September 24, 2004

• that 'u' in curiosity was unintentional. *commits suicide*
• there are actually a couple of villages in India where they still *speak* sanskrit. I dont know more about this, remember seeing this in a news bulletin many years back. But since sanskrit is considered to be the language of the gods, I doubt that anyone would translate modern texts into it.
• Some more links: Online access to the Monier-Williams Sanskrit dictionary. Sanskrit Tutor (Java). Another tutor. I'm told that this book Devavanipravesika: An Introduction to the Sanskrit Language is one of the best texts. A nearby academic library should have it.
• Sanskrit is not dead dead. It is listed as an official language in the Indian constitution. A couple of villages have been reported to speak it. And lot of schools in Bombay have it a 2-year course in 9th and 10th grade.
• Ooh, {bananas}... I mean, {kadalAni}. I shall look for that Deva book in the library tomorrow.
• One problem with the above M-W interface is that it's ass-slow (at least for me). Luckily the dictionary itself can be found; download and unpack (no viruses, I promise); the file you want is mwtot2.txt (about 16 megs expanded), which is nice and greppable.
• Bah, no luck with Devavani Praveshika. Not even the nearby Large State U. libraries have it. However, I did find William Whitney's Sanskrit Grammar, which is superb so far. So it seems that there isn't much source material in Sanskrit except for Hindu, Buddhist and Jain texts. Did no one write novels in Sanskrit?
• Soil and soul reconnect with Sanskrit at Melkote
• fuyugare If you want to read a story (a reaalllly long story), then read the Ramayana and Mahabharata.
• there are actually a couple of villages in India where they still *speak* sanskrit. I have no idea how this idea got started, but it's not true. Sanskrit was never spoken; the name means 'artificial,' and it was a regularized medium for poetry and religious texts, not anybody's dialect. Insofar as it represented a standard based on actual dialects, those dialects were spoken a couple of thousand years ago and developed into the prakrits that formed the basis of today's Indian languages (the Indo-European ones, of course). Things are still being translated into Sanskrit; here's a Sanskrit version of a Robert Graves poem. Lots of people study Sanskrit for other than religious reasons.
• fuyugare: Try the philosophy department. That's where they teach it at one of the local universities here, as part of Indian philosophy papers.
• gyan: yabbut the Ramayana and Mahabharata are Hindu epics, right? Incidentally, what does 'gyan' mean? I couldn't find it in Monnier-Williams. I can see that 'dhruva' means 'immovable' or something...

  dhruva ... with %{dhenu} f. a cow which stands quiet when milked AV. xii , 1 , 45

  I guess it figures that the Indians have a word for that!
• languagehat, there is a difference between Panini's "perfected" Classical Sanskrit and Vedic Sanskrit. If you're saying that the Classical was never used as a spontaneous form of communication, probably true. However, the written Vedas are purportedly originally transcriptions of oral traditions, even if later revisionists converted it into "perfect" Classical Sanskrit. You decide if Vedic Sanskrit is really Sanskrit. Anyway, it's possible to learn Classical Sanskrit as a conversational language. The villages thing first appeared in an Indian newspaper in 1987. Then, my uncle said a he saw it on TV in 1990. Articles have appeared intermittently since.
• fuyugare, jJAna.
• Gyan: Believe me, I'm well aware of the difference between Vedic and Classical; I suffered through two years of Sanskrit (during which I cheated by scribbling transcriptions into my devanagari texts -- hey, I was an Indo-Europeanist, I didn't care about the sacred script). But Vedic, though it's preserved plenty of irregularities and is doubtless from an oral tradition, isn't any more a spoken language than its close parallel, Homeric Greek. People just didn't "write as they talked" back then -- or, indeed, until recent centuries. I'm sure the villages thing has been in the papers -- what journalist could resist it? It's no more true, though, than the report I saw one memorable morning in the Long Beach Press-Independent about a successful breeding of a dog and a cat: scientists were allegedly trying to decide whether to call it a "cog" or a "dat." I was hard put to convince my aunt and uncle it was a hoax: it was in the paper!
• languagehat Maybe sanskrit was never spoken, but since I distinctly recall the TV programme where they showed a couple of people "chatting" in sanskrit in one of those villages, I am inclined to think that it was some sort of sanskrit revival movement.
• Ah, well that could well be, of course.
• The Sanskrit word for 'tiger' is, I believe, pronounced 'viagra.' Another possible modern use of Sanskrit is the title of the literary magazine Granta - 'grantha' is Sanskrit for 'book' or 'narration' - I think it's derived from granthi, meaning to tie or knot together ...
• M-W says: 'vyAghra', which is not like 'viagra' at all. The 'A' is a long vowel (held for two moras), and the 'gh' indicates aspiration.

  grantha m. tying , binding , stringing together L. ; = %{-thi4} , a knot TS. vi , 2 , 9 , 4 (v.l.) ; honeycomb Pa1n2. 4-3 , 116 Va1rtt. ; an artificial arrangement of words (esp. of 32 syllables = %{zloka} Jain.) , verse , composition , treatise , literary production , book in prose or verse , text (opposed to %{artha} `" mea ning "' VarBr2S. Va1kyap. Sarvad.) Nir. i , 20 Pa1n2. MBh. Up. &c. ; a section ( of Ka1t2h.) ; the book or sacred scriptures of the Sikhs containing short moral poems by Na1nak Sha1h and others (cf. RTL. pp. 158-177) ; wealth , property Jain . Sch. (cf. %{uttara-} , %{nir-} , %{SaD-}.)

  Did I mention that I love this dictionary?
• Yep I have the weighty Motilal Banarsidass reprint on my shelves. I did do Sanskrit 101 a few years ago as a way into classical Tibetan, but it led nowhere in the end, partly due to the inability of my brain to deal with languages in anything but a highly literal fashion (that is, being paralysed unless I thought I knew the *exact* word to use ...).
• carter: Granta is the original name of the river Cam that runs through Cambridge; it's an old Celtic river name.
• There are some comparisons of Sanskrit and Old Irish in this article.
• Ah; well, it was a good theory ...
• dhruva ... with %{dhenu} f. a cow which stands quiet when milked AV. xii , 1 , 45 dhruva's first name is Dinesh. Maybe you could do the addition.
• A new article about a Sanskrit-speaking village.
• Family Tree of Languages Has Roots in Anatolia, Biologists Say