How To Be Funny In Sanskrit.

“The only meaningful offering to the deity of languages, is the offering of usage.”

That’s fantastic! It should appear in a pop-up whenever anyone anywhere tries to post a comment complaining about some etymologically unsound use of “literally” or the like.

The Sanskrit adaptation of Layla in the comments was worth its four and a half-minutes.

Tamil being “in orbit around” Sanskrit is a Sanskrit-centric way of putting it.

Is Sanskrit the “mother-language” of India?

Nah, it’s Gondi. j/k, but the self-assertion of Gondi, Telengana etc is interesting to observe.

fisheyed, thanks for the link, but note that some of the anti-Sanskrit polemic quoted (Sanskrit as the no-longer-attractive “aged mother” v. Telugu as the more desirable “ravishing daughter”) itself metaphorically assumes the sort of relationship whereby the Dravidian vernacular is derivative/dependent as a historical matter even if it is now ready to leave home and strike off on its own. Mother:daughter::sun:planet is a pretty obvious analogy.

It’s not something I would say myself, but no one is offering to give me a column on the relevant website. (And the fellow who has the column is apparently an undergraduate majoring in physics, so we probably shouldn’t expect too much Sprachwissenschaft scholarly precision from him.) Now that I take a look, according to Professor Wikipedia: “Dravidian languages show extensive lexical (vocabulary) borrowing, but only a few traits of structural (either phonological or grammatical) borrowing from Indo-Aryan, whereas Indo-Aryan shows more structural than lexical borrowings from the Dravidian languages.” “Shows” is probably a bit strong for that last point, but the thesis seems to be that the ways in which the Indic branch of Indo-Iranian diverges from the Iranian branch are often consistent with the effects one might expect from a Dravidian substrate influence, which is certainly plausible.

I am afraid I have nothing enlightening to say about the Gondi cause – I don’t even know enough to have insight as to the competitive dynamics among the “Big Four” Dravidian languages with long-standing literary traditions, although I guess they all emerged in literary form early enough (but also long enough after the hypothesized fragmentation of Proto-Dravidian) that even nationalists can’t plausibly claim that “mine is the original and the others merely debased variants.” Although I guess nationalists have been known to make implausible claims.

I guess they all emerged in literary form early enough

No, not really. Malayalam emerged much more recently from Namboodiri influence on west coast Tamil.

Telugu and Kannada branched from proto-Dravidian, but the earliest extant literary texts are from later periods than the earliest extant Tamil literary texts.

Man, the threads on Mongolian and First Nations Canadian languages are so full of empirical detail, but it comes to Dravidian languages and its example-less assertions and random guessing. If it weren’t the cocktail hour, I would be protesting!!

I’m not interested in taking sides in this argument, but I did find myself raising my eyebrows at that paragraph.

If we applied it without change to Western Europe, this is how it would sound:

But Latin and Greek are only one facet of the language tradition of Western Europe. There are their daughters and foster daughters too: the Romance and Hellenic vernaculars, who are fulgent with best qualities of the mother. The fiercely independent German is a giant in her own right. Together, they form a wonderful language ecosystem— a diversity of languages from different families, each independent, yet together in orbit around two mother-languages from whom they have derived (and continue to derive) vocabulary, grammar and inspiration.

Or East Asia:

But Classical Chinese is only one facet of the language tradition of East Asia. There are their daughters and foster daughters too: the Sinitic vernaculars, who are fulgent with best qualities of the mother. The fiercely independent Japanese is a giant in her own right. Together, they form a wonderful language ecosystem— a diversity of languages from different families, each independent, yet together in orbit around the mother-language from whom they have derived (and continue to derive) vocabulary, grammar and inspiration.

Both may be true in a catchall sort of way (although the details may be a bit off), but do people really feel comfortable having their ‘eco-systems’ described this way? I suspect it’s only because we’re looking at India from a distance through a telescope that we would accept that kind of ‘mother-daughter / sun-planet’ analogy without any qualms.

Incidentally, I mentioned McEvilley because his thesis pokes holes in our adulation of Greece and Rome as the font of all that is great in Western civilisation, by showing how indebted the Greeks were to earlier traditions with possible deep links to India.

Indeed, some Tamil chauvinists are currently engaged in litigation in an attempt to get judicial rulings that their language is “classical” but its rival Dravidian languages are not: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/PIL-in-Madras-HC-opposes-classical-language-status-for-Malayalam-Odia/articleshow/46454207.cms I liked Tamil chauvinists better when they were rioting against Hindi hegemony.

@JWBrewer

Well, they have a point… sort of. I rather wonder about the Indian attempt to codify categories like “Classical languages” and its motivations. “Classical” is a word with a great deal of cachet. It calls up ‘high civilisations’ and ‘rich ancient literatures’. If you were to start sorting modern languages in any part of the world into arbitrary categories like “Classical” and “not Classical”, I suspect you would have a similar scramble. (“What? Danish Classical but not Norwegian? WTF”).

I also don’t think that “rhetorical characterisations” are totally harmless. They create hierarchies and make value judgements about “superiority” and “possession” in languages and cultures (“Ours is better than yours”, “Yours belong to us”, etc.), which are all too often tied to political issues. A lot of scholarly ink is and has been spilt in demolishing old “rhetorical characterisations” and creating new ones — new ways of perceiving the world. As a small example, William Labov’s work is interesting not only for its linguistics, but also for its fresh ways of looking at non-prestigious varieties of English (unfortunately without making much difference to what most people think). Linguists have also been trying for a long time to knock the rhetoric of “correctness” on the head but with little success.

Of course the background in this case is Indian politics and nationalism, which appears to be a can of worms, but as outsiders we should be able to discuss it dispassionately. fisheye was correct in identifying the rhetoric as “Sanskrit-centric”. I don’t think there is any other way to put it and to argue with what he says is pointless.

@Hat

Of course I’m happy to cut the guy some slack. I totally agree with his enthusiasm for the different varieties of language in India and I more than agree with his enthusiasm for Sanskrit. As I said, I was raising an eyebrow, not dissing the guy completely! But I do agree with fisheyed that we really should question whether “the notion of Sanskrit as the center, mother … is an accurate thing to say in 2015”. It’s a valid question and I think it’s worth asking.

Oh, I forgot. They claim that Gondi is a ‘classical’ one in the same league as Sanskrit. To quote: Research has gone in to posit Gondi as the “mother of Dravidian languages” and to suggest the Harappan script, whose illegibility has long stumped scholars, is actually decipherable using a Gondi one. If only John Emerson were here!

Tangentially related – traditionally, at German universities, you needed the Latinum (proof of having studied Latin succesfully for a certain number of years) to be admitted for studies, especially for the humanites, but also for medicine. This requirement has been removed for more and more faculties, and I don’t know how much it even is a requirement today any more, but when I went to university 30 years ago, the requirement was still there (I didn’t mind then, as I had had seven years of Latin at school). Now, the interesting thing was, as a foreign student you could fulfill that requirement also by proving that you had studied the equivalent Classical Language of your culture (Sanscrit, Classical Chinese, Classical Arabic, Classical Greek). So the reasoning wasn’t even “Latin will help you to understand scientific terminiolgy” or something like that, it was just “studying the classical language of your culture makes you the kind of culturally superior person we want at our universities”.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m all for studying foreign languages and knowing about the classical literature of human cultures, but I fail to see how that kind of thing is necessary for becoming a good surgeon? And putting some languages on a list of Classical Languages that count, while you’re out of look if your studied French, or Akkadian, or Farsi (just to take languages with a rich tradition of written literature) is really arbitrary.

I once had a professor who taught English etymology and was a scholar of ancient Greek. He would occasionally point out erroneous scientific names (at least in Greek). I asked him if he was ever consulted by scientists at the university when naming some discovery. He said, sadly no.

Yet there are many parts of the world where showing off your erudition by gratuitously using little bits of English (probably including bits that would be puzzling or comical to a native speaker because unidiomatic or ungrammatical) has the same sort of I-am-a-superior-sort-of-person signalling function as the use of little bits of Latin/Greek (probably including bits ditto) traditionally had in our own culture. I suppose that fact that these days having L2 competence in English generally also has practical/utilitarian/cash-value advantages in addition to those social-signalling advantages is what debars it from being “classical”?

My school district is apparently catching up late to the current fad and (subject to funding) adding Mandarin to the existing line-up of foreign languages offered (currently Spanish/French/Italian/Latin). I’d be happier if they were adding Tamil.

I saw somewhere that the Tamil version of the Ramayana has Ravana as the hero and Rama as the villain. That’s “inspiration”, of a sort.

Presumably “the” Tamil version of the Ramayana is Kamban Ramayanam, which does not have Rama as the villain. Kamban’s epic is the one that has the most importance in literary history.

There are minor versions with Ravana as a flawed hero, in EV Ramaswamy’s Rama is the villain. There are texts lauding Ravana in Sinhalese as well.

Hartman seems to be suggesting a fairly complex relationship. Note that he says Dravidian authors were trying to break away from Sanskrit influence. Consciously breaking away from a hitherto dominant tradition is common everywhere. Romantic nationalism in Europe rebelled against Classicism in Europe by appealing not only to the Romantic imagination but also to native traditions as embodied in ‘folklore’ etc. Japan’s attempts to differentiate itself from Chinese culture appealed to purely Japanese elements like Shintoism and Japanese aesthetic concepts (like mono no aware). Etc.

Perhaps as a result of these gargantuan efforts to bring later cultures out from under the dominance of Classical culture, we now accept the validity of many of these ‘new’ narratives (at least relatively new at the time they were proposed). But it seems that the dominant Classical culture set the standard, while the later ‘declarations of independence’ (as it were) were pushing back against the Classical culture. While they contributed a lot to the mix, they were arguably insufficient to create a full-blown Classical culture of their own.

This is pretty broad-brush stuff and I wouldn’t like to set up a grand theory of civilisation based on it, but there seem to be interesting parallels.

Oops, yes, that should have been Hart.

gargantuan efforts to bring later cultures out from under the dominance of Classical culture

Actually, thinking about your comment on nationalism, I’m not sure if the vacanas had any sense of Kannadiga self-assertion. There are medieval bhakthi Tamil poets like Gnanasambandar who definitely do assert Tamilness, but it’s against Jains, not against Sanskrit (couldn’t be, considering G’s religious beliefs). It is complicated, in short.

“If only John Emerson were here!” — where’s John?

And AK Ramanujan’s “Three Hundred Ramayanas,” included as the second essay in Richman’s book, has itself become controversial.

Norwegians, Nynorsk users or not, definitely can’t read the sagas in the original spelling.

Are you sure that’s a doublet? In German, lesen, las, gelesen is a strong verb and used to mean “choose” as well as “read” (“pick the letters one by one”), so Cinderella’s job is Erbsen lesen “sort peas”. Lehren, lehrte, gelehrt is weaksauce and doesn’t look related despite its *z (Gothic lais “I know”).

Danes know about Auslese as a fancier quality of German white wine. Checking, I find that at læse ærter was a thing as well, but Danish versions of Cinderella (Askepot) are not cited as a source.

lære < *laizijaną ablaut of *lizaną through MLG, thus = G lehren while E learn < PWG *liʀnōn fientive to *lizaną (which would be the verb attested in Gothic lais). Thus spake en.wikt. I assume they mean that *laizijaną was a new weak verb formed to one of the ablauted stems of strong *lizaną.

Thanks, David.