mdp2021 19 hours ago

> learn a language with very few speakers

Learn Sanskrit. You were writing in a descendant language just now. If you learnt the roots, you would understand the descendants better. And they are your tools, and knowing your tools is important.

Other more obscure languages? Well, as implied, languages are related... So studying the network clarifies the whole.

▲ wl 18 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Or learn Hittite. It's got the oldest corpus in the Indo-European language family. You've got your standard assortment of Indo-European cases. Grammatical gender is animate/inanimate and the animate gender has yet to split into masculine and feminine. The script is tons of fun, especially if you write it with a stylus on clay. And as a bonus, you get to learn a smattering of Sumerian and Akkadian vocabulary.

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rubberpoliceman 17 hours ago | parent [-]

Animate gender didn’t split into masculine and feminine — inanimate collective plural was repurposed as feminine.

	▲	wl 15 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		That "repurposing" is more morphology than grammar. You also frequently find in Indo-European languages multiple cases having overlapping morphology, but that doesn't necessarily change the cases themselves. My point, in any case, is that Hittite has the older animate/inanimate genders from Proto-Indo-European (only attested in the Anatolian languages!) whereas Sanskrit has the later masculine/feminine/neuter genders.
	▲	NonHyloMorph 15 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Can you point us somewhere zo learn more about that?

▲ wbl 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Sanskrit is not an ancestor of English. Sanskrit is a satem language English centum. Proto Indo Iranian diverged long ago.

▲ mdp2021 19 hours ago | parent [-]

> Sanskrit is not an ancestor of English

Sanskrit entered into Greek, Greek into Latin, Latin into English.

Edit: downvoter, express yourself clearly. I cannot see how the above sentence could be considered false, apart from gross interpretations of the chosen terms.

Again: you have a relation with "jñāna, gnō̃́sis, gnosco, knowledge"; then you have relations in other dimensions (jña, jñāti, gnṓmōn, gnṓmōn...): the awareness of those details enriches the awareness of the language. That is through the relation between Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, post-Latin - it is just there. What is contended is not clear.

▲ applicative 18 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Sanskrit is no older than Kurdish; English Greek etc have the same relation to it as to Kurdish — they are all alike of Indo European descent.

Like Greek and Latin, Sanskrit is an anciently written language associated with major states and ‘civilizations’ - and, crucially, is like Greek and Latin in that it is still remembered if only by some thin intellectual or priestly stratum of societies.

So by use of those three, Indo European unity could be especially well validated by pure textual scholarship (especially if the scholar was British or German and thus on another branch). It is surprising as the result is intuitively scientific — how could I arrive at it if all I do is read and write?! - and was indeed of massive importance to the framing of Darwin’s quite different scientific enterprise, which needed different evidence .

	▲	mdp2021 18 hours ago \| parent [-]
		If an awareness of Kurdish would help understanding Greek, than Latin, than our post-Latin languages in use, then such awareness would be surely welcome, but "the thing with" Sanskrit is also about the prominence of its literature. The wealth of relations between the terms in those languages is enlightening, and there is an important literary corpus behind it. (I am not quite prepared about Kurdish literature.) -- Edit: > still remembered if only by some thin intellectual or priestly stratum of societies You are "setting the bar" so incredibly low...

▲ nkrisc 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That still does not make Sanskrit an ancestor language of English, though both English and Sanskrit do share a common ancestry several thousand years ago.

English has borrowed words from many languages, as all but the most isolated languages have.

▲ mdp2021 18 hours ago | parent [-]

> That still does not make Sanskrit an ancestor language of English

You are taking 'ancestor' in a strict technical sense, which was clearly not my intention.

> though both English and Sanskrit do share a common ancestry several thousand years ago

And those roots can be found and recognized in the subsequent languages, and there lies the value.

▲ ben_w 18 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> You are taking 'ancestor' in a strict technical sense, which was clearly not my intention.

Blutly, this was not obvious, and what you suggested would have been equally true if you'd said:

  Learn Lithuanian. You were writing in a descendant language just now. If you learnt the roots, you would understand the descendants better.

Because Lithuanian has about as much in common with PIE as Sanskrit does.

	▲	mdp2021 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Does Lithuanian have a comparable corpus of important literature? Is Lithuanian equally giving when reconstructing the networks of meaning? Is it comparably enlightening in the suggestion of the original common language?

▲ nkrisc 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That wasn’t clear to me. Yes, they share similar roots because they have a common ancestor language. Just like any pair of extinct or extant languages descended from PIE.

▲ messe 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> which was clearly not my intention.

You did not express that clearly enough then.

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mdp2021 18 hours ago | parent [-]

My bad :)

It's just that I cannot allocate the safest amount of effort in composing. I thought it was clear enough.

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schoen 15 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It is basically confusing an uncle with a grandfather, or an aunt with a grandmother.

These languages are indeed relatives, literally part of the same family, but we usually distinguish whether they are lineal ancestors or not. If you said "Julia is your grandmother" when Julia was actually the person's aunt, that person might get very confused about your claim!

People's aunts do often have a cultural effect on them, but we can still be more specific and distinguish them from their grandmothers.

	▲	mdp2021 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		No, the succession (Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, post-Latin) was given mainly in terms of the apogee - one peak follows the other in time. When I wrote «Sanskrit entered into Greek, Greek into Latin, Latin into English» I described the phenomenon, not the fact. The literal matter (of direct inheritance) was meaningless to me in the composition, because the whole point was not and is not "what took from what": the whole point is the contribution that those languages give in the understanding of the current languages they informed.

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hn_throwaway_99 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Except the rest of your arguments fall apart if your point is just "Sanskrit and English shared a common ancestor thousands of years ago and English (and some actual ancestor languages to English) pulled in some Sanskrit loan words". As other commenters mentioned, lots of languages (and languages with long and robust literary traditions) fit this bill, so from an English speaker's perspective there is nothing special about studying Sanskrit. If anything there are a host of more direct ancestors.

	▲	mdp2021 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The perspective in your post is rationalistic and not empiricist. There was no theorematic argument intending to prove the importance of Sanskrit (and Greek, and Latin) for the understanding of English based on historical notions: it was a witnessing of the importance of Sanskrit (and Greek, and Latin) for the understanding of English based on experience.

▲ carefree-bob 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Both Vedic Sanskrit and Mycenaean Greek are the same age. Of course there may have been mutual influences as languages take cognates from each other.

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wbl 18 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There was extremely limited contact between them until thousands of years later, and no real cultural exchange until the era of exploration.

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mdp2021 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

But the point is in the strength of said relations in view of understanding the underlying roots in current languages.

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arjie 18 hours ago | parent [-]

Is that the point? Seems like Greek or Latin are more useful to an English speaker for familiarity, and Sinitic ones for foreign-ness. Sanskrit occupies a space that is less useful for a Western audience as a sibling language to English in a valley of novelty and similarity.

	▲	mdp2021 18 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Seems like Greek or Latin are more useful to an English speaker for familiarity It is that consideration of the several implementations (so, include Sanskrit - it augments the material importantly) clarifies the cones of meanings in the roots.

▲ sieve 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Everyone should learn Sanskrit if only to read the great poets and dramatists in the original. The translations are often nice, but you do lose something in the process. Thanks to the incredible efforts of Pāṇini[1], the language was mostly frozen in time and is still just as understandable today as it was 2500 years ago.

I started learning it because it is India's civilizational language and I wanted to read the itihāsas in the original.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C4%81%E1%B9%87ini

▲ mtalantikite 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I have the Assimil Sanskrit course sitting on my shelf that I’ve been meaning to spend time with. Would love to be able to read old sutras one of these days.

▲ jrkfjdifc 19 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]

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mxjxjxjd 18 hours ago | parent [-]

yeah, I wasted several years of valuable education time on a dead language instead of a foreign living one and it is NOT worth it unless you're a very specific kind of person. it is not going to help you understand English. I learned Latin. It's not helpful for anything. It's totally useless, and it's closer to English than Sanskrit. It was a total waste of time

	▲	NonHyloMorph 15 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Learning latin in school as a kid/teenager vastly improved my ability to learn english. Also helped alot with latinisms and academic lingo, which feels just natural, having internalised its semantic roots. So imho your statement it's not a universal truth. Still wouldn't learn a dead language as a grown up though.