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Was this the reason for slow death of Sanskrit as a living language? Too codified and "pure"? Hindi thrives precisely because its very happy to borrow words fr

by spaceman_2020 4y ago

Was this the reason for slow death of Sanskrit as a living language? Too codified and "pure"? Hindi thrives precisely because its very happy to borrow words from anywhere and everywhere.

danans 4y ago
> Was this the reason for slow death of Sanskrit as a living language? To use a software analogy, liturgical languages like Classical Sanskrit (and Latin and Greek, etc) got "forked" from their messy spoken source language and then "refactored". I don't think that their formalization necessarily caused their death as spoken languages any more than the natural processes by which spoken languages change over time. Some of those processes are internal to the language, and some are caused by the influence of other languages in the region (i.e. Dravidian for Sanskrit, Etruscan for Latin, and Minoan for Greek). > Too codified and "pure"? I'd say that since learning it came to require studying it (since it stopped being learned "naturally" as a primary language), it just wasn't accessible to most people. Broad accessibility was after all a non-goal of the codified language. And while it was codified grammatically, it was certainly not "pure" from that point on. Even after its grammatical codification, Classical Sanskrit admitted a lot of lexical influence from other languages, which allowed it to become the lingua franca of scholarship, statecraft, and literature (not just religion as we tend to think today) across the Subcontinent. In that sense, it was very much "alive", but maybe wasn't used for things like buying milk at the market.
rep_movsd 4y ago
Hindi is relatively new - Its changed a lot since teh start. I doubt that most Hindi speakers today would easily grok the dialect spoken during the Delhi Sultanate Sanskrit remains understandable after 4000 years
pessimizer 4y ago
Wasn't Hindi's origin an intentional purge of Persian influences from Urdu?
- danans 4y ago
  The modern official languages Hindi and Urdu are both the result of the politically motivated purging of their respectively "undesired" elements from the language Sprachbund known as Hindustani.

Was this the reason for slow death of Sanskrit as a living language? Too codified and "pure"? Hindi thrives precisely because its very happy to borrow words from anywhere and everywhere.

danans 4y ago

> Was this the reason for slow death of Sanskrit as a living language? To use a software analogy, liturgical languages like Classical Sanskrit (and Latin and Greek, etc) got "forked" from their messy spoken source language and then "refactored". I don't think that their formalization necessarily caused their death as spoken languages any more than the natural processes by which spoken languages change over time. Some of those processes are internal to the language, and some are caused by the influence of other languages in the region (i.e. Dravidian for Sanskrit, Etruscan for Latin, and Minoan for Greek). > Too codified and "pure"? I'd say that since learning it came to require studying it (since it stopped being learned "naturally" as a primary language), it just wasn't accessible to most people. Broad accessibility was after all a non-goal of the codified language. And while it was codified grammatically, it was certainly not "pure" from that point on. Even after its grammatical codification, Classical Sanskrit admitted a lot of lexical influence from other languages, which allowed it to become the lingua franca of scholarship, statecraft, and literature (not just religion as we tend to think today) across the Subcontinent. In that sense, it was very much "alive", but maybe wasn't used for things like buying milk at the market.

rep_movsd 4y ago

Hindi is relatively new - Its changed a lot since teh start. I doubt that most Hindi speakers today would easily grok the dialect spoken during the Delhi Sultanate Sanskrit remains understandable after 4000 years

pessimizer 4y ago

Wasn't Hindi's origin an intentional purge of Persian influences from Urdu?

danans 4y ago
The modern official languages Hindi and Urdu are both the result of the politically motivated purging of their respectively "undesired" elements from the language Sprachbund known as Hindustani.