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I 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 de

I 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 ago
My 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.

schoen 5y ago

My 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.