THE SANSKRIT NON-CONTROVERSY: WHY IT IS INDEED A SUPERIOR LANGUAGE
There is an unfortunate hoo-haa about German and Sanskrit in Kendriya Vidyalayas (KV), which is putting a negative spin on generally-positive Indo-German relations. It has even prompted German Chancellor Angela Merkel to question whether their language is being disrespected in India. Which of course is far from the truth, and is a storm in a teacup raised by the usual malign suspects in the media. Best to consider the forest (the desirability of Indo-German ties) over the trees (an ill-advised, illegal move by the UPA in 2011 to mess with the three-language formula, and its inevitable reversal now).
For several reasons, I find the fuss baffling. First, this is merely the reversal of an ill-considered and harmful – therefore typical UPA – step, dissing Indian tradition and replacing it with something European. Second, there is considerable value to Sanskrit that most of us are unaware of, especially if you look at the technical aspects of formal language theory.
People have thundered that the Sanskrit decision is preventing Indian students from aspiring to go to German universities, which is not true – most university education in Germany is conducted in the medium of English. Besides, if you want to learn German, you can still opt for it: it is not banished from the KVs.
Others have suggested that German is a global language, and therefore – they implied – Sanskrit is inferior to German. Which is not quite true: only a fraction of the people even in Europe speak German, and almost all large German companies conduct business in English. I used to work for Siemens in California, and not knowing German was not a big handicap in communicating with my colleagues, even when I traveled to Germany.
Others complained that this is a burden on students who have already opted for German, which is true. But then it is only since 2011 that German has been made available in all Kendriya Vidyalayas, replacing Sanskrit.
That is the crux of the matter: German replaced Sanskrit in the entire KV system recently. And why was that? Where was the uproar when, apparently on a whim, the previous UPA government decided to replace Sanskrit in mid-stream with German? And why German? Why not Japanese, or Chinese, or Arabic or Spanish, all of which have more commercial and job opportunities for young people? What was the rationale in choosing German?
The KV system, let us remember, has to be uniform all over the country: you cannot have a different curriculum in different states. Thus, if you switch languages, it apparently has to be a toggle effect, and teachers who teach X have to switch to teaching Y.
This is precisely what happened under UPA to Sanskrit. Why is nobody asking why the Kabil Sibal-led UPA ministry surreptitiously swapped Sanskrit out and swapped German in to the curriculum in 2011? Did that not do much damage to the students desirous of studying Sanskrit? Did it not force Sanskrit teachers to suddenly become German teachers?
Furthermore, did the Sibal coup, of the KVs signing an MoU with the Goethe Institute of the Max Mueller Bhavan in 2011, violate the hitherto sacrosanct Three Language Formula, which many of us have been forced into? Growing up in Kerala, according to this formula, my first language (yes, first!) language was mandated to be Hindi, my second language was English, and my third was Malayalam.
In fact, I could have avoided learning Malayalam altogether, because we had a choice of French, Tamil, Sanskrit and so on as optional third languages. So why is it not acceptable if the KVs now offer German as an optional, not a compulsory language? If there is enough demand, the schools will find enough German teachers: that is called the free market, supply /demand, Economics 101.
The Three Language Formula suggested Hindi, English and (preferably) a South Indian language for Hindi speaking students, and Hindi, English, and the regional language for non-Hindi speaking students. The whole idea was to force ‘national integration’, Congress-style. Whether that did so is questionable, but certainly introducing German (or French or Chinese or Japanese) would be unlikely to do any ‘national integration’. So ipso facto the idea of bringing in German is against the law, because German is not a regional language in India.
Now, I am quite a fan of the Germans, because of their diligence and methodical nature, but that doesn’t necessarily translate into a fondness for German, which is a bit difficult. I had to study technical German at IIT Madras, and all I remember now is ‘The chemische industrie produziert synthetische stoffe’. German and Sanskrit for Indians are like apples and oranges.
• A transactional language
• A literary language
• A liturgical language
• A cultural language
• A conquering language
German would be a transactional language or lingua franca with only a limited set of people: Germans, some Swiss, some Dutch, I believe. It is a good literary language, but it does not jell greatly with the Indian ethos. It is clearly not a liturgical language.
A cultural language is one that resonates with the culture of the people: for instance, if you read Guenter Grass’s magnificent works such as The Tin Drum and The Flounder, you can see it is replete with details of the history, the cuisine, and even the crops and fish of Kashubia (a land I have never read about elsewhere) and specifically of Danzig, now Gdansk.
English is the typical conquering language, which is imposed on (and eventually, as is evident, internalized by) the conquered – as in India, Ireland, Scotland, and elsewhere. Germans didn’t conquer India, so it is not a conquering language either.
If you look at Sanskrit carefully, you can see that it is many of the above: a lingua franca for most of India’s history, undoubtedly the greatest literary language of India and almost certainly of the entire classical world, the liturgical language of Hindus, and the cultural language that links the conceptual entity of Bharat.
Was Sanskrit also a conquering language? Some, still harboring notions about the Aryan Invasion Fantasy, would say so, but it is increasingly evident that it was the language of the natives, not imported by some "Aryans thundering down the Khyber Pass in their horse-drawn chariots" in the bizarre imaginations of certain "eminent historians" who are past their shelf-lives. One of the (intentional) mistakes people make is in imagining that Sanskrit was only a Hindu liturgical language. Far from it. As this tweet suggests, the body of non-religious literature in Sanskrit, including everything from texts for metallurgy to off-color jokes about bodily functions, is immense. For instance there was the beautiful erotic poetry written by one Dharmakirti; it turned out the same Dharmakirti was a severe Buddhist logician!
1. संस्कृतसंवर्धनम् retweeted
Hashmi Shams Tabreed @hstabreed
Critics of Sanskrit hate it for its religious association not realizing its richness. Music, Science, Arts Sanskrit Literature has it all
Sanskrit’s other claim to fame is that it is the most scientific human language of all time. I will have to delve into my computer science background and formal language theory to explain this. I have heard people say, "XYZ says Sanskrit is the best language to do Artificial Intelligence with" or words to that effect. This is not strictly speaking true: for AI, you need logic-based languages such as LISP or Prolog.
Paninian or Classical Sanskrit (as contrasted with Vedic Sanskrit) is the most refined and precise human language ever invented. It has an astonishing property known as a "context-free grammar", and so far as I know, it is the only human language that has ever had this. Context-free means that the language is utterly unambiguous, and every sentence in it can be derived precisely from a set of rules. In Paninian Sanskrit, as embodied in the Ashtadhyayi, there are 3959 rules.
Its context-free nature comes from an audacious attempt by Panini to encapsulate the infinite variety of expression in language in a finite number of rules. Even now, it is difficult to imagine that somebody, 2,500 years ago, had the chutzpah to attempt to condense infinity into a finite set of rules. This idea could have only arisen in ancient India, with its familiarity with the mathematical notion of infinity.
This idea, that Panini codified, was independently re-discovered in the 1950s by IBM engineers, as they tried to figure out a way to communicate with computers. What they needed was to find a way to instruct computers in totally unambiguous fashion. So Backus and Naur came up with context-free grammars (there was some work by Noam Chomsky at MIT in this area), and lo and behold, they were astonished to find out Panini had anticipated them by two and a half millennia!
The human-programmable computer languages that exist today, say C++ or Java or Ruby, can be described precisely in a few hundred rules. This precision allows these languages (and Paninian Sanskrit) to be lexically analyzed by a parser, which can then create a semantic tree structure that encodes the underlying 'meaning' of the statement (or program). That semantic tree than then be translated precisely into machine code (binary, ie 0 and 1, or hexadecimal, ie 16 characters, 0123456789ABCDEF) which will then run on the machine.The above is what compilers do – the programs that translate human-readable languages into the incomprehensible machine code (or slightly less obscure Assembly Language) that machines can understand. I worked on compiler construction for several years, and they are among the most sophisticated software in regular use.
So what exactly does "context-free" mean? It means that the meaning doesn’t depend on contextual knowledge or common sense. Obviously human languages are context-sensitive: you just have to know certain things as a user of the language or else you will be confused. Here is an example of two sentences in English:
1. Fruit flies like an apple
2. Time flies like an arrow
The two sentences are lexically identical, but to the human reader, based on contextual knowledge, they are vastly different. But to a computer, which has no context, they are identical. If the computer is fed the first and told that fruit flies are a kind of fly and that apples are fruits, it will create certain semantic model. Then, when given the second sentence, it will conclude that 'time flies' are a kind of fly and that arrows are fruits!
It is essentially impossible to write such ambiguous sentences in Paninian Sanskrit. That is one of the reasons why word order doesn't matter in Paninian Sanskrit, as it does in English (imagine "Rama killed Ravana" and "Ravana killed Rama" as examples).
That someone millennia ago was able to conceptualize, and even more astonishingly, create a Grand Unified Theory of Language is simply stunning. Let us note that even a widely acknowledged genius like Albert Einsten failed to come up with a Grand Unified Theory of Physics, even though he tried hard. Arguably, Panini’s successful effort then was the greatest accomplishment of a single mind in all of recorded history: creating something so advanced that it took 2500 years to figure out how to use it!
There is another reason for the perfection of Sanskrit, and that is the logical nature of Devanagari. There is no other alphabet that so scientifically orders different sound families horizontally, and the associated types (dental, retroflex etc.) horizontally. Just consider the Roman script – it has a randomly assembled set of sounds, in no particular order, in stark contrast to the rigorous order of Devanagari.
Many of us have studied another rigorously ordered scientific table that has horizontal families and vertical variants or types: that is the Periodic Table of Elements of Mendeleev, which was also so advanced that he was able to group the elements and suggest that there were gaps where new elements, yet to be discovered, belonged. The resemblance is no coincidence: Mendeelev was strongly influenced by Devanagari, and he acknowledged as much in his terminology.
Where there were gaps, he would call the missing, to-be-discovered elements eka-boron, or dvi-silicon or tria-carbon, consciously using the Sanskrit words for one, two, three etc. Later, these anticipated elements were indeed discovered and given new names. So here’s an example of what Rajiv Malhotra might call "digestion" of Indic ideas into western memes, although, to be fair, there is indirect credit.
From several points of view, thus, Sanskrit is not only the one candidate that deserves to be the national language – much as Israelis resurrected the once-moribund Hebrew – but it is by many measures the most perfect language ever invented: truly samskrt or civilized. There should be no reason to fuss even if it is imposed; much less when it is merely being put back into the syllabus where it used to be.
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Sanskrit maybe a great language but it is dead language
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This entire allegation of saffronisation is baseless. If this is called saffronisation then it was so until 2011 as well until German was introduced. Its crazy why people would prefer to learn German over their mother tongue. And the media is picturing as if sanskrit is being made mandatory where as in reality its a choice of learning any Indian language, sanskrit being one of them. If ppl are so much interested in learning German, it is still available along with other foreign languages.
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"There should be no reason to fuss even if it is imposed; much less when
it is merely being put back into the syllabus where it used to be" Exactly just reverting back the 2011 decision. Don't know what the fuss is all about. And why should German be the 3rd language instead of Indian languages(Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu, etc)?
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The article is a mix of hyperboles and false claims. Let me try to enumerate few:
"most university education in Germany is conducted in the medium of English." - false, all undergrad study is in german.
"This is precisely what happened under UPA to Sanskrit. Why is nobody asking why the Kabil Sibal-led UPA ministry surreptitiously swapped Sanskrit out and swapped German in to the curriculum in 2011?" - it didn't. Sanskrit continued, German was another option added.
" Did that not do much damage to the students desirous of studying Sanskrit? " - nopes, they continued learning Sanskrit. This move is different because it forces students to swap while earlier move made available other choices.
"So why is it not acceptable if the KVs now offer German as an optional, not a compulsory language" - it was always optional, now it is 'hobby' subject
"a lingua franca for most of India’s history" - Most accepted versions of history believe Sanskrit was never a lingua franca of India, only a language of learned.
"undoubtedly the greatest literary language of India and almost certainly of the entire classical world," - this is doubtful claim, many Tamilian believe otherwise
""Aryans thundering down the Khyber Pass in their horse-drawn chariots" in the bizarre imaginations of certain "eminent historians" who are past their shelf-lives." - Not certain, almost all eminent historians believe so. Yes, there are many non-eminent historians who claim Aryans out of India theory.
"This idea could have only arisen in ancient India, with its familiarity with the mathematical notion of infinity......Arguably, Panini’s successful effort then was the greatest accomplishment of a single mind in all of recorded history: creating something so advanced that it took 2500 years to figure out how to use it!" - Greeks were only too familiar with infinity at this time and already formulating axioms relating to it. Yes, Panini's work in language grammar can be termed at most advanced at that time, but in other fields (structural engineering, mathematics, astronomy) a lot other advanced stuff was happening in Greece. Further calling it Grand Unified Theory of language and comparing it to grand unified theory of physics are both rather huge leaps.
In fact it is contented that Sanskrit has never become lingua franca, for the very reason it was codified strictly. Human brains, it seems, need ambiguity in language that is why all natural languages have it. In any case, I agree Panini was a brilliant scholar of Grammar, but to compare his work with that of Einstein is meaningless. Also, you need strictly codified languages for computers hence people created such languages when they needed to talk to computers. You do not need such languages to talk to humans, hence nobody took the pains of codifying natural languages.
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Putting something in quotes and writing an opposite statement underneath it doesn't mean you are right. Let me tell you why you are wrong.
"- false, all undergrad study is in german."
No. Do some research. It is not required to do your degree in German at all.
" Most accepted versions of history believe Sanskrit was never a lingua franca of India, only a language of learned"
Highly illogical. Why should it be so? You are projecting your illiteracy in Sanskrit to other people. And you are assuming most people were not learned, which is fallacious and shameful.
""Aryans thundering down the Khyber Pass in their horse-drawn chariots" in the bizarre imaginations of certain "eminent historians" who are past their shelf-lives." - Not certain, almost all eminent historians believe so. Yes, there are many non-eminent historians who claim Aryans out of India theory."
If you are not certain, stop blabbering about it.
"Greeks were only too familiar with infinity at this time and already formulating axioms relating t..blah, blah"
He said a SINGLE MIND.
"You do not need such languages to talk to humans, hence nobody took the pains of codifying natural languages."
Every language comes with rules. Its another thing they cant make sense out of half of them. Don't celebrate their mediocrity.
Other points you raised were pretty childish so I didnt quote them.
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Eminient historians believe but genetics disagrees, read about center for cellular and molecular biology's report. Historians work with older historical work and most of the history of India was changed by the Europeans to show their supremacy.
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lingua franca means a bridge language between people not sharing the same native language. Sanskrit definitely served as that historically between people of various regions in india.
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anyway why particularly german? how many indian graduates find jobs in Germany every year? or use german for their jobs? I can understand if multiple languages like French, Japanese, mandarin - were promoted as optional languages so that students learning these could find jobs in those respective countries.
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promotion of foreign languages like English or german has a fundamental objective - brain drain. during colonial times india only produced raw material. after independence we are producing intellectual raw material as well - for the benefit of other countries. think of this : if IIT students did not emigrate abroad they would have been forced to live in india and then confronting its problems - corruption etc - they would have been forced to find solutions for such and made india a better place. so education in English or german promotes the interests of two parties - local corrupt politicians who don't want any opposition from the educated and foreign countries which want to benefit by indian brainpower. the IITs apparently were set up with the help of usa, Germany, England etc. given india's intellectual history, I think these foreign countries did it with the fundamental motive of brain drain.
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India always produced Intellectuals during it's thousands years of History, India gave the world high thinkers.
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Not agree, the point you made with #Sanskrit are not entirely true, not every one from KV is going to become and Engineer, and by all means, learning #German would still give them a best mean to earn a decent living vis-à-vis to Sanskrit.
And let's end the debate, why you are forcing #Sanskrit or removing #German, Give students a choice and let's see how many would opt for it.
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The devanagari and other scripts were written under one single line, which if read today would be difficult to separate given our experience with such a style. Talking of unambiguity of Sanskrit here are examples taking in consideration the ancient system of writing Sanskrit> devenasthitam (devena sthitam) = stable (made) by god.
devenasthitam (deve na sthitam) = not present in the god.
So let's end the debate about Sanskrit being ambiguous or unambiguous. All natural languages have a bit of ambiguity. And what do you mean by Paninian Sanskrit? Sanskrit doesn't belong to Panini. Panini's merit is just that he complied the patterns of Sanskrit in compact sutras. (Many grammarians like Shakatayana did it their way, much before Panini.) He also recorded exceptions. To promote Sanskrit you don't need to spread such chauvinism, you can simply do that by telling people what Sanskrit really is, a beautiful natural language.
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Nice article. I too learned German for 1 full year and the very next year could not understand when I heard the language.. by now I hardly remember a sentence.
On the contrary, I had not formally learned Sanskrit, but the first time I heard a speech in near-full Samskritam by Samskrita Bharati, I understood most of it
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RSS machinary in full swing. No one can stop them now.
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till now,most of last 67years, continuing legacy of 400years of white queens, Westren minded Taliban was in full swing, be it London nehru,or italy madam.
we indians atleast now feel hapy that some indian organization is in swing, for good or bad.
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We are here because of them, if those RSS loonies had gotten power in 1947, things would have been different
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Okay, I'll take a crack at the linguistic aspect of this.
Paninian or Classical Sanskrit (as contrasted with Vedic Sanskrit) is the most refined and precise human language ever invented. It has an astonishing property known as a "context-free grammar", and so far as I know, it is the only human language that has ever had this. Context-free means that the language is utterly unambiguous, and every sentence in it can be derived precisely from a set of rules. In Paninian Sanskrit, as embodied in the Ashtadhyayi, there are 3959 rules.
Okay, this is incorrect. Sanskrit is not the only "unambiguous, context-free" language in the world, it is the only language where the rules were actually encoded (for which, incidentally, Noam Chomsky has always credited Panini). This is less of a credit to Sanskrit, and more of a credit to Panini, and it does him a disservice to say "oh beautiful language", as if it were something obvious and intuitive, and that anybody could have come up with the generative theory. In all likelihood, if the language around Panini were Finnish, he'd have encoded the rules for Finnish. This really irks me - it's akin to worshipping Red Special because you're a fan of Brian May, and completely ignoring him.
This is what happens when the only language people study formally is English - there are plenty of more conservative languages that have even less ambiguity than Sanskrit. For example, Icelandic requires even proper nouns to be declined. I believe Lithuanian is considered the most conservative Indo-European language. Though Sanskrit is very conservative, admittedly.
That is one of the reasons why word order doesn't matter in Paninian Sanskrit, as it does in English
And doesn't, in millions of other languages. Stop comparing with English all the time.
That someone millennia ago was able to conceptualize, and even more astonishingly, create a Grand Unified Theory of Language is simply stunning. Let us note that even a widely acknowledged genius like Albert Einsten failed to come up with a Grand Unified Theory of Physics, even though he tried hard
Wat. If this was a grand unified theory of language, natural language processing wouldn't be a thing. Secondly, comparing to Einstein's unified field theory betrays a massive lack of understanding of both linguistics and physics.
There is another reason for the perfection of Sanskrit, and that is the logical nature of Devanagari. There is no other alphabet that so scientifically orders different sound families horizontally, and the associated types (dental, retroflex etc.) horizontally. Just consider the Roman script – it has a randomly assembled set of sounds, in no particular order, in stark contrast to the rigorous order of Devanagari.
a. There is no "Sanskrit script". Sanskrit was written with countless different scripts at different points of time.
b. Also, wat. He would have had an actual point if he pointed out that Devanagari was an abugida, where vowels are markers placed on consonants - a feature unique to the languages of South/Southeast Asia, Nigeria (I think) and Canada (natives), because that is legitimately an advantage over an alphabet. Not "oh the letters have a nice order".
c. Sanskrit scripts don't cover a massive number of sounds. Very few fricatives. No rounded front vowels, IIRC. An atonal language.
but it is by many measures the most perfect language ever invented: truly samskrt or civilized
Wat. You know what, I'm all on board with people praising Sanskrit for the massive corpus, the works of art, poetry, literature, music, what not. But don't pick out some completely arbitrary points and say "OMG SANSKRIT NO. 1!!!!", because for every one of these points that are picked to show the "perfectness" of Sanskrit, there are fifty others that show its imperfectness, and the perfectness of some other language.
That said, this author seemed a damn sight saner than most of the Sanskrit-thumping morons who claim that "98% of all languages are descended from Sanskrit" and shit like that.
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oh, typical JNU boy speaketh in typical JNU style. so according to you everything in sanskrit is in finnish, or uralo-hungaric, or sioux or cheyenne or the unwritten language of the aborigines of east papua new guinea, right? of course, none of us would be inclined to look up any of those, even if they exist, so you get away with utter drivel. even if you were right about some language having some property that sanskrit does, your logic is wrong, and it's a fallacy: the point is that all of these ideas are in one place in sanskrit.
i am surprised you didn't say how urdu has the better grammar or arabic the better script, as you guys normally do with anything to do with indian culture -- it is better in the middle east.
then, blabbering about whether to give credit to panini or sanskrit: it's like arguing whether raja ravi varma was a great artist or whether one of his paintings was a great portrait. apples, oranges.
clearly you have absolutely no idea about einstein or modern physics. he labored hard to find a single theory to cover weak interactions, strong interactions, gravity and electromagnetic radiation, and failed: there's something more fundamental that he didn't figure out. whereas panini figured out that language can be formalized. also, obviously you have no idea about formal languages other than something you picked up on the internet: no idea, eh, boy, about lex, and yacc, and optimizing code generators, and aho and ullman's green dragon book? and you must be totally ignorant about the struggle to give panini due recognition for prior invention by calling the notation panini-backus form, whereas whites persist in calling it backus-naur form?
the fact that the scripts for sanskrit (and all indian languages, even tamil which is distinct from the rest) are syllabic, that is, each letter is a syllable and not a part of a syllable, is not particularly revelatory or revolutionary. this is a routine matter for all indians who read any indian language. next, you'll be informing us all that each chinese ideogram is a whole concept. ohmygod, how insightful!
oh, you have no idea about the periodic table, do you? how the grid forms a precise, predictive pattern, just as does the devanagari grid, or the grids of every indian language that have 1 to 1 correspondence with devanagari? which is incomparably more scientific than latin script or arabic? hah, read up on some science for a change. that predictiveness of the grid is the point, which you have absolutely missed out on
now how about some hosannas to latin or greek and how they were superior to sanskrit? or about proto indo european or iravatham mahadevan's alleged deciphering of the indus script? that's all that remains to be done to make your response a true JNU screed. romila thapar (who knows no sanskrit of course) would be proud of you.
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>> There is no "Sanskrit script". Sanskrit was written with countless different scripts at different points of time.
The scripts traditionally used to write Sanskrit have the same logical structure. It is this organization that's important
>> Not "oh the letters have a nice order".
Errm ... the organization of the consonants is in fact very scientific and systematic. No other script comes close.
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Also, many of "conservative" languages cited are descendants of Proto-Vedic, in the first place.
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1. Wrong - Compare your Devanagri to Pallava script, and you will see.
2. Okay, tell me what is so scientific about word order? You can have any standard you like.
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1. Could be outliers, but consider Gujarati, Kannada, Bengali etc. Same structure as Devanagari. Tamil omits some consonants if I'm not mistaken.
2. Read again, I am talking about consonant order of Devanagari
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1. Rather, Tamil never had most of the consonants for Sanskrit. Hence, the Pallava script was developed from Tamil script to write Sanskrit.
2. Exactly: tell me what is so scientific about consonant order?
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telugu being second most spoken in india,worlds 11th most spoken language, not been taught in hindi speaking states..
this lets dravidian peole to think, if hindi speakers is not learning our language( either telugu, tamil, malayali, kannada...) why should we learn hindi..?
national integration, right?
why dont every indian learn sanksriit as national language and english language as interrational language, and their regional language (hindi, telugu, bengali, tamil, kannada, malayali,punjabi, marathi)???????
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Improve your G.K. first. Telugu is not the second most spoken language of India, it is Bengali.
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in world stage,bengali is most spoken, but in india it is telugu.
most of bengali count come from bangladesh, and in west bengal there are six official languages which states how many other than bengali living in west bengal.
having classical language status telugu is only official language of andhra, telengana, 9% of tamilnadu, many in karnataka especially bellry, mysrore,bangalore.
do some research before giving others some advice friend.
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Bengali speakers- 83,369,769
Telugu speakers- 74,002,856
2001 census.
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1.2001 census counted majority west bengalis as bengalis, later govt realized that six other languages were important languages of west bengal.
2. unfortunatly because of strong tamil sentiment and political power tamilnadu telugu are not being counted in census, similarly karnataka telugu are not being counted in census.
historically from British raj, telugu region wasn't a integrated single unit,(where as we knw the history of great bengalis) thats why the count looks less on census.
got it?
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@Pallavi: Do you know a state called Tripura? Well, check the official language of Tripura. Brush up your knowledge.
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indian Finance Miister on occation of budjet tabulated indian gdp as 2triliion rupees by giving details, at that time a intelectual MP sajit standup and say..
'minster sir, u forgot to mention Gdp of hen in my old house, it produces 50 eggs and 2kg of chicken, which mean 505Rs, please add to 2 trillion and say 2 trillion 505 rs
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George Carlin rightly said "Never argue with an idiot. They will only bring you down to their level and beat you with experience."
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@Pallavi: What a logic....he he
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Be practical. What is the use of an indian learning Sanskrit ? Is it spoken by many Indians ?
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@Krish Devendra Are there more german speaking people in India than Sanskrit speaking Indians? So why learn German?
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yes, im talking practically.
for current purpose of international survival, learning english.(remember 200yrs ago, english learning has no uses,but we learnt)
for desi purposes regional language.
for unity of india & to learn,research highest intelectual literature,science which existed, for which any new age science looks inferior, learing sanskrit.
i still wonder, how today sunset,sun rise timings were predicted million years ago.
those westren taliban minded may not understand legend of indian
intelligance.
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do you think , by learning a new language which is not spoken, will lead Unity? Language will not unite.
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language will not unite?
really, u think so...?
by the way, assuming u r hindi speaking person, dont u feel easy and connected to other hindi neighbors?
or do u feel connected to some french or chinese speaking person?
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communication is different from unity. If language unites, how come Khalistan movement (all Punjabis speak good hindi) in past? Learning Hindi or Sanskrit will not make people to unite. a common purpose for survival & growth will unite. Again utility of language differs person to person. In CBSE schools, Apart from Mother tongue & English, other languages should be kept as options. In any case, an adult can learn any modern language in short span of time say 3-6 months. Children should not be burdened with more language studies. Rather than jingoism, govt should take steps to develop spoken courses, research etc on Sanskrit.
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brother, a simple wikipedia reading will tell you why kalisthan movement was existed.
it had lot many reasons.
what u questioning is like a kid questioning 'why christian america and chirstian russia fighting'
if a kid ask me that question i woluld answer that, their christianity is the commonolity that atleast keeping them to a level of hatred.
if both are of differnt religion, say russia is Iraq, we could have
heard that "once upon there 'was' russia whch decimated by christian europe and america."
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Lajawaab simply Lajawaab Rajeev ji..!! Excellent informative article.. Though I imagine folks with limited knowledge of computer science may find some information hard to decipher.. Never the less you have captured the hypocrisy of Fiberals crisply and made your point about logic of learning Sanskrit emphatically..
No propaganda here dhimmis, just pure logic, common sense and science....
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I have worked for 6yrs in Germany and 3yrs in UK, 2 yrs in France; 5yrs in UAE and never felt dire need to learn or missed any of not learning German, French, Arabic. English is good enuf.
I dont buy this freaky arg that to work in Germany you direly need to learn German. Btw, you can learn these on job if required.
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Sir, can you please mention your exact job? You seem like a smart engineer. Have you ever met any Indian students during your stay in France & Germany? preferably some business students? Also, please dont say that you can learn German on the job if you yourself have not done it. Its not as easy as you make it sound. You must be an IITian.
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Further, In my school in TN Hindi was not taught but my parents got me Hindi exams Madhyamik, Rashtra privately.
So approach maxmuller bhavans if you are a die hard of this foreign language but dont sham our own language in the garb of modernity.
Every Asian country proud of their language, culture except India.
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Did you not learn Tamil, then?
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man you are confusing yourself.
we learn enough indian languages and take great pride in it.
dont forget we learn hindi, regional language
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You may be confused, not me.
I said Hindi not taught in our school and I learnt elsewhere.
As an Indian I love Sanskrit, Hindi; as Tamilian I love Tamil;
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Folks are outraged because Sanskrit is introduced mid-term, but was there any outrage when German was introduced mid-term?
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proof or you are lying...
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This happens when you don't read the piece and come straight to the comment section to do propaganda.
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