annotations, I had no issues at all to understand the 80% of it. But, spelling it? Heck, it didn't change at all, our Spanish standards (Nebrija's grammar) date back to that era.
yorwba 5y ago
> As an Arabic speaker, I can totally read a text the way it was pronounced 14 centuries ago You probably cannot. Every region with a tradition of reciting the Qur'an has their own way of pronouncing it. It would be a strange coincidence if your tradition in particular happened to keep the pronunciation unchanged while all the others didn't. E.g. do you pronounce ﺽ as a pharyngealized voiced alveolar lateral fricative? That's the most likely reconstruction of the sound: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E1%B8%8C%C4%81d https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E1%B8%8C%C4%81d
- hassancf 5y ago
  >> You probably cannot. Exactly my point. You’re under the impression I cannot because of your limited knowledge of this topic: even if 1 letter was slightly different (which it is not), how does that discard the prononciation of 99% of the rest? >> Every region with a tradition of reciting the Qur'an has their own way of pronouncing it Plain wrong. If you knew the topic, you would know that the various way to read the Holy Quran are so close that you could just say they are identical. In my original post, I’m not even necessarily talking about the holy Quran. What about the vast poetry written in Arabic in pre-Islamic times that anyone today can read the same way? I will not get into the subject of whether I would understand it or not since you are still debating whether I would pronounce it the same way. BTW, this is very different from : how does one pronounce Latin etc.
  - yorwba 5y ago
    It seems our disagreement is mostly about the semantics of what it means to pronounce something the same way.
- ssr2020 5y ago
  Because it is necessary to read the Qur'an properly, and in order for it not to change or deteriorate over time, old scientists wrote in books how to read each letter and its rules. It is written in detail where each letter will come out of the mouth and what features(like the sibilants, the stressed letters, the soft letters, the labiolinguals, and tremolo etc. ) it will have. For us in Turkey it is different ve more difficult but we learn it to read the Qur'an properly. You can listen a surah from the Quran from a Turkish or Arabic reciter there is no big difference.

stan_rogers 5y ago

Certainly vocabulary has been added to, but the whole point of the work of Pāṇini and others was to prevent the Vedas from drifting over time. That freezing of the core of the language was deliberate and artificial. (The same thing applies to the Arabic of the 7th century. It exists nearly unchanged at its core for religious reasons, and a version with various additions functions as a lingua franca and language of academic discourse - rather as Latin or Greek did in other cultures - in the Islamic sphere.)

Ar-Curunir 5y ago
And Paninian/Classical Sanskrit is not even Vedic Sanskrit!
prox 5y ago
Not only that, but in Vedic ceremonies you have a priest who is just there so no mistakes are made. >The brahman was the reciter of hymns from the atharvaveda who was largely silent and observes the procedures and uses Atharvaveda mantras to 'heal' it when mistakes have been made.
- gpraghu 5y ago
  It seems to me that you are proving my point.

jltsiren 5y ago

That's how foreign names work. People hear the name used in another language, and then they adapt the pronunciation and/or spelling to their own language. As a Finnish speaker, "Ganges" has the familiar form of a name borrowed from Greek or Latin, and it does not need further adaptation. "Ganga", on the other hand, sounds awkward in Finnish. Had ancient Finns been in contact with India, we would probably know the river as Kanka or Kankajoki ("Kanka river"). The latter in particular sounds like a proper Finnish river name.

gerdesj 5y ago
That's if we can even all agree on how to pronounce "Ganges"! Should it rhyme with cheese or oranges; are the g's hard or soft? In en_GB the first g is hard and the second one soft and the word rhymes with cheese. Oh, and the a is short. Place names are notoriously tricky. The town I live in is now called Yeovil. It has well over sixty documented spellings since around 500CE. It started off as Gifle - bend in the river. G -> Y is a common Old English/Saxon to modern English thing (-gard and -yard, -burg and -bury, dag or tag and day.) If you squint really hard you can get the rest of the word OK. It was Ival, Givelle, Evil and all sorts of spellings on the way to today. There was also a vowel shift en-route and a generally open approach to spelling.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

codesnik 5y ago

if that'd peace your mind, we call it "Gang" in Russia. But I wouldn't be surprised that it came from greek too, most greek words lost their endings when loaned to Russian

YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
Can you give some examples please? I'm Greek and I don't know any Russian. In Greek we have adopted many Turkish words and we always stick an "-i" at the end. For example, "passoumi" (a kind of footwear, "passoum" in Turkish), "briki" (for making coffee, "brik" in Turkish), "ati" (horse, "at" in Turkish) etc. I think we've also taken some Slavic words and treated them this way, for example "boureki" (borek, dumpling), kokoretsi ("kokorec") and probably others I can't think of now.

naveens 5y ago

it's tamil-ized as Kangai. Proper nouns are always absorbed according to the target language's own rules. Why quibble?