Talk:Sanskrit/Archive 1

message: In fact, students of both German and Sanskrit say that the similarities are sometimes quite striking [I have this on good authority, but I have no examples].
I'm a German native speaker, but unfortunately I know nearly nothing about Sanskrit. Nevertheless, I deem it very unlikely that there is any significant similarity. Sanskrit has a full-fledged flectional system featuring about 700 conjugated verb forms, I think - German has exactly two conjugated tenses and only a handful of conjugated forms. Sanskrit has eight declensional cases, German three or four. -- This list could be continued, I guess, but perhaps your authority could set me straight there.
Really striking similarities exist (AFAIK) between Sanskrit and the classical European languages like ancient Greek or Latin. For example, Sanskrit has an optative mode and an aorist tense - like Greek, but unlike most other European languages (I don't know about Farsi). Then, I once found a Sanskrit conjugation table giving some forms of the verb "ni", "to lead" - the present has the forms "nayami", "nayasi", "nayati" (...) "nayamah", "nayatha", "nayanti". This reminds me stronlgy of Latin "eram", "eras", "erat", "eramus", "eratis", "erant". These forms aren't present forms, I know, but the principle is the same.
Finally, I think it is wrong to speak of a Sanskrit "influence" on European languages. It would be better to say that they are of common origin.
:I think the example of german Atmen(to breathe), Sanskrit Atman(Breath,Spirit) is quite striking, although I'm not sure if that is a real cognate.
::it may be a cognate, but the etymology is obscure (for both words), so it's not really a very good example. there are many clear cognates, hamsa=Gans, shvashura=Schwager etc. but that's just because both languages are Indo-European, and not because they are particularly close within the IE group. dab 09:15, 17 Nov 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks... BTW, I must admit that the stem(root?) of the word is at(e)m and the -en ending is only the standard german verb infinitive ending, don't accuse me of lax nostratic etymology, here... =P Btw, what is the believed stem of atman?
Pokorny (1959)
  e:t-me/n-
'Hauch, Atem':   Ai. a:tma/n-, Gen. a:tma/nah. m. `Hauch, Seele';
    ags. æ:ðm m., as. a:thum `Hauch, Atem', ahd. a:dhmo:t (Isid.) `flat', sonst im Ahd. m. gramm. Wechsel a:tum (= a:dum Isid.) m. `Atem', nhd. Atem und (mit dial. o aus a) Odem. Ob hierher ir. athach (*@t-a:ko-) `Hauch, Wind'? 
the point is that the root e:t is not otherwise known, so the equation is shaky. dab 09:02, 19 Nov 2004 (UTC)

text: Not Max Mueller. William Jones (philologist). Most Indians don't seem to be able to grasp science as a concept apart from politics or mythology. But "Sanskrit is very close to German" is nonsense, anyway. dab 09:18, 17 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: German and Sanksrit

message: There should be section about translittering sanskrit to latin script using diacritical marks. How is the academic sanskrit-latin translitteration officially called? How the symbols can be produced on a normal keyboard? Unicode fonts and unicode-aware browsers do display these symbols correctly, but how do you actually create them? All the samples on this page should be written using the mentioned transliteration scheme.
:Hi, I have removed the paragraph you added on transliteration because it should be in the devanagari article, which already appears to have some info, so this para should be merged with that article. In particluar, devanagari says that the most common transliteration is the National Library at Calcutta romanization while you say it is the International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration. Are these two the same? I don't know, so I haven't edited it. -- Arvindn 12:06, 25 Mar 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Arvindn, I think you're making a mistake. I know that Indian languages have very similar sound inventories and that transliteration schemes are similar but this isn't to say that every Sanskrit transliteration scheme is identical to every generic Devanagari transliteration scheme - and even if it is it is certainly worth providing such information here. Besides this, Sanskrit is very much older than the Devanagari script and has been written in several other scripts through history but latin-based transcriptions of Sanskrit need not be based on the Devanagari writing system. Again, even if it turns out that the all are, this is worthy of noting here. — Hippietrail 12:24, 25 Mar 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Devanagari became predominant around the 11th century, IIRC, so all transliterations of Sankskrit to latin are likely to be based on it. That said, you have a point, so feel free to reinstate the paragraph. -- Arvindn 12:35, 25 Mar 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I returned the paragraph slightly modified. After some research I did not find easy way to denote sanskrit diacritical marks on a standard web page even though the page is using unicode. Is there a way to note the dot under r or top of n by using standard unicode font and some standard HTML tags? This page should have sanskrit words written using diacritical notification. --Arjuna 15:49, 25 Mar 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Sure there is: ṛ ,  ṅ. You really should take a look at devanagari. -- Arvindn 16:36, 25 Mar 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Thank you, Arvindn - I have studied a lot about entering unicode diacritics into HTML pages. Fixed also vowels section to include diacritics. Please feel free to correct if I made any mistakes. For instance, perhaps it would be better to use capital Lrii (Ḹ) for the sake of clarity --Arjuna 20:41, 27 Mar 2004 (UTC)
replies: text:  I changed "Pāṇini's c. 500 BC Aṣṭādhyāyī" to "Pạ̄nini's c. 500 BC  Ạṣtādhyāyī". At least at my system the latter is viewed better. The prior one utilizes pre-composed diacritical marks and is more convinient to produce, and latter utilices composing diacritics written separately and being harder to produce but gives better result. Which is the proper way of presenting diacritics in Wikipedia? Found an article that discusses the same problem without solution: "Them old diacritical blues again"
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000616.html and http://tenser.typepad.com/tenser_said_the_tensor/2004/03/underdots.html --Arjuna 19:58, 29 May 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Hmm. That smacks of being incorrect, at least to my ear/eye. It's not just that it's harder to produce, it's a less accurate way of recording the information. What exactly is your problem with viewing the "pre-composed" marks? If it's just that you don't have a good font covering unicode indic characters, that's a user-end problem that shouldn't effect our composition practices. If it's that you're using monobook and some lameass made Verdana the standard font for monobook, well, I hope that'll be remedied soon. And I'm pretty sure there's no current standard on Wikipedia. -- कुक्कुरोवाच|Talk‽ 22:03, 29 May 2004 (UTC)

text:  I'm using mozilla as my browser and standard wiki skin, that appears to be monobook you mentioned. Default font being verdana that is lacking those precompiled diacritics makes my browser to search for another font when it comes across with a character that isn't included in the default font set. Combining diacritics view correctly, though. Still yesterday I did not know that it is only problem with my system, I thought I was being smart. Sorry folks. --Arjuna 06:38, 31 May 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Transliteration issues

message: Quick question: Do any of the folks who edit this page have any interest in the Sanskrit-language wikipedia, or know recruitable online communities of fluent Sanskritists? I ask because it sounds like a nifty thing to have around, and it actually exists, but it's totally empty. I don't feel comfortable trying to populate it myself as, while I'm okay at translating from Sanskrit, I'm not so great at translating into it. So while I would enjoy helping with editing and maintenance and whatnot, I can't really add substantive content. And yet, it would be a shame to just leave it there...कुक्कुरोवाच 03:45, 2 May 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: [[:sa:Main_Page|Sanskrit Wikipedia]]

message: As far as I know India's official languages are Hindi and English. Maybe we should have more but I don't think Sanskrit will make the list in the future anyway.  I find it hard to believe that I'm mistaken about this but I'm posting here first in case I am.  If I'm not the official language of India part at the top of the article needs to be removed.
no, it's quite correct. just look at a rupee note; india has lots of official languages (as it should, too):
there are 15 other official languages: Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil, Urdu, Gujarati, Malayalam, Kannada, Oriya, Punjabi, Assamese, Kashmiri, Sindhi, and Sanskrit; (CIA factbook)
:Dbachmann 08:46, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Konkani, Manipuri, Nepali are also official languages since 1992. -- 210.214.227.228 19:50, 4 Aug 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Official language of India? 

message: I removed this section:
:=== Sanskrit and computing ===
:Sanskrit is probably the only spoken language to have context-free grammers, which are central to computer languages.
There was recently some talk about Sanskrit as a programming language in some internet discussion lists, which probably refers to a technical paper from 1989, but the above sentence is absolutely false. In fact, only a very few syntactic constructs in a very few language have been proved to be non-context-free. The vast majority of natural languages are context-free, even though the grammars might be too large to handle. It has been claimed that Panini's grammar of Sanskrit is essentially context-free. If this is what the author wants to imply, the above section needs to be rewritten. Burschik 09:44, 5 Aug 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: well done! Dbachmann 12:46, 5 Aug 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Removed section 

message: The encoding of the Sanskrit glyphs seems incorrect and not within the Unicode standards. It woud be advisable to replace all glyphs here with the correspondent Unicode. --Zappaz 03:11, 7 Dec 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: um, elaborate please? (which ones?) As far as I can see they are properly encoded. U+0905 = #2309 = अ User:Dbachmann|dab (T) 10:49, 7 Dec 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: something must be wrong with my browser (Mozilla Firefox) I cannot see any of the glyphs Any ideas? I am working on several articles to display ancient alphabets and I need my Unicode to work... --Zappaz 16:53, 7 Dec 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: well, I am using Firefox (on KDE 3.2), and the fonts display fine (although Devanagari ligatures are not yet realized in any browser afaik). It must be a fonts-issue, I think; you do not have the proper fonts installed, or the browser doesn't know where to find them... dab (T) 17:00, 7 Dec 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, the problem is in Firefox 1.0 (under Mac OS X), In Safari I can see the glyphs without any problem. Thanks for the assistance. --Zappaz 00:59, 8 Dec 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I primarily use Safari on Mac OS X and Mozilla on Windows XP. Both browsers do just fine with Unicoded Devanagari, and ligatures appear exactly as they should. --Marnen Laibow-Koser (talk) 22:11, 8 Dec 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I neglected to mention in my earlier comment that certain fonts may not be able to display Devanagari ligatures properly, but that's not a browser problem. --Marnen Laibow-Koser (talk) 11:28, 9 Dec 2004 (UTC)

text: It's also worth noting that certain skins specify fonts that interfere with the display of extended characters. You might want to try a different skin. --Marnen Laibow-Koser (talk) 21:07, 9 Dec 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, I checked with the Mozilla folks and they said that Firefox still needs to somooth its corners regarding Devanagari and other Unicode groups. --Zappaz 22:54, 9 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Unicode Encoding 

message: 6000 of them? is this correct? iirc, there were some 300 native speakers reported in the 1981 census (and even those are self-described native speakers, i.e. I don't think anybody checked) I think I will dig up the census data to verify this. dab (ᛏ) 10:45, 28 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: native speakers

message: well, it is difficult to come up with a relevant image for a language article, and I don't think it should be an FA requirement. and no, I don't think a screenshot of :sa: is very notable. I did a web search and came up with an image of a manuscript, which I have now included. dab (ᛏ) 17:02, 2 Jan 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: image

message: Hi Dbachmann,
the correct sanskrit spelling is संस्कृत वाक्, not संस्कृता वाक् - I saw that you reverted my correction. I have set it back to the correct spelling again.  --ashwatha 00:55, 16 Jan 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I am afraid what we are transliterating here is saṃskṛtā vāk, i.e. the Sanskrit term, not the Hindi term. saṃskṛta- is an adjective (as explained in the etymology section!). masculine: saṃskṛtaḥ. neuter: saṃskṛtaṃ. feminine: saṃskṛtā. vāk happens to be feminine, therefore: saṃskṛtā vāk. dab (ᛏ) 07:57, 16 Jan 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  Ah, that's fine then. I hadn't noticed the explanation before. Now I remember that 'vaak' is feminine in Sanskrit. Thanks, and my apologies. --ashwatha 19:51, 17 Jan 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  typo 

message: I'm just concerned about the neutrality of the lead section.  What kind of proof is there for Sanskrit being the "premier classical language?"  As a Classicist (and former student of Sanskrit),  I realize it may sound a little funny coming from me,  but there doesn't seem to be any basis for this comment other than elitism.  -Eudyptes  04:15,  31 Jan 2005 (UTC)
:I think the syntax is supposed to mean "the premier classical language of India" here, which is arguable. I agree that it still reeks of Hindu elitism, and should be rephrased. dab (ᛏ) 07:51, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: POV?

message: Well, why does the entry Vedic Sanskrit link here? I expected to read something about the differences between classical Sanskrit and Vedic, which are significant. A lot of form common in Vedic but lost somewhere in the 1st millenium BC are not in Panini's grammar; that makes the differences big enough, I think, to discuss the extremely archaic Vedic apart. But if you have any objections, then let us write at least a little on Vedic Sanskrit on this page - I think that is something it deserves!--Caesarion 16:10, 16 Feb 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: of course -- the redirect is just sitting there, waiting for someone's loving attention. dab (ᛏ) 19:01, 16 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Vedic 

message: In this article I read that Vedic Sanskrit has the following phonemes /f/ and /x/. Is this really true? Can you provide us some examples? If this is correct then this means Vedic Sanskrit resembles Avestan which also has these phonemes.  Meursault2004 14:00, 22 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Ah right, can you also tell me in which positions this will occur? Meursault2004 00:45, 25 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Before /p/ and /k/ respectively, if memory serves. --Marnen Laibow-Koser (talk) 20:35, 25 Mar 2005 (UTC)

text: OK thanks! Meursault2004 05:03, 26 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: phonology

message: I'm sorry, I have indeed mixed up vocalic and retroflex L in an earlier edit. It's ok now, vocalic L should of course not appear under consonants either. I am bracing myself now to export Vedic-specific stuff to Vedic Sanskrit. Concerning klp,
:Finally, there was a vocalic l, also transliterated ḷ (L), but not to be confused with the cerebral l sound just mentioned. This vowel was phonematic, but it survives only in a single root in the Rigveda (kḷp "to order") and is lost in the later Vedic texts
It's true that the root is classical (with a present kalpate etc.) But forms containing vocalic L are restricted to Vedic, I think? It is in either case notable that the phoneme occurs only in this single root (cognate to English help, btw). dab (ᛏ) 15:25, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Vocalic L is attested in classical Sanskrit, AFAIK. I don't know Sanskrit well enough to be 100% certain, but I seem to recall that both classical Sanskrit grammars I have (neither of which delve at all into Vedic forms other than passing mentions) speak of classical forms such as कॢपतम् kḷptam. I'm at work right now, so I don't have the books in question handy, but I can check at least one of them when I'm at home. --Marnen Laibow-Koser (talk) 16:04, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I have checked now. There are indeed classical forms with vocalic L. --Marnen Laibow-Koser (talk) 13:56, 4 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: L

message: I'm going to add conjugation and declension tables in IAST, but I'm afraid to touch the Devanagari in Unicode. Perhaps someone with more experise could add those in? StradivariusTV 16:04, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: The Devanagari is redundant, and a pain. This is not the Devanagari article, so why should we bother with it? It adds no information. And, as we point out already, there are like a dozen scripts Sanskrit is or was written in, and we'll certainly not add all of those. Compare Arabic grammar: I've written the whole thing in transliteration, so that people can concentrate on the grammar, not the alphabet. All there is to know about that goes to Arabic alphabet. dab (ᛏ) 07:09, 31 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Of course Devanagari isn't the only alphabet used to write Sanskrit, but it certainly is the most common worldwide (kind of the "default" script for the language), and it represents the language far more efficiently than Roman transliteration (which I actually find more tiring to read than the Devanagari in some respects). If any script is redundant here, it's the Roman, but we add it so that people who don't read Devanagari can understand the article. --Marnen Laibow-Koser (talk) 13:55, 4 Apr 2005 (UTC)

text: Yes I do agree with Dbachmann. This article is about the Sanskrit language and Devanagari is not the only alphabet used to write Sanskrit. Let's respect the others and just stick with the neutral Roman script. Meursault2004 12:38, 1 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: ok, but on a related note, what is :Image:John 3 16 Sanskrit translation grantham script.gif doing in the language template? it is not a very typical script, nor a very typical text (John 3:16) at all, nor does it seem common to have script samples in the template at all, so if you don't mind I'll just remove that. dab (ᛏ) 09:19, 3 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Transliterating 

message: This article in specific was discussed during the development of the naming policy for language articles, and the consensus is that the word language would only appear in the article title when the language's name had a primary meaning distinct from the language, which is not the case with Sanskrit. See Wikipedia:Naming conventions (languages), which says "If the language's name is unique, there is no need for any suffix." Nohat 17:53, 11 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Article title 

message: I found the following text in the article: "Sanskrit, though many linguists may deny, has great influence on Old Latin and other present-day Europian languages too. The study of relation between Sanskrit and Europian languages has already began in India, which is in its early stages at present." which sounds a bit like patent nonsense. So I removed it.
:Good call. By the way, you can sign your comments with ~~~~. --  04:06, Jun 17, 2005 (UTC)
:very patent, thanks. I consider this article about "halfway there", at the moment (thanks for the declination tables!). Once we filled in the remaining blanks, it'll need another general overhaul before we can start thinking of FA. But keep going! It'll get there some day. dab (ᛏ) 08:20, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Patent nonsense? 

message: I would like to start this article.I am search through google now. If anybody would like to recommend a link or collaborate, please let me know.--Jondel 09:24, 25 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: [[Hinduism in the Philippines]]

message: the 'revival' of Sanskrit as a "vernacular" as claimed in the indiantimes article is a bit of an oxymoron: Sanskrit can never be a vernacular, since by its very definition, from the times of Panini, it was the non-vernacular, as opposed to "the Prakrits"="the vernaculars". If they really succeed in reviving a Sanskrit based vernacular in Karnataka, all they will do is recreate some sort of Prakrit: All vernaculars are innovative, while Sanskrit is "frozen", i.e. its grammar is prescriptive. The situation will at best be similar to Ivrit, which certainly isn't equal to biblical Hebrew. dab (ᛏ) 13:48, 26 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: vernacular?

message: This is a good article overall, but the second sentence is confusing as it states that "it is a dead language" with "no community of native speakers" and then immediately "some 6000 Brahmins even identify it as their mother tongue". Could it be this mirrors some confusion about the status of Sanskrit in India today?
Also, regarding the sentence, "Most Sanskrit texts available today were transmitted orally for several centuries before they were written down in medieval India," although the oral tradition is important, I believe that Sanskrit manuscripts were kept from earliest times. But I don't have the facts to hand right now to back this up.
Regarding the previous comment, I agree that Sanskrit is by definition not a vernacular language, and this should be changed in the article. However, neither is Sanskrit "frozen": literary style, choice of vocabulary, precise word meaning etc. change over time, so, for example, the Sanskrit of Kalidasa is very different from that of Dandin a few centuries later.
--Abhinava 00:56, 16 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  General remarks 

message: Substituted at 22:02, 3 May 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: Assessment comment