3 ms·

> "This discovery will revolutionise the study of Sanskrit at a time when interest in the language is on the rise." Why is the interest rising though?

rhaway84773 4y ago
The easy answer is an Indian government push to promote the language, but that official push hasn’t really had much of an impact. I suspect the more likely answer is that we are about slightly more than a generation away from India’s fiscal opening in the 1990s which led to a tremendous rise in wealth, and it’s usually children of wealthier people who can afford to pay the opportunity costs of basing a career in the humanities as opposed to STEM or Finance related, so now there are more Indians who would take up the humanities. And if you are taking up the humanities, it makes sense to research highly under-researched and yet extremely old areas of the culture your family is from, since it’s a wide open area with a lot of opportunities that you may have an edge in, having been raised in or adjacent to the culture. In the languages space this would mean more research in Sanskrit and potentially other indigenous languages.
- svat 4y ago
  > “I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.” — John Adams, 1780 (https://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/doc?id=L17800512jasecond https://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/doc?id=L178005...) I think your "rise in wealth" answer is correct, but note that it is not just people being able to afford a career in the humanities: it's also people who studied STEM/whatever and now have jobs with a bit of free time to spend on reading, or a bit of wealth to donate to keep their culture alive.
strikelaserclaw 4y ago
maybe correlates with the rise of Indian Nationalism
- devnull3 4y ago
  I don't think so. Govt of India has been promoting Sanskrit (without much success) since many decades. There is/was even Sanskrit news. Now-a-days I can see "Weekly Sanskrit Magazine: Vaartavali" from national news Doordarshan [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELmU3GXcuuo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELmU3GXcuuo
  - abc_lisper 4y ago
    Yep. National news was broadcast all over the country in Sanskrit language daily on Radio. Weekly on TV I think
  - treis 4y ago
    Modi seems to have given it more attention than before. And it does dovetail with his nationalist bent. It's a lot easier for practical and symbolic reasons to drive nationalism when everyone speaks the same language. A bit like how Israel adopted Hebrew.
  - cuteboy19 4y ago
    There are local radio stations broadcasting Sanskrit news for the past few decades at least
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
tgflynn 4y ago
I don't know anything about the situation in India but I can give you a few reasons why I, as a westerner, am fascinated by the language. First the depth and clarity of thinking by ancient and medieval Indian scholars writing in Sanskrit in relation to key philosophical and existential questions is extraordinary. Personally I am currently inclined to think that the advaita vedanta tradition may have the most accurate understanding of the nature of consciousness I have yet seen. Moreover this tradition is largely based on purely logical arguments, which, while perhaps not 100% convincing to a modern reader, are I think definitely worth exploring. The above points are perhaps not unrelated to certain features of the Sanskrit language itself, which seems to have a logical structure that is rare or unheard of in other natural languages. The existence of such structure is in large part due to the work of Panini 2500 years ago, as mentioned in the article, but also to later followers who developed a register of Sanskrit that can be compared to modern frameworks for knowledge representation, as discussed in this paper: https://ojs.aaai.org//index.php/aimagazine/article/view/466 https://ojs.aaai.org//index.php/aimagazine/article/view/466.
- mistermann 4y ago
  > First the depth and clarity of thinking by ancient and medieval Indian scholars writing in Sanskrit in relation to key philosophical and existential questions is extraordinary. Personally I am currently inclined to think that the advaita vedanta tradition may have the most accurate understanding of the nature of consciousness I have yet seen. Moreover this tradition is largely based on purely logical arguments, which, while perhaps not 100% convincing to a modern reader, are I think definitely worth exploring. Can you think of any resource that would provide an overview of what you're getting here that doesn't require months of reading? Something to just get one's feet wet, to know what is out there to be learned if one is willing to invest the time?
  - tgflynn 4y ago
    With respect to advaita vedanta I would recommend the YT videos of Swami Sarvapriyananda. All of his longer talks on advaita say more or less the same thing so recommending a single video is more difficult, but this may be a particularly good one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EijmfagFw20 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EijmfagFw20. The main figure of classical advaita is Adi Shankara. You can probably find some translated/commented texts of his in book form. If you mean more generally the whole of classical Indian philosophical thought it is really a vast subject of which I have barely begun to scrape the surface, so there's not a lot I can recommend there. I'm mostly still at the stage of reading related wikipedia articles. EDIT: One more thing I should add is that there were also heterodox schools which explicitly rejected some or all of the assumptions of Hinduism (such as reincarnation). For example Charvaka (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charvaka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charvaka) was a materialist school.
svat 4y ago
A practical reason: The internet makes it possible for those of us interested in Sanskrit to communicate with each other, and feel a part of a community. Two decades ago, if you were interested in Sanskrit you were always conscious that you were in a minority, a niche interest, a fish out of water, whatever. Now you can spend each day watching just videos in Sanskrit on YouTube, say. (Hypothesis: if this explanation is correct, I would imagine there has similarly been a rise in the Latin-speaking community: more attendance at Living Latin etc. Looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_Latin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_Latin gives me the impression this may be true, though I'm not familiar enough to say.)

rhaway84773 4y ago

The easy answer is an Indian government push to promote the language, but that official push hasn’t really had much of an impact. I suspect the more likely answer is that we are about slightly more than a generation away from India’s fiscal opening in the 1990s which led to a tremendous rise in wealth, and it’s usually children of wealthier people who can afford to pay the opportunity costs of basing a career in the humanities as opposed to STEM or Finance related, so now there are more Indians who would take up the humanities. And if you are taking up the humanities, it makes sense to research highly under-researched and yet extremely old areas of the culture your family is from, since it’s a wide open area with a lot of opportunities that you may have an edge in, having been raised in or adjacent to the culture. In the languages space this would mean more research in Sanskrit and potentially other indigenous languages.

svat 4y ago
> “I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.” — John Adams, 1780 (https://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/doc?id=L17800512jasecond https://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/doc?id=L178005...) I think your "rise in wealth" answer is correct, but note that it is not just people being able to afford a career in the humanities: it's also people who studied STEM/whatever and now have jobs with a bit of free time to spend on reading, or a bit of wealth to donate to keep their culture alive.

strikelaserclaw 4y ago

maybe correlates with the rise of Indian Nationalism

devnull3 4y ago
I don't think so. Govt of India has been promoting Sanskrit (without much success) since many decades. There is/was even Sanskrit news. Now-a-days I can see "Weekly Sanskrit Magazine: Vaartavali" from national news Doordarshan [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELmU3GXcuuo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELmU3GXcuuo
- abc_lisper 4y ago
  Yep. National news was broadcast all over the country in Sanskrit language daily on Radio. Weekly on TV I think
- treis 4y ago
  Modi seems to have given it more attention than before. And it does dovetail with his nationalist bent. It's a lot easier for practical and symbolic reasons to drive nationalism when everyone speaks the same language. A bit like how Israel adopted Hebrew.
- cuteboy19 4y ago
  There are local radio stations broadcasting Sanskrit news for the past few decades at least
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

tgflynn 4y ago

I don't know anything about the situation in India but I can give you a few reasons why I, as a westerner, am fascinated by the language. First the depth and clarity of thinking by ancient and medieval Indian scholars writing in Sanskrit in relation to key philosophical and existential questions is extraordinary. Personally I am currently inclined to think that the advaita vedanta tradition may have the most accurate understanding of the nature of consciousness I have yet seen. Moreover this tradition is largely based on purely logical arguments, which, while perhaps not 100% convincing to a modern reader, are I think definitely worth exploring. The above points are perhaps not unrelated to certain features of the Sanskrit language itself, which seems to have a logical structure that is rare or unheard of in other natural languages. The existence of such structure is in large part due to the work of Panini 2500 years ago, as mentioned in the article, but also to later followers who developed a register of Sanskrit that can be compared to modern frameworks for knowledge representation, as discussed in this paper: https://ojs.aaai.org//index.php/aimagazine/article/view/466 https://ojs.aaai.org//index.php/aimagazine/article/view/466.

mistermann 4y ago
> First the depth and clarity of thinking by ancient and medieval Indian scholars writing in Sanskrit in relation to key philosophical and existential questions is extraordinary. Personally I am currently inclined to think that the advaita vedanta tradition may have the most accurate understanding of the nature of consciousness I have yet seen. Moreover this tradition is largely based on purely logical arguments, which, while perhaps not 100% convincing to a modern reader, are I think definitely worth exploring. Can you think of any resource that would provide an overview of what you're getting here that doesn't require months of reading? Something to just get one's feet wet, to know what is out there to be learned if one is willing to invest the time?
- tgflynn 4y ago
  With respect to advaita vedanta I would recommend the YT videos of Swami Sarvapriyananda. All of his longer talks on advaita say more or less the same thing so recommending a single video is more difficult, but this may be a particularly good one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EijmfagFw20 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EijmfagFw20. The main figure of classical advaita is Adi Shankara. You can probably find some translated/commented texts of his in book form. If you mean more generally the whole of classical Indian philosophical thought it is really a vast subject of which I have barely begun to scrape the surface, so there's not a lot I can recommend there. I'm mostly still at the stage of reading related wikipedia articles. EDIT: One more thing I should add is that there were also heterodox schools which explicitly rejected some or all of the assumptions of Hinduism (such as reincarnation). For example Charvaka (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charvaka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charvaka) was a materialist school.

svat 4y ago

A practical reason: The internet makes it possible for those of us interested in Sanskrit to communicate with each other, and feel a part of a community. Two decades ago, if you were interested in Sanskrit you were always conscious that you were in a minority, a niche interest, a fish out of water, whatever. Now you can spend each day watching just videos in Sanskrit on YouTube, say. (Hypothesis: if this explanation is correct, I would imagine there has similarly been a rise in the Latin-speaking community: more attendance at Living Latin etc. Looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_Latin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_Latin gives me the impression this may be true, though I'm not familiar enough to say.)