The amount of advertisements instantly made me close the page before reading.
Taleb says that some languages are only meant for ritual.<p>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).<p>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.
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.
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.
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.
The majority of surviving Sanskrit literature is actually secular like Poems, Dramas, science and mathematics.<p>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.<p>Why would Sudraka,Vatsayana, Brhathari write in Sanskrit if no one spoke it?
> 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.<p>I think, and it is just my speculation, that for most of Indian History, Sanskrit was the link language.<p>Just like "Latin" in the USA and Europe of the early 17th and 18th centuries, when all academic instructions were carried out in Latin!<p>So, nobody used Sanskrit as the primary language, but everyone could or knew someone who could convert Sanskrit to the local dialect.<p>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.
Yes this makes a lot of sense, if I recall correctly the first grammar of Telegu was written in Sanskrit, and many South India languages use a lot of Sanskrit words, but of course they are not intelligible if you don't know the grammar.
There's always Lithuanian.
> This new revival is not going to lead to actual communication, just a lot of visual art based on the script and quotations<p>This, but also social sciences and interdisciplinary research (especially in the NLP, CompLing, and ML space).
This highly recommended, excellent school in Sydney offers Sanskrit.<p>"A third elective is chosen from Accelerated Classical Greek/Italian/German, Sanskrit, ..."<p><a href="https://www.sydgram.nsw.edu.au/life-at-grammar/academic/" rel="nofollow">https://www.sydgram.nsw.edu.au/life-at-grammar/academic/</a><p>My children had a great time there.
>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.<p>I don't understand how you can take what happened to AH Dani at BHU and say this with a straight face.
It is caused by the ability of LLM to translate it quite accurately
we named our dog "santosha", such a great word.
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.<p>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.<p>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).<p>There is a similar revitalization for older texts in Tamizh, Telugu, Koshur, Pahari, Tibetan, etc as well.
That's fascinating to learn. I'm curious, is there a <i>political</i> 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.
There is a political aspect to it as well, but it's overstated to a certain extent.<p>Most of these humanities programs are being created via philanthropy from alumni or business families now thinking about their legacy.<p>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.
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.
> What about Prakrit and Punjabi?<p>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.<p>"Sanskrit", on the other hand, meant "cultured" and its grammar, at least for the last 2500 years, is strictly defined by Panini (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A%E1%B9%A3%E1%B9%AD%C4%81dhy%C4%81y%C4%AB" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A%E1%B9%A3%E1%B9%AD%C4%81dhy%C...</a>)
Yes as well. My list of languages was non-exhaustive.