4 ms·

> learn a language with very few speakers Learn Sanskrit. You were writing in a descendant language just now. If you learnt the roots, you would understand the

by mdp2021 3mo ago

> learn a language with very few speakers Learn Sanskrit. You were writing in a descendant language just now. If you learnt the roots, you would understand the descendants better. And they are your tools, and knowing your tools is important. Other more obscure languages? Well, as implied, languages are related... So studying the network clarifies the whole.

jrkfjdifc 3mo ago
[flagged]
- mxjxjxjd 3mo ago
  yeah, I wasted several years of valuable education time on a dead language instead of a foreign living one and it is NOT worth it unless you're a very specific kind of person. it is not going to help you understand English. I learned Latin. It's not helpful for anything. It's totally useless, and it's closer to English than Sanskrit. It was a total waste of time
  - NonHyloMorph 3mo ago
    Learning latin in school as a kid/teenager vastly improved my ability to learn english. Also helped alot with latinisms and academic lingo, which feels just natural, having internalised its semantic roots. So imho your statement it's not a universal truth. Still wouldn't learn a dead language as a grown up though.
mtalantikite 3mo ago
I have the Assimil Sanskrit course sitting on my shelf that I’ve been meaning to spend time with. Would love to be able to read old sutras one of these days.
wbl 3mo ago
Sanskrit is not an ancestor of English. Sanskrit is a satem language English centum. Proto Indo Iranian diverged long ago.
- mdp2021 3mo ago
  > Sanskrit is not an ancestor of English Sanskrit entered into Greek, Greek into Latin, Latin into English. Edit: downvoter, express yourself clearly. I cannot see how the above sentence could be considered false, apart from gross interpretations of the chosen terms. Again: you have a relation with "jñāna, gnō̃́sis, gnosco, knowledge"; then you have relations in other dimensions (jña, jñāti, gnṓmōn, gnṓmōn...): the awareness of those details enriches the awareness of the language. That is through the relation between Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, post-Latin - it is just there. What is contended is not clear.
  - nkrisc 3mo ago
    That still does not make Sanskrit an ancestor language of English, though both English and Sanskrit do share a common ancestry several thousand years ago. English has borrowed words from many languages, as all but the most isolated languages have.
    - mdp2021 3mo ago
      > That still does not make Sanskrit an ancestor language of English You are taking 'ancestor' in a strict technical sense, which was clearly not my intention. > though both English and Sanskrit do share a common ancestry several thousand years ago And those roots can be found and recognized in the subsequent languages, and there lies the value.
      - messe 3mo ago
        > which was clearly not my intention. You did not express that clearly enough then.
        mdp2021 3mo ago
        My bad :) It's just that I cannot allocate the safest amount of effort in composing. I thought it was clear enough.
wl 3mo ago
Or learn Hittite. It's got the oldest corpus in the Indo-European language family. You've got your standard assortment of Indo-European cases. Grammatical gender is animate/inanimate and the animate gender has yet to split into masculine and feminine. The script is tons of fun, especially if you write it with a stylus on clay. And as a bonus, you get to learn a smattering of Sumerian and Akkadian vocabulary.
- rubberpoliceman 3mo ago
  Animate gender didn’t split into masculine and feminine — inanimate collective plural was repurposed as feminine.
  - NonHyloMorph 3mo ago
    Can you point us somewhere zo learn more about that?
  - wl 3mo ago
    That "repurposing" is more morphology than grammar. You also frequently find in Indo-European languages multiple cases having overlapping morphology, but that doesn't necessarily change the cases themselves. My point, in any case, is that Hittite has the older animate/inanimate genders from Proto-Indo-European (only attested in the Anatolian languages!) whereas Sanskrit has the later masculine/feminine/neuter genders.
sieve 3mo ago
Everyone should learn Sanskrit if only to read the great poets and dramatists in the original. The translations are often nice, but you do lose something in the process. Thanks to the incredible efforts of Pāṇini[1], the language was mostly frozen in time and is still just as understandable today as it was 2500 years ago. I started learning it because it is India's civilizational language and I wanted to read the itihāsas in the original. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C4%81%E1%B9%87ini https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C4%81%E1%B9%87ini

by mdp2021 3mo ago

jrkfjdifc 3mo ago

[flagged]

mxjxjxjd 3mo ago
yeah, I wasted several years of valuable education time on a dead language instead of a foreign living one and it is NOT worth it unless you're a very specific kind of person. it is not going to help you understand English. I learned Latin. It's not helpful for anything. It's totally useless, and it's closer to English than Sanskrit. It was a total waste of time
- NonHyloMorph 3mo ago
  Learning latin in school as a kid/teenager vastly improved my ability to learn english. Also helped alot with latinisms and academic lingo, which feels just natural, having internalised its semantic roots. So imho your statement it's not a universal truth. Still wouldn't learn a dead language as a grown up though.

mtalantikite 3mo ago

I have the Assimil Sanskrit course sitting on my shelf that I’ve been meaning to spend time with. Would love to be able to read old sutras one of these days.

wbl 3mo ago

Sanskrit is not an ancestor of English. Sanskrit is a satem language English centum. Proto Indo Iranian diverged long ago.

mdp2021 3mo ago
> Sanskrit is not an ancestor of English Sanskrit entered into Greek, Greek into Latin, Latin into English. Edit: downvoter, express yourself clearly. I cannot see how the above sentence could be considered false, apart from gross interpretations of the chosen terms. Again: you have a relation with "jñāna, gnō̃́sis, gnosco, knowledge"; then you have relations in other dimensions (jña, jñāti, gnṓmōn, gnṓmōn...): the awareness of those details enriches the awareness of the language. That is through the relation between Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, post-Latin - it is just there. What is contended is not clear.
- nkrisc 3mo ago
  That still does not make Sanskrit an ancestor language of English, though both English and Sanskrit do share a common ancestry several thousand years ago. English has borrowed words from many languages, as all but the most isolated languages have.
  - mdp2021 3mo ago
    > That still does not make Sanskrit an ancestor language of English You are taking 'ancestor' in a strict technical sense, which was clearly not my intention. > though both English and Sanskrit do share a common ancestry several thousand years ago And those roots can be found and recognized in the subsequent languages, and there lies the value.
    - messe 3mo ago
      > which was clearly not my intention. You did not express that clearly enough then.
      - mdp2021 3mo ago
        My bad :) It's just that I cannot allocate the safest amount of effort in composing. I thought it was clear enough.

wl 3mo ago

Or learn Hittite. It's got the oldest corpus in the Indo-European language family. You've got your standard assortment of Indo-European cases. Grammatical gender is animate/inanimate and the animate gender has yet to split into masculine and feminine. The script is tons of fun, especially if you write it with a stylus on clay. And as a bonus, you get to learn a smattering of Sumerian and Akkadian vocabulary.

rubberpoliceman 3mo ago
Animate gender didn’t split into masculine and feminine — inanimate collective plural was repurposed as feminine.
- NonHyloMorph 3mo ago
  Can you point us somewhere zo learn more about that?
- wl 3mo ago
  That "repurposing" is more morphology than grammar. You also frequently find in Indo-European languages multiple cases having overlapping morphology, but that doesn't necessarily change the cases themselves. My point, in any case, is that Hittite has the older animate/inanimate genders from Proto-Indo-European (only attested in the Anatolian languages!) whereas Sanskrit has the later masculine/feminine/neuter genders.

sieve 3mo ago

Everyone should learn Sanskrit if only to read the great poets and dramatists in the original. The translations are often nice, but you do lose something in the process. Thanks to the incredible efforts of Pāṇini[1], the language was mostly frozen in time and is still just as understandable today as it was 2500 years ago. I started learning it because it is India's civilizational language and I wanted to read the itihāsas in the original. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C4%81%E1%B9%87ini https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C4%81%E1%B9%87ini