ayearinlanguage: A Year in Language, Day 57: Sanskrit Sanskrit is to the Indian Subcontinent and it&
ayearinlanguage: A Year in Language, Day 57: Sanskrit Sanskrit is to the Indian Subcontinent and it’s cultural vassals what Latin and Greek are to Europe. In it’s oldest form, Vedic Sanskrit, the language is almost identical to Proto-Indo-Aryan, ancestral to all Indo-Aryan languages. Vedic Sanskrit was spoken in the 2nd Millenium BCE, and wouldn’t be fully supplanted as a literary language until the 6th century BCE when the linguist Panini would standardize it into what is now called Classical Sanskrit. Sanskrit was a highly inflected language, arguable more so even that its European sisters. Verbs had three voices (active, passive, and middle), three moods (indicative, imperative, and optative) and not just four tenses, but for tense paradigms, each with a handful of subcategories. Nouns were inflected for three genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter), three numbers (singular, dual, and plural) and eight cases. In addition both nouns and verbs fell under between 6-10 different declensions based on phonetics. And that’s just the two parts of speech. Sanskrit is also known for its compound words, of the kind westerners may be more familiar with in German. It’s often said that between the grammatical complexity and productive compounding that Sanskrit is able to phrase any single idea in many, many different ways, which likely has as much to do with its millennia long use as a language of poetry than any strictly unique grammatical function. -- source link