4 ms·
I once went to a wedding involving academic linguists and Hindu prayers. A Hindu priest chanted a prayer in Sanskrit and then an academic linguist followed up b
by schoen 5y ago
I once went to a wedding involving academic linguists and Hindu prayers. A Hindu priest chanted a prayer in Sanskrit and then an academic linguist followed up by chanting the same prayer with his view of what it would have anciently sounded like. Notwithstanding the priest's own view of his Sanskrit as an ancient language, his pronunciation didn't match up with the academic linguist's view of the historical pronunciation.
Relatedly, I went to a spoken Latin event where I (an American) spoke Latin with an Italian man. His pronunciation and mine were wildly different, although we could understand each other. Neither was all that similar to the academic linguists' view of what our conversation would have sounded like thousands of years ago, though I guess his vowels were generally closer and my consonants were generally closer.
People retaining ancient languages for liturgical and scholarly uses are generally not that great at preventing the pronunciation from shifting, and I think that's true across the board. ("Atque memento, nulli adsunt Romanorum qui locutionem tuam corrigant." -- Henry Beard.)
- YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago"There are no more Romans to correct your speech"?
- schoen 5y ago"And remember, there are no Romans around to correct your pronunciation."
- YeGoblynQueenne 5y agoCheers. Yeah, I let the "remember" bit drop :)
- gpraghu 5y agoI don't understand why an academic linguist is more qualified than a traditionally educated scholar in India, who has deep knowledge of the classics. I don't deny that there were likely some influences, but the care and precision with I was taught recitation is something I have not encountered in any other discipline. I am an engineer, but if I start from the Ashtadhyayi, I don't see how things could have changed much.
- schoen 5y agoMy understanding is that it's not clear to what extent Panini understood or attempted to explicitly treat articulatory phonetics. Addressing articulatory phonetics well in writing alone is still hard, and understanding it in detail was immensely hard before the creation of audio recording, spectrograms, and x-rays. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiva_Sutras#Arrangement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiva_Sutras#Arrangement So while a present-day understanding of classical Sanskrit grammar could be derived fairly directly from his work, that's still not any guarantee that you would pronounce Sanskrit just as Panini would have. A moderately imperfect analogy is that while Jews have been carefully learning to read, recite, and copy the Torah for thousands of years -- including reading commentaries, which, while nowhere near as systematic or thorough as Panini, elucidate lots of grammatical issues -- there still emerged huge, systematic regional differences in the pronunciation of particular Hebrew letters, even in liturgical use. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Hebrew https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Hebrew https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sephardi_Hebrew https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sephardi_Hebrew https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mizrahi_Hebrew https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mizrahi_Hebrew https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiberian_Hebrew https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiberian_Hebrew among several others. The people using each pronunciation were often incredibly sophisticated in their religious scholarship and incredibly familiar with the underlying material, but they definitely didn't (and don't) pronounce it the same way. Modern linguistics has been able to find evidence for comparing these pronunciation variants and also understanding their histories, and I believe something similar is true for Sanskrit pronunciation.