The Second Life of Sanskrit

https://openthemagazine.com/india/the-second-life-of-sanskrit

by bookofjoe • 11 days ago

69 76 11 days ago

alephnerd5• 8 days ago

Something that isn't called out but is playing a role as well is the rise of humanities and interdisciplinary research in India. 20-30 years ago, specializing in ancient languages and texts from a CompLing perspective or a humanities perspective just didn't occur.

As India grew richer, the newer generation of liberal arts colleges (eg. Ashoka) and humanities programs in public universities (eg. IIT Delhi, IIT Kanpur, IIT Hyderabad, JNU) started attracting and hiring Western educated faculty and researchers (Indian as well as Foreigners) to help revitalize interest in humanities and social sciences.

India also now has a new generation philanthropists who are starting to donate to this kind of research (eg. Murthy and the "Murty Classical Library of India" at Harvard).

There is a similar revitalization for older texts in Tamizh, Telugu, Koshur, Pahari, Tibetan, etc as well.

selimthegrim5• 8 days ago

What about Prakrit and Punjabi? I knew a guy at UCSB, Gurinder Singh Mann who taught me to read Punjabi. Nice guy (to me) but got himself in a lot of trouble for many different reasons.

alephnerd5• 8 days ago

Yes as well. My list of languages was non-exhaustive.

ashishb4• 8 days ago

What about Prakrit and Punjabi?

There is no official "Prakrit", by definition of the term itself. "Prakrit" just means "natural" and the way I understand it, was the term for all colloquial dialects/languages across India.

"Sanskrit", on the other hand, meant "cultured" and its grammar, at least for the last 2500 years, is strictly defined by Panini (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A%E1%B9%A3%E1%B9%AD%C4%81dhy%C...)

lioeters3• 8 days ago

That's fascinating to learn. I'm curious, is there a political angle to the revival of some of the languages? The posted article mentions "values and traditions" associated with Sanskrit, and I imagine some religions and cultures are motivated to bring back languages for..not to say "selfish", but for their own survival and spread of ideas.

alephnerd5• 8 days ago

There is a political aspect to it as well, but it's overstated to a certain extent.

Most of these humanities programs are being created via philanthropy from alumni or business families now thinking about their legacy.

Also, now that India isn't as poor as it was previously, it's unsurprising that a new generation of humanities and social sciences researchers are choosing to take roles in India versus abroad.

profsummergig• 8 days ago

Taleb says that some languages are only meant for ritual.

IMHO, Sanskrit quotes sound cool to those who know Prakrit languages just like Latin and Greek quotations sound cool to those who know Romance languages (and even to those who know English, like myself).

Yes, there is a revival, and an interest. But Sanskrit has always been known to the "priestly" class even though they never conversed in it. This new revival is not going to lead to actual communication, just a lot of visual art based on the script and quotations. IMHO.

alephnerd5• 8 days ago

This new revival is not going to lead to actual communication, just a lot of visual art based on the script and quotations

This, but also social sciences and interdisciplinary research (especially in the NLP, CompLing, and ML space).

smokeyfish• 8 days ago

There's always Lithuanian.

alephnerd5• 8 days ago

Or Koshur - it still retains archaic word forms, syntax, and roots that fell out of other Indo-Iranian languages.

ralfd• 8 days ago

Context?

FlyingSnake5• 8 days ago

The majority of surviving Sanskrit literature is actually secular like Poems, Dramas, science and mathematics.

Sanskrit was widely spoken and understood just like Latin or Avestan, in its heyday. Otherwise it wouldn’t be part of the liturgical traditions of Buddhism, Jainism and Nastika traditions.

Why would Sudraka,Vatsayana, Brhathari write in Sanskrit if no one spoke it?

ashishb4• 8 days ago

Sanskrit was widely spoken and understood just like Latin or Avestan, in its heyday. Otherwise it wouldn’t be part of the liturgical traditions of Buddhism, Jainism and Nastika traditions.

I think, and it is just my speculation, that for most of Indian History, Sanskrit was the link language.

Just like "Latin" in the USA and Europe of the early 17th and 18th centuries, when all academic instructions were carried out in Latin!

So, nobody used Sanskrit as the primary language, but everyone could or knew someone who could convert Sanskrit to the local dialect.

It is almost like how Chinese and Colombian traders might sign a contract for coffee purchase in English. Neither might use English in most of their daily operations.

busymom0• 8 days ago

I grew up in India and till grade 8 (or 9? Can't remember), it was mandatory for me to take Sanskrit lessons along with English and Hindi.

srean3• 8 days ago

Sanskrit was widely spoken and understood just like Latin or Avestan

Is that so ? I am not knowledgeable myself but some of my family members are (professor s in Sanskrit) and from what I have absorbed from their conversation is in direct contradiction to your claim.

The language of interpersonal communication were vulgarised forms, aka the vernacular languages. Sanskrit was used were a need for formality, respect, speciality was felt.

Regarding your claims about secularity, you are very correct.

lioeters3• 8 days ago

The revival of Hebrew is a counter example, of a "ritual" language that managed to become a practical daily language for written and spoken communication.

DiscourseFan3• 8 days ago

Biblical Hebrew has no vowel markings (well it does, but they are an interpretation), so it cannot be used in daily speech. Modern Hebrew is distinct from Biblical Hebrew. Sanskrit itself does not have much use as an actual language because it lacks a lot of the features that, say, Hindi or English or Ancient Greek have, it has 7 past tenses that are basically identical and it does not make fine distinctions between moods, which it does not have enough of. Only Vedic Sanskrit could actually be used as a language, but similarly to Ancient Greek there are relatively few extant texts in Vedic Sanskrit and certainly the task of learning the language to fluency would be monstrous compared to studying a living language; and one that few, if any, would be willing to devote their life towards, especially considering that Classical Sanskrit already works fine enough as a literary language and is only so practical for that purpose because it has such a strictly defined grammar.

ColdStream• 8 days ago

My favorite use of Sankrit is the plant 'Ashwagandha'. Sounds fancy but it means 'Smell of a horse' as that is what it smells like.

ccgreg• 8 days ago

It's kind of interesting that you contradict much of what the article concludes, even though the article gives a lot of examples. Maybe your prediction will be true.

throwawayamzn1• 8 days ago

It is caused by the ability of LLM to translate it quite accurately

Alien1Being3• 8 days ago

This highly recommended, excellent school in Sydney offers Sanskrit.

"A third elective is chosen from Accelerated Classical Greek/Italian/German, Sanskrit, ..."

https://www.sydgram.nsw.edu.au/life-at-grammar/academic/

My children had a great time there.

latchkey2• 8 days ago

we named our dog "santosha", such a great word.

ashishb4• 8 days ago

Fun fact: the famous "Sentosa" island in Singapore is a spelling variation of the same word.

__rito__• 7 days ago

Don't tell that to Indians! A lot of humans are named "Santosh". :x

Unlike in the West, naming one's dog after someone's name is considered an insult. "I will have a pet dog named after you" is insult thrown in fights. So, Indians name their dogs uncommon among humans. Or they have foreign names like Johnny, Jack, etc.

latchkey2• 7 days ago

I really don't care. A Swami suggested the name and I agreed to it.

selimthegrim5• 8 days ago

According to Tripathi, the problem of Sanskrit being narrowed to religion is a colonial inheritance. British Orientalists, he argues, created an image of Sanskrit as the language of ritual and one religious community, ignoring its vast Buddhist, Jain, Carvaka, scientific, theatrical, poetic and philosophical corpus.

I don't understand how you can take what happened to AH Dani at BHU and say this with a straight face.

tecoholic2• 8 days ago

From down south of India - the Proto Tamil language is the basis for modern Tamil, Malayalam and others. We still have Sanskrit being used by Temple priests. One of changes in the last decade is - Tamilnadu finally has temples with priests using Tamil for religious rituals. Sanskrit was gate kept by the priestly class. It’s not a colonial reframing.

thesmtsolver23• 8 days ago

Look forward to Tamil being used in mosques and the Adan being in Tamil instead of Arabic.

iamshs2• 8 days ago

Let's go a bit back and try to understand what happened with Buddhists of India. A whole religion exterminated from such a vast land.

thesmtsolver23• 8 days ago

Buddhism wasn’t exterminated due to violence like Zoroastrianism from Iran.

https://www.reddit.com/r/IndianHistory/comments/18rdfjx/hist...

rramadass6• 7 days ago

You might find my following earlier interaction with "selimthegrim" on this topic interesting - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41526431

thisumang• 8 days ago

The amount of advertisements instantly made me close the page before reading.

an0malous• 8 days ago

There’s some Sanskrit texts that don’t have English translations that I’d really like to read so I was going to use an LLM to create translations. Does anyone know how well LLMs handle Sanskrit or have any suggestions? Are any particular models better than others? Especially because I know that ancient texts sometimes use different dialects of Sanskrit and have different challenges.

The one I’m mostly interested in translating is called the Moksopaya, here’s the Sanskrit on GRETIL: https://gretil.sub.uni-goettingen.de/gretil/1_sanskr/6_sastr...

orsenthil3• 8 days ago

No, LLMs do not handle low resource / low corpus languages, including Sanskrit well.

rramadass6• 5 days ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48945898

neomantra• 8 days ago

Yesterday in HN "what are you working on", dr_dshiv presented SourceLibrary [1] which has tons of machine translation of beautiful texts.

Here's my "Let Me SourceLibrary That For You" using their Librarian search which presents the "The Yoga Vāsiṣṭha (The Expanded Mokṣopāya)" [2]

ETA: My apologies, I went deeper and the links therein are scans/ocr of English translations of that text. The library does have other Sanskrit translations, but not of that?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48889335

[2] https://sourcelibrary.org/librarian?thread=6a56c578a50845441...

rramadass6• 5 days ago

The Madras Sanskrit College in collaboration with IIT-Madras is working on a exclusive LLM for the Sanskrit language - https://madrassanskritcollege.edu.in/

From Mylapore to the World: The Story of India’s Sanskrit LLM - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AB_Bic7RqOg

PS: What translations of Yoga-Vasistha/Laghu-Yoga-Vasistha have you read/have had access to? This is one of my favourite philosophical texts and i am curious to know more.

orsenthil3• 8 days ago

There is also, Sourashtra, a surviving and a thriving of dialect of Prakrit (Souraseni Prakrit), which was a common man Sanskrit. Buddha is believed to taught in Prakrit.

iamshs2• 8 days ago

Look at the IIT Bombay photo, in the background is the colonial era copy of Lady Britannia - "Bharat Mata". The fact article is hosted on Open Magazine, I was already a bit suspect. So the full context missing from headline is - "Under Hindu Nationalism".

What the article misses is what some of these accounts post. SanskritSparrow channels his followers on stories to some kooky post which claims to have decoded Indus Valley Script as Sanskrit. Learned persons better be careful about the intent here, the rider that is riding the "ancient" horse into the present is as much trying to invade intellectual spaces, as the actual Rishis were trying with the lands. Besides, the appeal is only among upper caste Hindus. What else is a Dalit going to do with Sanskrit? No literature is written for them in Sanskrit. They're not even allowed learning it, it is an exclusive domain of Brahmins. What will Dalits get from reading Vedas and finding out how they are termed as devils and filed under a degraded caste pyramid? It's an article borne out of very rosy lens. A Dalit Ambedkarite writer should research the accounts mentioned and tell us what the subsurface vibe looks like here, is it the same old wine in new glass?

WelkinFolk• 7 days ago

Which Vedas call Dalits "devils"? In what context are these verses, if any? And why would a majority of the Hindu population not benefit from reading their sacred texts - Vedas and Gita and such? My literal Sanskrit teacher wasn't a Brahmin, what on earth are you on about?

Alien1Being3• 8 days ago

My South Indian Dravidian language Malayalam, is around 50% Sanskrit words.

Technically any Sanskrit word is also a Malayalam word.

Examples of Sanskrit words we would use daily in conversation with a fluent Malayalam speaker include:

Pusthakam (Sanskrit: Pustakam) - Book

Bhāryā - Wife

Swapnam (Sanskrit: Swapnam) - Dream

Agni (Sanskrit: Agni) - Fire

Varṇam - Color

Samayam (Sanskrit: Samayam) - Time

Vidhyālaya (Sanskrit: Vidyālaya) - School

And of course many personal names ( including mine, my wife's and my children's ) are in Sanskrit.

We have a word for this phenomenon : "Manipravalam is a medieval South Indian literary style and hybrid language that blended Sanskrit with local Dravidian vernaculars—primarily Malayalam and Tamil. Translating to "ruby and coral," it symbolized the seamless, decorative intertwining of the local tongue's grammar with the eloquent vocabulary of Sanskrit"

There are thousands of other Sanskrit words in daily use in Malayalam.

"bodham, santoṣam, saṅkaṭam, sneham, iṣṭam, premam, deṣyam, (Skt : dveṣyam) kopam, viṣamam, saṁśayam, bhayam, buddhi, dhairyam, ālocana, cinta, vicāram, vedana, daya(vu), dākṣiṇyam, abhimānam, mānam, sukham, tṛpti, manass, antass, śānti, samādhānam, svairam, sahatāpam, paribhavam, parāti (a Malayalam word made using Sanskrit; parātī, act of rejection) duḥkham, ātmā(vu), āgraham, virodham, prayāsam, kaṣṭam, manaḥprayāsam, manassamādhānam, manośūnyam (this is a common phrase in some dialects and completely absent in others, it refers to the act of not having mental happiness in anything) dhārṣṭyam (I am surprised how mallus still use such tough words) puccham, (means “tail”/”inferior” literally, used in the sense of contempt) ahaṅkāram, bhāvam, svabhāvam, guṇam, āśvāsam, āśaṅka, (colloquial in some dialects) ākulam, (colloquial in some other dialects) ākrāntam, ārtti, krūram, vīryam, ākāṃkṣa, vātsalyam, vāśi, tātparyam, svapnam, saṅkalpam "

"vṛtti, sampatt-, sāmpattikam (this is a Malayalam word made using Sanskrit vṛddhi rule, the Sanskrit word should have been sāmpadikam) svatt-, prakṛti, praśnam, upayogam, svantam, svātantryam, sādhanam, sammānam, sammatam, saṅgītam, pratīkṣa, pradhānam, ādyam, avasānam, divasam, rātri, sambhavam, samayam, kālam, vidham, vidhi, śīlam, rīti, svasthata, asvasthata, sūryan, candran, bhūmi, guḷika (meaning “round”, same root as gola) sūkṣ-ikkuka, rakṣa, surakṣa, upadeśam, lābham, prayojanam, āvaśyam, atyāvaśyam, adhikam, sāram, nissāram, tatkālam, prasiddham,upakāram, anugraham, varam, dānam, śāpam, śalyam, aṅgīkāram, anveṣaṇam, ākrama-, akramam, parākramam, yuddham, tarkam, sallāpam, niścayam, jīvitam, mārgam, uccam, śabdam, āghoṣam, sādhu, puṇyam, pāpam, svargam, narakam, pātāḷam, prakāśam (more colloquial words are veṭṭam, veḷiccam, all are equally frequent according to dialects) viśvāsam, kāryam, śuddham, vaśam, sāmarthyam, sādhakam, dikk, diśa, vākk, svaram, ābharaṇam, viparītam, nāśam, vārtta (for “news” : made using vṛddhi from Sanskrit varta- “present affair”, compare with NIA bāt) sāmyam, trāss (from Skt tulās) saṃsāram, vartamānam, anusaraṇa, anuvādam, anāvaśyam, alpam, svalpam, abhiprāyam, dhārālam (an old Sanskrit dialectal word used today only in Malayalam, the opposite of viralam) and hundreds more. (even out of the world Sanskrit-Malayalam combination words like vṛtti-kEṭu, buddhi-muṭṭu, piṭi-vāśi)"

leosanchez2• 8 days ago

Pusthakam (Sanskrit: Pustakam) - Book

Bhāryā - Wife

Swapnam (Sanskrit: Swapnam) - Dream

Agni (Sanskrit: Agni) - Fire

Varṇam - Color

Samayam (Sanskrit: Samayam) - Time

Vidhyālaya (Sanskrit: Vidyālaya) - School

all these are used in Telugu as well :) except maybe Varṇam for color as I never heard anyone use it

Alien1Being3• 8 days ago

Free Sanskrit lessons from IIT Roorkee:

https://sanskritclub.iitr.ac.in/course/Subhashitam/uview

pianoben• 8 days ago

Sanskrit is an amazing language - it is so BIG! Because of its extensive case system (10 different cases, IIRC), word order is highly flexible. The formalized rules of how spelling changes based on word adjacency (sandhi), and the ambiguity of interpreting long compounds, combined with the free word order, are so rich with poetic possibility that English seems baby-talk in comparison.

It's hard to describe just how cool this language is. Even the alphabet! The way we learned it, it is arranged in a grid with all of the letters in a row corresponding to one sound, and each column based on where in the mouth you make the sound.

I wish I could do it justice, but words fail. IMO it is absolutely, intrinsically, worthwhile to study.

rraghur• 8 days ago

For anyone here, here is a great example of constrained writing in Sanskrit from 7th or 8th century

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shishupala_Vadha#Linguistic_in...

Just the verbal gymnastics, the wordplay and the ingenuity is mind boggling

rramadass6• 6 days ago

In this context, this former discussion thread is also relevant;

Words for the Heart: A treasury of emotions from classical India (book review) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43249766

Bhartrihari is a notoriously difficult philosopher, and scholars are still puzzling over what exactly his work means. But perhaps radically oversimplified, here are a few things he suggests. First: wholes are always more real than the parts that comprise them. The whole comes first, and parts exist always and only as conceptual divisions within a pre-existing, coherent whole. Second: these divisions are always linguistic. It is language that carves up experience. But importantly, when language carves up experience, it is not, as some Buddhists thought, simply the superimposition of an artificial, conceptual filter onto a non-conceptual reality. Instead, Bhartrihari tells us, ordinary language is a crystallization of something already implicit in reality. Reality itself is fundamentally linguistic, and what we think of as language—ordinary language, with its words and conceptual divisions—is just a devolution or fragmentation of this more primordial linguistic totality. This is precisely why, for Bhartrihari, the ultimate reality is shabdabrahman, a linguistic absolute. So this is a strong form of idealism: things in our experience, and all things in existence, are fundamentally linguistic. We have no access to anything outside of language and therefore no reason to assume that there is, or ever was, anything separate from it.

Note-1: Does the above explain why many people perceive LLMs to be "conscious"?

Note-2: The effectiveness of Mathematics (when considered as a language in itself) to explain the "real world" also seems related here.

See also the book; The Word and the World: India's Contribution to the Study of Language by Bimal Krishna Matilal - https://archive.org/details/wordandtheworldindiascontributio...

The Second Life of Sanskrit

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