Sanskrit and Lisp (2011)

http://ifacethoughts.net/2011/03/15/sanskrit-and-lisp/

by yati • 13 years ago

82 61 13 years ago

sravfeyn• 13 years ago

Here's the Google Cache http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:XaBQEvN...

Sanskrit is a festidious language that agglutinates huge numbers of tenses and forms in to a festival complexity that is a classical feature of the Indo-European language family. It might be great if you feel like being really damn specific, but it might also suck. It depends what you want to do with it.

I would posit that Sanskrit is more like assembly language (for its unique combination of specificity, table-thumping traditionalism, and verbosity). On the other hand, classical Chinese, which presents a roughly similar vintage literature, is a more fluid and combinatory system for type-indistinct component thoughts ... sort of like an extreme version of perl.

kaka189• 13 years ago

Sanskrit isn't verbose. I haven't seen any English translation that is very much lesser in size compared to original sanskrit text. I have to agree with author's comparison to lisp, very powerful ,very systematic (in fact the alphabets are arranged in the order in which tongue and palate interact to make that sound http://www.sanskritsounds.com/about-sanskrit/46/index.html) but lacks adoption of masses.

contingencies5• 13 years ago

Sanskrit isn't verbose. I haven't seen any English translation...

Sure! Long multi-phoneme words with all the tense built in... the wordcount will be low. I meant semantically verbose, roughly: "average minimum unit of well-formed expressible information". In this facet, I found Sanskrit far worse than even Latin.

arnsholt• 13 years ago

Your view of Sanskrit is probably skewed by a few things. First of all, nearly the entire corpus of Sanskrit literature was written after (and in many cases long, long after) it was used as a day-to-day language. It was probably already losing ground at the time of Panini, roughly 500 BCE.

Second, what Sanskrit literature we have is highly artistic and edited literary text, replete with hard-to-get cultural references, not ordinary spoken language.

Finally, it's probably just plain different from whatever language you're used to, not intrinsically harder or more complicated.

contingencies5• 13 years ago

IMHO Sanskrit is both harder and more complicated than Latin, which I spent years on before coming to a dalliance with Sanskrit and Pali. Then again, other than Latin (which I aced), I've never had much success with Indo-Europeans (except basic French, through drink).

anuraj4• 13 years ago

Not really, there is no evidence of Sanskrit being used for conversation other than in learned circles. Most of the Upanishads, Aranyakas and Puranas and the last two vedas were written after 500 BC. Kalidasa - arguably the greatest litterateur in Sanskrit lived after 500 BC. Bhasa - the playwright lived after 200BC. Most of the Sanskrit oeuvre has been produced after 1st AD and prolific works continued till 16th century.

pattisapu2• 13 years ago

More of one's working knowledge is loaded into the specifics of vocabulary in classical Chinese, whereas more of one's working knowledge is loaded into grammar in classical Sanskrit. At least it seems so at first. Wrestling with the complexities of compounds in Sanskrit and syntax in Chinese blurs this distinction though. The animating morphologies transcend the vocabulary/grammar distinction in highly modular languages.

At bottom both Chinese and Sanskrit, like many other classical languages (Latin, Greek, Arabic), are quite modular. While Chinese's phanopoetic menagerie may not at first glance appear as RISC-y as Sanskrit's lexis (comparing radicals to roots may not be fair anyway), basically it's rare in both languages to stumble across a word that is just a black box, whose etymology you can't pull apart so as to guess what it means. Rarer, at least, than modern languages, which seem more atomized and dictionary dependent, as opposed to the classical languages, which by their systematic modularity were able to function as universalist languages of empire.

Jd4• 13 years ago

I know both Classical Chinese and Sanskrit and have no idea what you are talking about.

"It's rare in both languages to stumble across a word that is just a black box, whose etymology you can't pull apart so as to guess what it means."

Err, yeah I guess you can guess from the morpheme of a Chinese character that a particular character is a type of tree or has something to do with trees, but that's about it. Similarly with Sanskrit, because of sandhi rules often times you can't even figure out what the word is in advance, and I'm not sure how you are suppose to "guess" the meaning absent looking it up in Monier Williams (unless you are guessing backwards from other Indo-European languages, in which case your potential guessable vocabulary will be quite small).

ableal• 13 years ago

phanopoetic

It's not every day that we meet a legitimate word for which Google can only find a paltry 119 results ;-)

(This result did the most for me: Do we privilege sight or sound? - Foetry http://foetry.com/forum/index.php?topic=330.0;wap2‎ Let us call these tendencies the Phanopoetic and the Melopoetic; [...])

eksith• 13 years ago

Very apt comparison considering I have the same problem with Lisp (and Erlang) as Sanskrit

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5452038

lcedp3• 13 years ago

Here is what I came up with during our discussion...

You are looking for reasons where there is none.

* Why Brazil speaks Portuguese? * Why do we speak English now? * Why do people in Ukraine speak Russian instead of Ukrainian?

Not because Russian is more expressive. But because they were killed for doing otherwise. It's not about language features, it's about politics, wars, colonization, economics.

Sven7• 13 years ago

When kids ask why, parents are at their creative best. The difference these days, is they blog about it.

temp453463343• 13 years ago

People primarily speak Russian in Ukraine not because they were afraid of being killed but because it was the lingua franca of the region and it was taught in Soviet schools. There was a lot less literature available in Ukrainian because Ukrainian was a language spoken primarily by serfs (educated people spoke a mixture of French and Russian).

lcedp3• 13 years ago

Maya people in America primarily speak Spanish not because they were afraid of being killed but because it was the lingua franca of the region. Oh, wait...!

vadman• 13 years ago

Sources? I'm really interested to learn who has been killed for speaking Ukrainian.

lcedp3• 13 years ago

Just overall scope of history: [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_Ukrainian_langua...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDeujOxl3jc (they are talking about this in the video: [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bykivnia )

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinnytsia_massacre

As the policies of Ukrainisation were halted (1931) and replaced by massive Russification approximately four-fifths of the Ukrainian cultural elite, intellectuals, writers, artists and clergy, had been "eliminated", executed or imprisoned, in the following decade. The term was coined for this - Executed renaissance.

Many would argue that Holodomor (1932-33, 2-10 millions of Ukrainian speaking people died) was a part of Russification campaign.

redofrac2• 13 years ago

Much like Latin, a good deal of the regularity is because Sanskrit is only a written language.

statictype• 13 years ago

Not sure what you mean but I believe Sanskrit was a spoken language, written down in each region's local script before being formalized in Devanagari.

joiguru• 13 years ago

Sanskrit was not a natural spoken language. I was created as a language for worship. Although Sanskrit was spoken among the educated circles in India, but not in a natural setting. The example that our language teacher gave us, was of couple of students speaking French (say) who are learning it as a foreign language.

anuraj4• 13 years ago

Sanskrit was only used for scholarly conversation between learned people - Ordinary folks always conversed in Prakrits (unrefined tongues)

anuraj4• 13 years ago

And there is no formalization of Sanskrit in Devanagari - We (Keralites) still use Grantha script to write Sanskrit - And a lot of late Sanskrit works have their origin in Kerala. Infact Malayalm script was invented to write Sanskrit with ease on palm leaves.

gngeal5• 13 years ago

I think what he means is that what people actually spoke every day was as different from our bookish notions of what Sanskrit is as the language of a poor farmer or a slave in Ancient Rome was from the writings of Cicero. You really can't equate the two things.

mathattack• 13 years ago

One could take the analogy further - for the same reason people choose C versus LISP. :-) Sometimes structure isn't the best (or quickest) solution for the problem at hand.

Jd4• 13 years ago

So there are several things in this article that are flat out wrong:

  (1) "No wonder so many languages are derived from it."

Not sure what he is referring to exactly, but Sanskrit itself is a descendent of proto Indo-European, from which many other Western languages were derived. So it is a near cousin to the original language of the Indo-European people, but not the direct ancestor of Western languages (this was a misconception of the 19th century linguists that "discovered" Sanskrit).

  (2) "It is more expressive"

I assume by this he means you can do more with less. To a certain extent this is true.

  (3) Very systematic

This is only true to a certain degree. Classical Sanskrit is itself not the original language, and probably the largest single pain point is the "sandhi" rules, in which words are combined together. Although someone eventually wrote down a large number of rules that shows how these changed together, they are more the product of slurring of speech over time, rather than "design" per se.

  (4) "Excellent grammar"

Is a lot of grammar "excellent grammar" ? In Sanskrit, it does allow certain structures that are not available elsewhere (like the existence of a dual case), which presumably facilitate density, and, consequently, presumably also facilitates efficiency. If so, one could argue that the grammar of Attic Greek is more "excellent" than that of English. However, to me "excellence" is something that depends more on the specific use case -- a language that someone can speak and use is better than one that one cannot.

pavanky2• 13 years ago

Not sure what he is referring to exactly, but Sanskrit itself is a descendent of proto Indo-European, from which many other Western languages were derived. So it is a near cousin to the original language of the Indo-European people, but not the direct ancestor of Western languages (this was a misconception of the 19th century linguists that "discovered" Sanskrit).

OP never says Western Languages descended from Sanskrit, you are making that part up. The fact is that many Indian languages descended from it (or rather from the natural form, Prakrit, as opposed to the classical form). This is similar to how Romance languages (Spanish, French, Italian and Portugese) evolved from Vulgar Latin.

tty• 13 years ago

OP never says Western Languages descended from Sanskrit, you are making that part up. The fact is that many Indian languages descended from it (or rather from the natural form, Prakrit, as opposed to the classical form). This is similar to how Romance languages (Spanish, French, Italian and Portugese) evolved from Vulgar Latin.

He's not necessarily :making it up_. It's quite common for Indians, and even Indian linguists to spread ridiculous ideas about Sanskrit, including it being "perfect", "better than other languages", "holy", and quite commonly "all other languages descending from it" as well as the claim of Sanskrit being "the first language".

There's a lot of things in that blogpost that would make most linguists facepalm (especially the part about Sanskrit being "more expressive" and "more systematic"). The idea that Sanskrit is an ancestor language for other languages (far away from the Indo-Aryan group) goes quite hand in hand with these ridiculous notions.

hannibal5• 13 years ago

The reason why Sanskrit seems so interesting for programmers is that it was first language to have formal rules for grammar over 2400 years ago.

Panini defined Sanskrit grammar using Bakus-Naur rules and meta rules.

http://mathomathis.blogspot.in/2010/08/backus-naur-form-pani...

Jd4• 13 years ago

This is very true, although one minor nitpick is that you should say "formal written rules" for grammar. The rules appear in fact appear to be more formal and consistent in the centuries before Panini, and the need to write them down (including the aforementioned sandhi rules) was partially due to inconsistencies derived from the evolution of the language.

gngeal5• 13 years ago

To sum it up, the writer probably has the mentality of William Jones: sort of romantic, but essentially flawed.

amalag2• 13 years ago

The imaginary "proto indo-european" language is a very deep seated racist brother of the Aryan invasion theory. You can read the wikipedia article and the start of this mythical language construct with Sir William Jones who wanted to make his study of Sanskrit fit within his Christian worldview. He found the Sanskrit, Latin and Greek related and decided that there is some mythical imaginary language that preceded them. How could well educated Britishers and Europeans come to the conclusion that Sanskrit was indeed the ancestor of Greek and Latin.

crux2• 13 years ago

You seem to agree with the linguistic consensus that Sanskrit, Latin and Greek are all related. You seem to depart from the consensus with the conclusion that because they are all related, they must share an ancestor.

If that's so, how do you account for the relation between Sanskrit, Latin and Greek (and Russian, and English...)?

Or do you deny the relation altogether? Do you have a competing theory that you could point me to?

vivin• 13 years ago

It's not racist in the least. If Sanskrit is the ancestor of Latin and Greek, then there should be Sanskrit a superstratum in Latin and Greek. However, there isn't. But there are common elements in all three languages that could only have come from an ancestor language.

What you're doing is ad homimen: discounting the theory based on personal attributes of the person who came up with it.

Can the theory stand on its own regardless of the personal motivations of the person who came up with it? Then the theory is solid.

X42• 13 years ago

Language Complexity that you speak against here is a good thing! But only when the rules are simple, yes even when you have many similar rules. The language would still be more efficient than a language with much less rules.

The other thing you criticize is your notice about the evolution of the language. That makes only sense when you just wanted to be accurate, but then it shouldn't look like critics. If a language evolved, it means it was successful.

voidlogic• 13 years ago

(1) "No wonder so many languages are derived from it." >Not sure what he is referring to exactly, but Sanskrit itself is a descendent of proto Indo-European, from which many other Western languages were derived. So it is a near cousin to the original language of the Indo-European people, but not the direct ancestor of Western languages (this was a misconception of the 19th century linguists that "discovered" Sanskrit).

This misconception is very much like that of creationists when propose that evolution means "people came from monkeys"; when in fact we simply share increasingly recent common ancestors as you move from primitive primates to the other great apes.

pramalin• 13 years ago

Sanskrit is an artificial language. No wonder why it resembles programming languages.

ankitml• 13 years ago

At the level you are talking about, All spoken/written languages are artificial.

X42• 13 years ago

haha, that's true (1:0 for @ankitml)

zeckalpha• 13 years ago

It's quite likely that natural Sanskrit did not have those properties, and all that has survived is the well documented formalizations of its grammar.

EDIT: By natural, I meant Vedic. Speaking as a linguist, I doubt that all of Sanskrit was accounted for when it was formalized.

anuraj4• 13 years ago

There is nothing called natural Sanskrit(refined) - Sanskrit is a specialized language built and used for only scholarly purposes - ordinary people always used to communicate in Prakrit(unrefined)

FlyingSnake• 13 years ago

I doubt that is the case. Panini wrote Sanskrit grammer in around 4th century B.C. and it is still the base of Sanskrit education.

scotty792• 13 years ago

Expressive, systematic, powerful - it looks atractive but none of that counts. What counts is ease of being copied and easy assimilation of unprecise copies. That's why PHP rules the web and DNA rules the life and english rules the world despite their messines.

yati2• 13 years ago

English is not popular because it is "easy to copy" or any nonsense like that. As already mentioned, people who didn't speak English were killed. Likewise in the PHP boom, people who did not write PHP were underpaid(not all, but you get my point) - and BTW, the Web is not all a programmer has to/can hack on. Not sure why you put DNA in there, but I think the DNA is pretty expressive, powerful(packs a lot in a lot less) and Darwin has helped us understand evolution as a pretty systematic process. At least do some basic homework before making bold claims.

gngeal5• 13 years ago

English is not popular because it is "easy to copy" or any nonsense like that.

English may not be easy to copy but it's comparatively "bland". "Bland" in this case means "has a smaller number of marked features". For example, it has no tones. It's always easier for someone speaking a tonal language to learn a toneless language than the other way round. Sanskrit has a complex system of synthetic inflection, which is a rather marked feature, and all speakers of analytic languages would hate your guts for forcing it onto them if you tried to make them learn it. In many ways, Sanskrit is like Ancient Greek. You spend a year learning something that other languages can do without (and do so without muddling the meaning of the text), and even if you learn it, you'll still be doing mistakes quite a lot of the time. Such a language would never have a chance of spreading as an international medium of communication.

scotty792• 13 years ago

Non PHP web devlopers underpaid? PHP devlopers are the bottom feeders. I know. I'm one. They are paid lowest because there's a lot of them.

There are a lot of them because they are most abundant. They are most abundant not because PHP is well desinged language but because ability to use PHP is easy to copy.

As for DNA read about non-coding sequences, telomers, pleiotropy and such. I'll state again. DNA is the pretty dumb chaotic stuff, built out of the most common intersting chemical element, carbon. It's everywhere not because it's well designed but because it copies well. It has 4bln years of incremental chaotic patches and cruft all around. I don't think any system that suffered through such history would be admired by any software architect.

dkeskar• 13 years ago

Sanskrit is considered a "refined" language, implying serious effort to systematize phonemes, grammar, declension and even verb classification distinguishing recipient of actions (1-10 ganas, PP/AP padas, etc.). Refinement can give subtlety, accuracy, concision etc. but does not automatically and objectively mean "universal", "perfect" or "excellent", even though proponents conflate those aspects.

IMO, Sanskrit persisted as the language of metaphysical and scientific treatises for a long time because of practical advantages. A large library of concepts, allowed easy reuse and concision [1]. Being trained in Vedanga (phonetics, metre, grammar, etymology, etc.) allowed practitioners to compose new sutras easily, much like PhD students using mathematical notations and proofs in papers.

It was used conversationally, at least in courts and debates. Its decline into a quasi-venerated read-only language over the last 1000 years would be an interesting (and contentious) topic for dissertation.

[1] Patanjali Yoga Sutras http://www.arlingtoncenter.org/Sanskrit-English.pdf

Sanskrit and Lisp (2011)

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