Indian historical linguistics
Setting the record straight
May 13th 2013, 7:41 by S.A.P. | LOS ANGELES
IT IS rare that Johnson is compelled to respond to comments. But my last post, about the fun parallels in the hybrid development of English and Dravidian languages, seems to have stirred the passions of our readers. Many of them commented, dismissing the post as (at best) misguided and (at worst) a piece of neocolonial rubbish. That is a shame. Studying the history of India’s languages can be immensely fascinating. With so much linguistic diversity in the subcontinent, Indian languages can provide a primer on nearly every major aspect of historical linguistics: the ways in which sound systems and grammars change over time, the impact of socioeconomic, ethnic and religious divides, the influence of foreign languages, and the development of writing systems, to name a few. India is home to 22 constitutionally recognised languages and hundreds more unrecognised ones. India is also home to sizable communities natively speaking major world languages like Farsi, Arabic, Chinese, Tibetan, English, Portuguese and French. India should be fascinating, to Johnson readers especially, because it is a microcosm of the world’s language diversity.
The central focus of language studies in India is, of course, Sanskrit. As a liturgical language of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, Sanskrit has played an outsized role in India’s linguistic development. Over its lifetime, Sanskrit traveled as far as Indonesia, Japan and Afghanistan on the backs of Hindu and Buddhist religious emissaries. The language’s name for itself, saṃskṛta vāk, means “perfected speech”—and its users genuinely believed that Sanskrit was indeed perfect. Sanskrit grammarians and authors looked down on commoners’ prākṛta, “natural”, languages as seriously deficient compared to Sanskrit. Rulers and other elites felt the same way. (These prākṛta languages, descendants of Sanskrit, eventually became most of the languages spoken in northern India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Bangladesh, including Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi, Sinhalese and Marathi.) Because the native religious traditions of India highly value the precise oral recitation of scriptures, the liturgical language itself holds sacred importance. For thousands of years, Sanskrit persisted as a language of religion and elite education even as local vernaculars increasingly diverged from it. This relationship parallels the continued formal use of Latin in continental Europe through the Middle Ages despite the Romance languages developing apart from it, or the freezing of written and formal Arabic in its Koranic form as the spoken dialects became, in effect, new languages over the past 14 centuries.
Sanskrit’s position of prestige also allowed it to infiltrate the vocabularies of unrelated languages. This included the major languages of southern India, including Kannada, Telugu and Malayalam, as I wrote last week. Sanskrit also influenced (and was influenced by) Tamil, another major southern Indian language. More recently, Tamil-speakers have worked to shed the language of its Sanskrit borrowings, in part because of complex class and ethnic politics associated with the creation of modern India. Farther off, Sanskrit words penetrated deep into languages like Thai, Burmese, Khmer, Javanese, Balinese, Malay and Indonesian. For prominent examples, see Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport, from Sanskrit suvarṇabhūmi, “golden land”, or Singapore, from siṃhāpura, “lion city”.
Sanskrit’s star billing in these many languages doesn’t mean that they are related to, or descended from, Sanskrit. A language’s genealogy is much more fundamental. Figuring out whether two languages are related, however distantly, involves a thorough study of the structural features of a language. Linguists look at many things to determine structural relationships. How is a language’s grammar constructed? Are there vowel and consonant sound changes that have occurred in many words? Are there written records of intermediate forms of a language? Did ancient historians observe language change? Are there well-known social, class, ethnic and religious divisions that could have affected the way a language is shaped? Historical linguists spend decades piecing together the different ways languages could have changed over time. Persistent and systematic patterns usually provide the best clues.
It’s no secret that, say, Nepali is descended from Sanskrit, though. The job of figuring out more distant cross-continental relationships is altogether more difficult. Sanskrit, as it happens, played a central role in the development of historical linguistics. The existence of a language family stretching from Ireland in the west to Bangladesh in the east, now known as the Indo-European language family, was first proposed when an Anglo-English civil servant, William Jones, discovered persistent similarities between Sanskrit, Latin and Ancient Greek. Two centuries of thorough research has created a body of ironclad scholarship in Indo-European linguistics. The Indo-European relationship does not mean that Sanskrit came from European languages, or that European languages came from Sanskrit. It means that languages as different as Irish, Italian, Russian, Armenian, Farsi and Bengali all share a very distant ancestor, a language known as Proto-Indo-European (PIE). Over thousands of years, PIE and its successors spread across Eurasia. PIE’s linguistic descendants underwent natural sound change, absorbed other languages’ vocabulary and assumed unique characteristics. Over time, they became the hundreds of modern Indo-European languages.
In the Indian subcontinent, PIE’s descendant Sanskrit came into contact with Proto-Dravidian languages, the ancestors of today’s modern southern Indian languages. (Some Dravidian languages, like Brahui, are found in Pakistan, suggesting that the family was once more widespread across the subcontinent.) That long and fruitful exchange gave Sanskrit, among other features, a new set of common sounds—retroflex consonants—that aren’t found in many other Indo-European languages. In turn, Dravidian languages absorbed, and continue to absorb, Sanskrit sounds and vocabulary. But Dravidian languages are structurally unrelated to Indo-European languages. This fact gets obscured by the confusing relationship of Dravidian languages to Sanskrit. Lots of vocabulary has been adopted into Dravidian languages because of Sanskrit’s status as a prestige language, and the sound catalogue of some Dravidian languages has changed as a result of this contact. These exchanges don't change the genealogy of a language group. Dravidian languages are distinct from Indo-European languages, just as Japanese is distinct from Chinese despite borrowing some of its features, and just as Farsi is distinct from Arabic despite borrowing some of its features. Similarly, Burmese, Thai, Khmer, Malay, Indonesian, Javanese and Balinese have all absorbed a great deal of Sanskrit vocabulary. Just as in Dravidian languages, Sanskrit-derived terms are used in formal or ritual contexts in those languages. Linguists have studied these languages and deduced that (like Dravidian languages) the grammatical structure of each is fundamentally different from Sanskrit and other Indo-European languages.
When language communities interact, the product is hardly easy to categorise and parse. When these interactions happened ages before anyone bothered to record them, the task is much harder. Languages can absorb a great deal of another language without ever changing its structure. Distant linguistic relatives might even meet up again, unrecognised, as when Hindi absorbed a great deal of Farsi vocabulary during Mughal rule in India. Languages might meet up more than once, as in English's on-and-off relationship with Latin-derived vocabulary. And distinct language communities can have different layers of exchange. Far away and long ago, the medieval Indianisation of Southeast Asia was largely led by people who spoke Tamil, a major Dravidian language. They spread both Tamil and Sanskrit, along with religion, to places like Cambodia and the Indonesian archipelago. Nearly a thousand years later, Tamil-speaking people again reappeared in Southeast Asia, brought to places like Singapore and Malaysia as indentured servants for European colonists in the 1700s and 1800s. The Tamil-Southeast Asia cultural contact was reborn, adding a rich new layer of complexity to an already hybridised culture.
The serious study of Indo-European languages, just like the study of any language group, is not normally part of any political or social agenda. What we know about the Indo-European language family is the product of centuries of thorough research—not just in the Indian subcontinent, but in places like Iran and Europe, too. This has included the painstaking reconstruction of (an idealised form of) Proto-Indo-European, a language which was never written down, but which researchers know must have existed to account for the systematic similarities between Bengali, Russian, Portuguese and the rest.
In India, though, some people have been busily rewriting parts of Indian history to conform to jingoistic ideas about Indian exceptionalism and cultural superiority. They have attempted to cut out huge swaths of history involving the exchanges Indians have had with Greeks, Persians, East Asians, Arabs, Central Asians, Southeast Asians, and Western Europeans. They intend to write a story of Sanskrit and Hindu culture that is “pure” and devoid of foreign influence. Linguists know, based on reams of research, that a form of PIE, the language, did arrive in India from elsewhere, becoming Sanskrit over time. That fact doesn't have to diminish the "Indianness" of the language. Sanskrit's deep and longstanding cultural importance in the subcontinent is a strong enough connection. Its shared ancestry with farflung languages is just one of the many connections that have been made and remade over and over again in India's history.
This approach, of course, is nuanced and complex. Matters get complicated when religion and cultural identity is at stake, and Sanskrit isn’t alone in being used as an ideological tool. Hebrew, for another, has been touted as a “perfect” language and the source of all the world’s languages. Trained linguists describe the world’s languages as they are, not in the service of political, social or religious ends. It’s a shame that the conversation about India’s linguistic history gets twisted in ways that are at odds with what linguists and historians have deduced. Viewing India as a microcosm of the world’s diversity is far more fascinating. Seeing Indian languages as the product of many rich and varied cultural exchanges is far more exciting. These perspectives also have the virtue of being true to the facts.
joski65May 14th, 06:29
I just don't understand this need to defend purity and source of languages that this comments trail contains. A language is a tool of expression and in every language there is beauty. A language that borrows does not become less it only becomes more beautiful.
I remember once meeting the great actor Naseeruddin Shah who had spoken a few lines in Hindi. At the request of some people I asked him to say the same in Urdu. His response was liberating as it was enlightening. He smiled and asked me, "Tell me how are they different? which of the words I used should I change?"
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Shreevatsa RMay 14th, 06:02
While factually mostly correct (that is to say, consistent with the modern linguistic understanding of things), this article in places betrays several implicit opinions. I'm not sure if these are merely a reaction to the uininformed comments on the previous article, or the author's deep-held views.
The general thrust of these remarks is that there is something _wrong_ with Sanskrit "borrowings" that have been a part of other languages for centuries. In the case of Kannada, a large part of its (non-basic) vocabulary comes from Sanskrit, and these words have not only been used by all poets beloved of Kannadigas, from "Adikavi" Pampa to "Rashtrakavi" Kuvempu and everyone in between, but are also commonly used everyday words. The ridiculous political idea of purging the language of these "foreign" words, and replacing them with new unfamiliar words coined from "native" Dravidian roots, which has been floated by some (and even successful to some extent in neighbouring Tamil), is tantamout to throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and leads to such absurdities as "Anglish", the similar idea for English. (See http://anglish.wikia.com/ with its articles like "Alzheimer's addle is the most meanly kind of mindloss. There is no heal for the addle [...] It was first builded by German mindleech and brainlotaddler Alois Alzheimer" and "Scorelore (also called reckonlore) (English: Mathematics) is the lore of scorings, or deals mindful on draughts such as howmuchness, forbuilding, room, and shift, and also the lorewise thewfastness that learn about them.")
The comments from this article:
* "Sanskrit has played an outsized role in India’s linguistic development"
-> Seems to suggest that there is a "right" size of a role, and something is wrong with Sanskrit's role in India's linguistic development, for having exceeded this alleged right size.
* "saṃskṛta vāk, means “perfected speech”—and its users genuinely believed that Sanskrit was indeed perfect"
-> Minor quibble: saṃskṛta means in this context not 'perfected', but something like 'refined' or 'polished' (literally, 'well done').
* "Sanskrit’s position of prestige also allowed it to infiltrate the vocabularies of unrelated languages"
-> The use of the word "infiltrate" suggests that something morally wrong happened. But of course, Sanskrit is not a sentient being with intentions. What happened is that *people* of other languages ("unrelated" in terms of lingusitic genealogy, but clearly related regionally and otherwise), of their own will, chose to use Sanskrit-derived words. The author's opinion seems to be that this is a wrong thing, that people shouldn't use words from language families that are etymologically unrelated. Perhaps the author also thinks that English shouldn't use words like "karaoke", "kung fu", etc.?
* "Trained linguists describe the world’s languages as they are, not in the service of political, social or religious ends."
-> Indeed, it would be *wonderful* if linguists did just this.
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ashbirdin reply to Shreevatsa R3 hours 46 mins ago
I admire the insights you add. They provide yet one more peeling of the onion. The final couplet -
* "Trained linguists describe the world’s languages as they are, not in the service of political, social or religious ends."
-> Indeed, it would be *wonderful* if linguists did just this.
- is as good as it gets. Indeed.
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NS RajaramMay 14th, 03:29
This article is based on outdated, scientifically discredited theories. For the latest findings on language development and Indo-European origins, please see articles on the subject at: http://folks.co.in
The following article summarizes the findings.
The Quarterly Journal of the Mythic Society
Vol. 104, No. 1 (January – March 2013)
SCIENCE ON INDO-EUROPEAN ORIGINS
What science, especially natural history and genetics tell us is the near opposite of what historians and linguists have been saying for over a century. In particular, they have vastly underestimated the time scales involved by an order of magnitude.
Navaratna Rajaram
Introduction: the two hundred year-old question (IE origins)...
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k6sbxWH2jCMay 14th, 03:28
Well said
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raghuvansh1May 14th, 03:08
I fully agree with you that influence of Sanskrit language on Tamil language is clear cut.What may some bigot Tamil people think they are doing this in fear the death of their language.They don't understand culture ritual more of all Hindus are same.Just read their name Karuna nithi,Kamraj,Prabhakaran all are drive from Sanskrit.Worship of all God came from Sanskrit.So influence of Sanskrit on all regional languages are tremendous and no one can erases it,
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VarqMay 14th, 02:44
"They have attempted to cut out huge swaths of history..."
I think that the word, in UK English, is "swathe". If you search The Economist's Web page you'll find that appears to be the usual practice there. It's also the usage in the Oxford and the Cambridge dictionaries on-line. "Swath" is given as US usage and, I believe, The Economist is a UK publication.
Since you were discussing linguistic nationalism, I thought I'd add my bit.
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SirBedevereMay 14th, 01:05
For the Indian nationalists worried about Sanskrit being un-Indian in some sense, you might point out that it is only un-Indian in the same way English is un-English, Greek is un-Greek, Spanish is un-Spanish, etc.
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VasumatiMay 14th, 00:41
Thanks to reading this article and its premise, I had to go back and read the previous article as well. Those two, in addition to the comments of some really knowledgeable people (not to forget some ignoramus...full disclosure, I am of Indian origin), I further confirmed the Socratic statement: "The only thing I know is that I know nothing". I would love further delving into this by The Economist.
As someone who speaks a number of languages, I also had this personal deja-vu here. My wife who is Italian spoke excellent English when I bumped into her first. I was rather stumped by her control over the Queen's language so I asked her as to what the secret was. She explained: say she is planning to use the word "guilty", it does not normally come to her but the Italian world for “guilty” is "colpevole" and so she modifies it to use the word "culpable" (Latinate) and voila', she speaks highfalutin English.
My knowledge of Italian, Spanish and French has definitely improved the quality of my English. Nevertheless, speaking of various languages and which should be used to speak to whom, I would humbly submit this: instead of speaking Italian to women, I would prefer to speak Bengali.
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circular argumentMay 14th, 00:04
Tiresome sermon from another exercise in orientalism. While the jingoist nationalist agenda is laughably transparent yours (and other white fellows) is more insidious
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ocassiusoMay 13th, 22:53
Languages, cultures, nations, beings: nothing human is produced by parthenogenesis.
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jlawlerMay 13th, 21:15
Thank you for a very fine summary.
I might mention that many of the same comments can be made, mutatis mutandis, for Arabic and Persian words entering the vocabularies of Muslim populations, no matter what language they may be speaking. Often, as in Indonesia, these strata overlay and mix with the Sanskrit strata laid down by Buddhists a millennium before. This difference between descent and borrowing shows up in comparative linguistics very clearly.
This is a puzzle from a freshman class illustrating the difference:
• http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/LangRelations.pdf
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ashbirdin reply to jlawlerMay 13th, 22:41
Thank you for teaching. I want to say "us", but I shouldn't, as others may disagree. So I'll just say "me".
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Nirvana-boundMay 13th, 21:10
PIE-in-the-linguistic-sky!
PIE, like God is neither unequivocally provable nor categorically dismissable!
Obviously, every language must have primordially evolved from an unstructured proto-type compilation of grunts, groans, squeals..& the like. Nobody is denying that.
All I say is that Sanskrit originated & evolved in the Indian subcontinent & has been predominant there, for thousands of years - since the early Vedic era & beyond. As such it is, for all rational purposes, an "Indian" language - Johnson's hypothetical arguments not withstanding..
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vuptin reply to Nirvana-boundMay 13th, 21:26
And if I may ask, why "Indian," instead of "Pakistani," "Nepali," "Sri Lankan," "Afgani," or "Bangladeshi"?
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Nirvana-boundin reply to vuptMay 13th, 23:05
Coz it was spoken predominantly in what constitutes (North) India today..
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Eva51May 13th, 20:25
I am astonished to read comments from people who are so obviously totally ignorant of linguistics, like bhartruhari. It is like when Hitler called theoretical physics "Jewish science", without knowing a thing about it. Thank you Mr. Johnson for an erudite article. Maybe it could be added that the breakup of the original PIE is supposed at about 5000 years ago. That is, at a time when there was no India, no Europe, no Iran, etc. Just a bunch a nomads speaking various dialects of PIE and wandering through Eurasia.
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roddalitzMay 13th, 19:50
"These perspectives also have the virtue of being true to the facts."
Unfortunately, "facts" seem to be a last-century concept no longer relevant.
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bhartruhariMay 13th, 19:06
Its the symptom of "crying before being pinched" !!
British came and wrote Indian history without either the understanding of the local language, customs, traditions or any respect to that.
Most history books printed in the world completely ignore India's contributions to Math and other sciences (except for the occasional grudgingly accepted zero).
Most history books' few words about Hinduism is caste, poverty and several thousand deities.
Many linguists have proposed so many theories about Indian languages, without even knowing to speak one full sentence in that language.
A linguist is fast becoming a journalist, in terms of professional ethics.
And when somebody finally says "hey may be we should correct the misconceptions", people say this:
"In India, though, some people have been busily rewriting parts of Indian history to conform to jingoistic ideas about Indian exceptionalism and cultural superiority. They have attempted to cut out huge swaths of history involving the exchanges Indians have had with Greeks, Persians, East Asians, Arabs, Central Asians, Southeast Asians, and Western Europeans".
In fact, this is exactly what the British did, isnt it? "They rewrote parts of Indian history to conform to the superior ideas of european culture and attempted to cut out huge swaths of history involving the local contributions to science, arts and other fields and focusing only on aryan invasion theories because Indians could not have been superior without an European influence."
So the new line of the academics now is if Indians talk about themselves and their own culture in flattering words, then they are jingoists. In every other part of the world, they are called patriots. Please inform Oxford and Webster too, its time jingoism is redefined, just like secularism was redefined recently.
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bhartruhariMay 13th, 18:42
This PIE nonsense has been thrown around a lot and is used as a haven to hide for academics. Show me the evidence of PIE. Then talk about it. How scientific is it to assume something when there is no clear evidence of it? Just because you say that "oh there must be a common language to all, but we have lost it, so lets call it PIE" seems to be the line of the modern linguists. Its just a theory and my theories are surely better than yours.
Why are you linguists so well bent on fixing a status for Sanskrit? Nobody bothered about the history of the language until British came. Sanskrit did well without you guys for more than 5000 years and she will do fine in future too. Just learn the language and leave her alone from your pet history theories.
There is nothing new in the article. Its a rehash of several disoriented theories under one blog post.
"The serious study of Indo-European languages, just like the study of any language group, is not normally part of any political or social agenda" -- Ha ha! Tell that to Mr Witzel. Please post his reaction picture.
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Hari Pin reply to bhartruhariMay 13th, 21:17
It's amazing how many people here talk about something they have no idea about.
Do you have any idea how PIE was reconstructed. Try reading on comparative linguistics first.
As they say, better to remain silent and be thought a fool then to open your mouth and remove all doubt.
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wælcyrigein reply to bhartruhariMay 13th, 22:31
Evidence such as the plain similarity between Attic Greek and Sanskrit? The very easily-noticed phonological correlations?
I notice that Indians never repudiate the relationship between Arabic and Hebrew and the various ancient Kemet tongues, nor the relationship of Old Chinese to the current Sinitic languages, nor any of the work done on Polynesian languages Nope. They only thing they object to is being in any way associated with Europeans, even if they were Asian at the time.
It seems rather double-minded, doesn't it?
'Nobody bothered about the history of the language until British came.'
Because history as a field of scientific inquiry originated with the Greeks and didn't really make it to India, where Sanskrit was kept inscrutable by the natives anyway, what with being the holy language.
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BaseldocMay 13th, 18:20
Compliments to Johnson for this vigorous and cogent defense of his original proposition, which I would have naively thought not to need any defense.
An amusing slip above: [Sir] William Jones is described as "Anglo-English." I had fun trying to think of a meaning for this term. Maybe Johnson meant to say "Anglo-Welsh," which is what Wikipedia calls the man in question. I am not qualified to say whether the latter expression is a useful designation of anyone.
As for the use of unrelated languages in varying admixtures by the same speakers in two different registers, another example that is close to home (in my case) is that of Hebrew and Yiddish. Yiddish is basically a variety of German with some Hebrew mixed in, along with chunks of Slavic, Romance, Hungarian, and "miscellaneous." It originated among the Jews of the Rhineland in medieval times. The interesting point (from the perspective of the present article) is that words of Hebrew origin tend to be used in Yiddish for religious and philosophical matters. The more hifalutin the discourse, the more Hebrew goes into it, till, at the high end, one ends up with what appears to be an unbroken series of Hebrew "meaning words" strung together with Germanic "function words" to make the grammar conform to the Yiddish pattern. Obviously, religious scholars (Jewish pandits, as it were) would be more likely to speak in such a style than the common people.
I imagine there is an analogy here between Dravidian/Sanskrit in South India and Germanic/Hebrew among Yiddish-speaking Jews. The different twist, if you will, is that for Jews the ancestral language is the liturgical/intellectual language and therefore occupies the higher register.
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HibroMay 13th, 14:42
Speaking of Indo-European, Freddie Mercury of the British rock group Queen, was originally named Farrokh Bulsara, an ethnic Parsi who spent part of his childhood in Mumbai.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VTXBNadd28
Many people could easily have mistaken him to be European.
http://www.dnaindia.com/world/1599305/report-the-freddie-mercury-we-didn...
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Nirvana-boundin reply to HibroMay 13th, 21:23
Likewise Cliff Richard & Engelbert Humperdinck, who were both Anglo-Indians..
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Reluctant Polluterin reply to Nirvana-boundMay 14th, 03:53
There are opposite examples, too: Cat Stevens aka Yusuf Islam aka Steven Demetre Georgiou. Hellenic-English?
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jourisMay 13th, 13:55
And so we see (from the comments which inspired this) that linguistics is a hard science, not a "social science." That is, it has two characteristics of the hard sciences:
1) it is informed by hard data, and therefore theories in linguistics are able to be supported or refuted by data.
2) it is subject to vigorous dispute by those who demand that their cultural/religious beliefs be given primacy over real data from the real world.
Thank you, Johnson, for a great article.
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Like I was saying...in reply to jourisMay 13th, 20:50
Dude, that's just, like, your opinion, man.
1) is wrong outright.
2) has nothing to do with "hard science".
But, whatever floats your boat, man.
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jourisin reply to Like I was saying...May 13th, 21:41
1) rather than being just my opinion, is based on having actually studied linguistics. I don't claim to be a world expert in the subject, but I do have a bit of background.
I take consolation, vs your last remark, from the number of people who have been gracious enough to hit Recommend. ;-)
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VidurnaktisMay 13th, 12:16
A well written article, I'll just point out however that the Indic languages aren't the only Indo-European languages with phonemic retroflex consonants. Sardinian, Polish & Russian all developed them independently off the top of my head.
andym101May 13th, 11:55
Reading this rebuttal prompted me to check out the comments for the article 'English and Dravidian'. Two points, the first of which I thought was clear enough in the original article, but which many posters seemed to wilfully ignore was that Indo-European language is a name for a language group, not implying Indian languages came from Europe at all.
The second point is that many of the posters were betraying exactly the same sort of colonialist mindset they claimed to be against. Instead of everything worthwhile must be British/American/European/Whatever and anything from any other source is worthless, they imagine that everything worthwhile is Indian and everything from any other source is at best an imitation of something that originated in India.
Scary, short sighted and quite frankly not good for the future.
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MrRFoxin reply to andym101May 13th, 13:02
A scholarly piece of work - TE at the top of its game. Just ...
... a cryin' shame it takes the rantings of a bunch not worthy of a rebuttal of this excellence to get the piece in print for the rest of TE's readers to enjoy. Suppose we should be grateful for those others' boorish behavior, or we might not have ever had this piece. Still, don't give the clowns more standing than they deserve -
The kind of jingoistic posts that prompted it - they are what is know as 'non-assertive conduct'; conduct that isn't meant to be a declaration of one's state of mind but is none the less - like turning and running at the sound of a policeman's whistle.
There are two or three ethnicities that reflexively go into 'jingo mode' whenever anything that pertains to them appears in print. This conduct betrays nothing but self-doubt, insecurity and perhaps a latent sense of inferiority. Confident and capable people don't do that kind of thing. So, don't let them get you down, SAP - and please don't wait for them to prompt you before you give us more stuff of this caliber.
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ballymichaelin reply to andym101May 13th, 13:23
It's not good, no. But it isn't new. Greece had, and Norway has, officially-mandated diglossia, for much the same reason. A significant minority rejected foreign linguistic influence, insisting on a "pure" language.
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vuptMay 13th, 11:33
Johnson, Thanks for a well argued and nice article. Thanks also for the mention of Nepali language. If you have some scientific references about Nepali language's evolution, I would highly appreciate it.
I would also like to bring to the readers' attention some recent work on mapping the origins of many Indo-European languages. Please refer to the works by Quentin D. Atkinson, et. al. on this subject. Important ones are their work published in 2003 (Nature, Vol. 426) and 2012 (Science, Vol. 337). They map out how Indo European languages evolved, spread and branched out from one another.
There are over 100 languages in the Indo-European language family, including most spoken in Europe and South Asia. Sanskrit is most likely the ancestor of various languages spoken in South Asia. I think South Indian languages like Kannada and Tamil do not belong to this family. However, as Johnson argues, there was a lot of interaction among languages and they exchanged different elements.
As many Indians (of course not all Indians are like that, but definitely some very vocal ones on the internet, like the ones who prompted this response from Johnson) would like to believe (I guess because of a post colonial pride in the previous decades, and more recently because of a new found pride associated with being a rising global power ?), Sanskrit is the mother of many languages, and Hinduism is the most ancient of all civilizations. They believe that as a result, they are more superior than any other country in this world. A direct inference often seems to be that Hindi, because of being a language spoken by many in India, should receive the same respect. Research findings like the ones I mentioned above, paint a different picture, however. Sanskrit is definitely a very old and special language. But it probably benefited from other contemporary languages and enriched them in return too.
Additional information: The works I mentioned above also show with high confidence that apart from Kashmiri and Singhalese, Nepali is the oldest South Asian language. Singhalese is spoken in Sri Lanka. All three were related to Sanskrit, directly or indirectly.
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QcAGPDNAa2May 13th, 11:24
Yes a fine essay indeed.
Dont let these internet commentards get to you.
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AccruxMay 13th, 11:07
My congratulations on this fine essay, Johnson/S.A.P. I will read it again later on.
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Anjin-SanMay 13th, 09:58
Because Sanskrit came to Japan indirectly via China, hand in hand with Bhuddism, Sanskrit is to Japanese what Ancient Greek is to English. Since character divergence between Sanskrit and Chinese is far greater than the character divergence between Latin and Greek alphabets, Sanskrit words entered Japan already Sinicized (In Hanzi characters rather than original Sanskrit letters), making it hard to identify a word of Sanskrit origin.
For instance, a common Japanese expletive 'Baka 「馬鹿」' originally came from Sanskrit 'Baka-moha (impediment to training)', but the Kanji characters used to describe the word came about from a Chinese parable about a king who made his subjects call a Horse（馬） a Deer（鹿） .
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Accruxin reply to Anjin-SanMay 13th, 10:55
Interesting. As an aside, since you mention "Baka", in the Second World War the Kamikaze ("god wind", more commonly "divine wind") suicide attacks were derogatorily called "Baka" (fool) by some Americans.
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pdottin reply to AccruxMay 13th, 13:09
The derogatory term Baka was a result of misunderstanding-deliberate or otherwise-of the term Oka that the pilots liked to describe themselves. Oka I understand means cherry petals and that is how one such pilot saw himself in a haiku
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joski65May 13th, 09:45
Clarified and how. It's a pleasure to read this essay written by an author who is clearly a master of his subject.
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Tushar ThakkarMay 13th, 09:25
Well written, Johnson. Those attempting to impose primacy of culture do not really care about facts, but for those who do, this article is a very interesting read.
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ballymichaelMay 13th, 09:14
a dignified and erudite rebuttal. There's an idea for another column.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_purism
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TTG-IndiaMay 13th, 08:19
Don't let these people with their half-baked education get to you Johnson. The relationship between languages as widely dispersed as German, Farsi, Hindi are well documented and available to anyone who can use Google. As for the rest, let them carry on believing the world is flat. It will only get them so far.
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http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2013/05/indian-historical-linguistics#comments
English and Dravidian
Unlikely parallels
May 1st 2013, 19:28 by S.A.P. | LOS ANGELES
IF FORCED to pick my favourite part of the history of English, I’d be torn. There are so many to choose from. Would I pick the Great Vowel Shift, the mid-millennium change in pronunciation that largely explains English’s inconsistent spelling? Perhaps I’d turn to colonial times, when English vocabulary ballooned. I do like Noah Webster’s attempts to change American English spelling in the name of efficiency, too.
But my favourite must be the Norman invasion of 1066. When the Normans, who spoke a dialect of Old French, ruled over England, they changed the face of English. Over the ensuing two centuries, thousands of Old French words entered English. Because the ruling class spoke Old French, that set of vocabulary became synonymous with the elite. Everyone else used Old English. During this period, England's society was diglossic: one community, two language sets with distinct social spheres. Today, English-speakers pick and choose from the different word sets—Latinate (largely Old French borrowings) and Germanic (mostly Old English-derived words)—depending on the occasion. Although English is no longer in a diglossic relationship with another language, the Norman-era diglossia remains reflected in the way we choose and mix vocabulary. In informal chat, for example, we might go on to ask something, but in formal speech we’d proceed to inquire. There are hundreds of such pairs: match/correspond, mean/intend, see/perceive, speak/converse. Most of us choose one or the other without even thinking about the history behind the split. Germanic words are often described as earthier, simpler, and friendlier. Latinate vocabulary, on the other hand, is lofty and elite. It’s amazing that nine hundred years later, the social and political structure of 12th-century England still affects how we think about and use English.
English isn’t alone in having this sort of split personality. Halfway across the world, languages spoken in southern India underwent similar changes. Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, and Telugu, the four major languages spoken there, are Dravidian languages. They are structurally unrelated to the languages of northern India, which are Indo-European. But Sanskrit, an Indo-European language of ancient India and the liturgical language of Hinduism, has held prestige all over the subcontinent for over two thousand years. Kannada, Telugu, and Malayalam—and to a lesser extent Tamil—have absorbed, and continue to absorb, thousands of Sanskrit words. (A relatively recent movement among Tamil-speakers aimed to expunge the Sanskrit borrowings.) Much of southern India, just like Norman England, was diglossic between Sanskrit (used ritually and formally by Hindu elites) and vernacular Dravidian languages. Today, that diglossia is gone, but Sanskrit-derived vocabulary still forms an upper crust, mostly pulled out for formal speech or writing.
Some writing, especially poetry, still slants toward native vocabulary. Two influential religious movements among Hindu Kannada-speakers, the 12th-century Lingāyat and the 16th-century Haridāsa movements, treasured simple Kannada poetry. These movements arose in part to spread religious teachings beyond Sanskrit-educated elites to the common people. Works written then are largely devoid of obvious Sanskrit borrowings. To many Kannada-speakers, those works are softer and folksier than stiffer Sanskrit-heavy works. But caste and class politics didn’t end then, of course. Sanskrit still holds sway in India today, officially one of the "scheduled" languages listed in the constitution. It sometimes seems like any Kannada newscaster or speechwriter worth his salt swears by a Sanskrit dictionary. Sanskrit borrowings are used all over the place in order to sound proper, even when it sounds strange. (My favourite example of strained usage is the upscaling of “toilet” to shauchālaya, “abode of cleanliness”.) In the most tortured formal writing, Sanskrit words might just be strung together with Kannada grammatical endings. This has the strange consequence of allowing speakers of unrelated languages like Hindi to take a stab at translating the text. (Hindi, as it happens, is also split between the Sanskrit-heavy shuddh, “pure”, Hindi, popular in government and academia, and colloquial Hindi, which makes greater use of Arabic and Persian borrowings.) There’s some sweet spot in the middle of both extremes. Good writers seem to get it best.
It has always fascinated me how the Sanskrit/Dravidian divide in Kannada is so strikingly similar to the Latinate/Germanic divide in English. In English, word choice is often used to judge someone's class or education. In Kannada, caste is also mixed in. Picking certain words over others can have social consequences, branding the speaker or writer according to his vocabulary. In both languages, older borrowings underwent sound and spelling changes, but newer borrowings keep the roots intact. (In English, these old pre-Norman borrowings are mainly religious terms, like "nun", "monk", or "priest".) “Native” terms are considered earthier and Sanskrit/Latin-derived borrowings are stuffier. But there are interesting differences, too. English didn’t descend from Latin, though they’re both Indo-European. Dravidian languages, in contrast, aren’t related to Sanskrit at all. In Kannada, Telugu and Malayalam, the alphabet had to expand dramatically to incorporate Sanskrit sounds like voicing and aspiration. The shift was so complete that each language's alphabet, while written completely distinctly, contains nearly all of the same sounds as the Sanskrit-descended Hindi.
Many languages have "high" and "low" layers of vocabulary. But in most other languages, the two sets are drawn from the same source. By contrast, contact between Old English and French, Dravidian languages and Sanskrit, Japanese and Chinese, Persian and Arabic, and other pairings around the world have created fascinatingly hybrid languages. These mixed lexicons are, for linguistic and social historians, akin to the layers of fossils that teach paleontologists and archaeologists so much about eras gone by.
Some people even think English is descended from Latin, or Kannada from Sanskrit. That’s frustrating not only because it’s wrong, but also because the reality is far more interesting.
NNkikcjgqJMay 13th, 21:26
It has always amused me that the saxon peasant herded the sheep, but his norman master ate mutton, ditto the cows and beef!
As an English solicitor, too, I can see my forbear acting as a sort of turncoat interpreter between the saxon client, and the norman barrister (and pocketing something in between) probably, as now, despised by both sides!
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semicontinuousMay 13th, 12:18
As it would benefit John-son to know... In swedish the same phenomena can be observed: words of norse/germanic root sounds "earthier" than french or latin loanwords, with greek loan-words playing a more neutral role. For a while, french was the language of the court and while swedish has a large number of words of french/latin origin the influence is of course smaller than that of french in english.
Nowadays many swedish intellectuals, especially in humanities and in hard science, prefer to restrict themselves to words of pure norse/germanic origin as a social marker.
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Student of IndiaMay 9th, 16:56
Essentially correct, but one can quibble about the author's statement that "Works written then [12th - 16th centuries] are largely devoid of obvious Sanskrit borrowings. To many Kannada-speakers, those works are softer and folksier than stiffer Sanskrit-heavy works." The words "largely" and "obviously" shield the complexity of the situation -- Contrary to the widely prevalent perception, there IS a great deal of Sanskrit loan vocabulary in the Vachana poetry as well as in the Dasa Sahitya (Haridasa devotional (Bhakti) poetry, as, indeed there is in even today's ordinary spoken and written Kannada of any level of education or sophistication. So many tens of thousands of Sanskrit words are part of everyday Kannada vocabulary, spoken and written (I am not writing about fancy or scientific writing, but everyday language), but people are not aware that they are borrowings -- they are so intimately integrated into the lexicon. It is, therefore, difficult to agree with those extremists among the Kannada reformers who want to throw the baby with the bathwater, that is replace even perfectly understood, commonly used words in everyday use and replace them with unfamiliar hothouse inventions from native roots.
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President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert CamachoMay 9th, 07:04
Sanskrit originated in India during the Vedic era which i think succeeded the Indus valley civilization. What is this nonsense about Sanskrit and European languages having a common ancestor? Perhaps other European languages are related to sanskrit due to the outward migration of the Indus valley people into Europe thousands of years ago.
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NR.May 7th, 22:36
Oh, in a week I'm to have an exam in the English language history. It is involving subject when you read it out of curiosity, such funny things as the word wifman (woman) was of masculine gender in Old English, but not very motivating to compare OE words to those from other Indo-European or Germanic languages and explain all the changes, like Grimm's or Verner's law.
Reading the comments, I guess some readers of Indian background might have misinterpreted the point about the Indo-European family of languages. Roughly speaking, we study this subject in Ukraine (following the Russian academic approach) exactly in line with views expressed here - while comparing Germanic and Romanic languages to Latin and Old Greek, European scholars of the past assumed that they all might have one common ancestor language which had already become extinct to that point of time. When William Jones went in XVIII to India and learnt Sanskrit, he found it to be the nearest to perfectness, especially for its synthetic character. His conjecture that Sanskrit is the nearest/oldest language related to that supposed common Proto-Indo-European language-ancestor was a bedrock of comparative linguistics. All Indo-European languages are being compared to Sanskrit. In my textbook the Indo-European family of languages comprises Indian, Iranian, Baltic, Slavonic, Germanic, Romanic, Celtic, Greek, Albanian, Armenian, Hettish, Tokharian branches of languages. The word-combination Indo-European itself clearly reflects that this supposed language family originated from India and has settled as far as all over Europe.
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ashbirdin reply to NR.May 8th, 18:20
Your post is so interesting! Now if I can do it all over again, I would like to learn Sanskrit! Some readers of Buddhism find it very difficult to grasp the concepts when they have been "translated" into another language. Reading your post, it makes sense that that would be so ("nearest to perfectness, especially for its synthetic character"). Language is the most fascinating on the level of the concepts represented by the words, and how the concepts string together. Many words simply cannot be translated, and the way they are linked simply cannot be relinked in a way another language would link them. That aspect of a language is endlessly revealing about a people and their culture.. I just find all of this so fascinating. Thanks for you post.
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NR.in reply to ashbirdMay 9th, 16:37
My pleasure! Such information may be found in textbooks like Introduction to Linguistics. I couldn't agree more that this subject is a reward itself and every language is a gate to another universe, another worldview. As for translation, my books on this subject suggest that it is possible to render faithfully mostly the factual information layer of the text, but the imagery of a certain language and its hidden depth are bound to suffer from losses.
An evident example may be found within the lowest, basic level of any language - its sound system. There is a language phenomenon of sound imitation, when words imitate sounds of nature or animals (splash, bark, meow, tweet). It is called an onomatopoeia and (from Wikipedia): "Onomatopoeias are not the same across all languages; they conform to some extent to the broader linguistic system they are part of; hence the sound of a clock may be tick tock in English, dī dā in Mandarin, or katchin katchin in Japanese." It reveals that speakers of different languages perceive differently the very same sound - even though it is simple factual information, not sophisticated concepts - and yet it is amazingly asymmetric among these languages! Or, for instance, there are a lot of idiomatic sayings originated from the Bible; when in English they have "fly in the ointment", in Russian the same is known as (literally) "a spoon of tar in the barrel of honey". Thinking about the same concept, people imagine different things.
We have learnt at Uni that poetry and fiction are difficult to translate since they are often based on the nationally-specific lexicon, metaphors and other figures of speech which are either asymmetric in any two languages, or absent in one of them. Translation of sacred texts, which address sophisticated concepts, unique to certain culture, must be the most challenging task. Since language is a 4-D system at least (sounds, words with their sets of direct and indirect, often culturally-specific connotative meanings, then word-combinations and sentences), it ought to be a miracle to render such texts faithfully equivalent on each level, preserving all original meanings, style, images, as well as the formal side of the text - from character of sounds to grammatical structures, which may 'speak' in their own way. And then - different sounds and their combinations perceived in a very different way by people used to different languages, so they have to be changed in translation. According to a modern widespread views on translation - the text's effect on the reader/listener must be a main goal of a translator. Sorry, it turned out to be too long, looks like I have unwittingly started to revise for my module tests.
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against_south_asian_studiesMay 7th, 16:15
The author of this article is not a complete ignoramus but very sloppy and amateurish. Here are some examples.
1. As commenter "Tropicana" has pointed out, the "shaucha" of "shauchalaya" refers to the alternate meaning, namely "excretion" and not "cleanliness". I think the author was too eager to caricature what he imagines is overzealous sanskritization.
2. He talks of "the Sanskrit-heavy shuddh, “pure”, Hindi, popular in government and academia, and colloquial Hindi, which makes greater use of Arabic and Persian borrowings."
Bad dichotomization - the Hindi spoken in different parts of India possess varying degrees of urdu influence. There are parts of India where the Hindi is closer to the "shuddh Hindi". The author also seems to be ignorant of the fact that there was a similar movement in urdu that purged all sanskrit origin words in somewhere around the 19th century.
3. "Dravidian languages, in contrast, aren’t related to Sanskrit at all." - while a vocabulary-wise matching has not been found, the Dravidian sentence structures (order in which parts of speech are arranged) are much closer to Sanskrit than Sanskrit sentence structures are to any western language. So unless one ignores something as fundamental as that (which your highly political self seems only too happy to do) one would be more cautious while coming up with such a claim.
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guest-isliwsoin reply to against_south_asian_studiesMay 13th, 15:15
your comment number 3 is so wrong that any amateur linguist will outrightly reject that sanskrit is in the same family with dravidian...
cultural aspect aside.. sanskrit is in a diferent family (coming later from iran to india) than dravida (indigenous language)
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guest-isliwsoin reply to against_south_asian_studiesMay 13th, 15:16
your comment number 3 is so wrong that any amateur linguist will outright reject that sanskrit is in the same family with dravidian...
cultural aspect aside.. sanskrit is in a different family (coming later from iran to india) than dravida (indigenous language)
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Avid-historianMay 6th, 22:34
Two volumes comparing details of grammar and phonology of Avesta and Sanskrit can be found online at Google books. It was written more than 100 years ago by Prof. Kohlhammer. Search the title "An Avesta Grammar in Comparison with Sanskrit"
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Nirvana-boundMay 6th, 22:13
Sanskrit has no "European" lineage or ancestry worth mentioning. Claiming otherwise is sheer, unadulterated conjecture. How delusional can you get, Johnson??
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Mantonatin reply to Nirvana-boundMay 7th, 22:35
Where does Johnson mention any European lineage in Sanskrit?
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Nirvana-boundin reply to MantonatMay 7th, 23:15
He claims it's an "Indo-European" language
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Texan31May 6th, 16:54
Rubbish!! Badly researched article & utterly incorrect! Calling Sanskrit a "European" language in itself destroys the credibility of the article as India and the language existed long before Europeans even were in the picture!
If it were indeed European, why is it that Europeans can't pronounce 90+% of Indian names .. Ridiculous!!
Nice try to 'Divide & Rule'. This article qualifies for the trash cans ..
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wælcyrigein reply to Texan31May 6th, 22:14
It's Indo-European, you half-wit. Distantly related to European languages (with some notable exceptions, e.g. Hungarian, Finnish, Euskara), like Latin and English or Greek and Norwegian, or, for non-European languages, Hebrew and Arabic and Ancient Egyptian.
Europeans just can't understand Indo-Iranian languages without training because the relation is distant, like with every other language.
So, basically, you're daft. Look to fixin' that.
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Texan31in reply to wælcyrigeMay 7th, 02:01
You seem to be a blonde. Blonde, how about showing some historical evidence of Sanskrit being European? Remember back in the day, there was only 1 civilization, the Indian civilization and nothing else (Iranian was another point made, read the article and comments before typing 'blonde' .. haha go home boy. Sanskrit is Indian .. as Indian as can get.
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theundercurrent.caMay 6th, 14:50
In General, west cannot accept any non western success. And for them to see India as a cultural success is too hard. They just want to break it.This article is another confirmation of that. The article in not factual, and more a hypothesis of an active mind that is intellectually deficient.
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Mantonatin reply to theundercurrent.caMay 6th, 16:54
The funny thing about this is that the majority of Western linguists agree to the fact that Western language evolved from outside origins. If there was any political or racial subtext, this would not be the case. No modern linguists are saying that any Indian language evolved from any European language.
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ashbirdin reply to MantonatMay 7th, 05:53
No modern linguists are saying that any Indian language evolved from any European language.
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I am not a linguist by profession. I only wanted to point out if one studies world history and civilizations and do that by going as far back in time as possible, and that means millenia, one has to come to the conclusion Sanskrit is separate from any European language and predates any European language.
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An even more convincing piece of evidence is take a look at Sanskrit as Sanskrit exists now in the 21st century. What in it could have derived from a European language?
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A commenter brought up that certain folks in the "West" are given to exhibit a strange brand of political posturing that is anachronistic by this time of world development. I don't know what the heck the posturing is about and what it proves - that the "West" is "older", "better", more "advanced"? It all seems very strange to me.
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In the end, what is is and what isn't isn't. That's all there is to it. There is no gain by saying something that is not true is true.
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thelordofbacklandMay 5th, 20:11
There is no such thing sanskrit vs dravid. It is theory propagated by English men. Dravid word itself is derived from sanskrit word "Trivid". "Trivid" means land between three rivers. Telugu is most purest form of language which is derived from sanskrit. At least do some research before posting on platform which has good public outreach.
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Phenkooin reply to thelordofbacklandMay 6th, 01:35
The study and classification is highly scientific and based on research. This is not done to satisfy or justify some political ideology. So please look beyond your jingoistic outlook and base your conclusions on proper research. Having learnt Kannada I can vouch for the ideas presented by the author. There was indeed a Sanskrit vs local language divide. This was also topic for learning in the curriculum, and we had to learn the Dravidian equivalent for the Sanskrit word.
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Texan31in reply to PhenkooMay 6th, 16:49
I disagree, knowing Kannada myself and been in the state for 3 decades, Kannada is the language that comes closest to Kannada (the analysis shows 90+%). This is not jingoism, being an Indian in America, I am aware of the forces acting to 'divide and conquer' post colonialism and people like you are the 'sepoys' - wake up to reality.
Secondly, the Dravidian - Aryan philosophy has been long destroyed, so the basis itself is incorrect! Mr. Sepoy, wake up .. why will you, you are Mr. Sepoy!!
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Tropicana312May 5th, 11:03
shauchālaya : does not mean abode of cleanliness. Shuchi means cleanliness. Shaucha-karma is derived from the word Shuchi, means act of excretion or defecation. And shauchālaya (alaya = place / house) means the place where the act of "Shaucha-karma" is done.
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guest-lwawisnMay 5th, 10:46
Sanskrit doesn't belong to India. It is a Indo-European or more of Indo-Iranian Language. As the Indus Valley civilization had no traces of sanskrit and had many evidences of existence of dravidian languages throughout the nation India, the aryan invasion theory can never be proved wrong. The structural difference of dravidian languages and sanskrit are like square and a circle, so it is absolutely intolerable to call Dravidian languages came from Sanskrit. In other ways it actually adulterated it.
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primeargumentin reply to guest-lwawisnMay 6th, 16:15
You are factually wrong. The only place in the world where Sanskrit is spoken is India then how can it be a foreign language? You are simply repeating a misconception propagated by colonial scholars with political agenda of dividing people in India and for justifying there own "invasion" of India. The category Dravidian language it self was coined by christian missionaries to create a divide between people and elicit conversions. It is still used by aggressive missionaries in the form of movements like "Dravidian Christianity". You seem to be one of their henchmen too looking at your caustic and inaccurate views. AIT is already dead there is no archaeological evidence for it no serious scholar talks about "Aryan Invasion" any more. The Indus-Valley civilization has also been more correctly found to be actually Indus Sarasvati civilization and many evidence of continuity of civilization have been found. Also Iranian language Avestan is believed to be derived from vedic Sanskrit rather than the other way round you should check your facts before commenting on these issues.
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Texan31in reply to guest-lwawisnMay 6th, 16:57
Rubbish!! It's no point proving you wrong, it would be like speaking to a stone in denial!! .. and by the way, Iran was a part of India back in the day.
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FelixTranMay 4th, 19:12
This has always fascinated me. I guess it all comes down to which language were dominant in the past. The Chinese language has a huge influence on Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese and other languages in the region. My native language is Vietnamese and we always switch between the native Vietnamese words and Sino-Vietnamese words. I remember being quite surprised when I come across the same thing in English years later, Latinate, Germanic, Latinate, Germanic.
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perguntadorMay 4th, 03:07
My first English teacher knew this very well.
She used to tell her teen-age pupils, half-jokingly, that we could sound more learned and scholarly in English by using Latinate words instead of their Anglo-Saxon pairs.
These words were more familiar and easier for us to remember, of course, as our native language was Latin-derived Portuguese. She meant this not as a suggestion. It was a warning, instead: be careful not to talk as arrogant, pretentious snobs.
Her own favorite reaction to anything that displeased her, though, could not be more Latinate: "preposterous!", she said, with an intonation not unlike the late ms. Thatcher's.
Like most good teachers, she had perfected her bit of theatre to grab the attention of our young and disorderly minds.
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sysfxin reply to perguntadorMay 5th, 20:24
Agreed. Also, it is hard to believe that all or most Latin words entered English due to the French presence during the 12th century. In fact, Latin found its way into most -probably all- languages for the simple reason that it was the language of science for centuries.
"Armada", for example, is obviously of Spanish origin. "Automobile", "composite", "dinosaur" and many other Latin-originated words did not even exist back then...
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MATT1970May 4th, 00:02
Not to stray far from the topic, but French does not inflect case, so did the influence of Old French help get rid of case?
Or did Old French inflect case?
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NonPseudo SecularistMay 2nd, 22:47
Academic article marred with Ideological bias & political correctness
Author conveniently forgot the biggest religio-political project of all which is Urdu. As an 8th grader watching Pakistani TV, I realized that Urdu=Hindi-Sanskrit because 8th grader, who never learned Urdu and for whom Hindi is a 2nd language, thought that TV-anchor is speaking Hindi & can understand the TV-anchor.
It is politically correct to say that pure Hindi is spoken only by academia & govt but the fact is that recently I meet several Bhutanese refugee, of Nepali descent, and they speak pure Hindi.
Hindi's original name is 'Bhasa' meaning 'Language'. 'Bhasa' spoken in Pakistan & Northwest India has more Persian/arabic words, and 'Bhasa' spoken in NorthEast/Central India has fewer Persian/arabic words.
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Accruxin reply to NonPseudo SecularistMay 2nd, 23:20
"Hindi's original name is 'Bhasa' meaning 'Language'."
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Interesting. Though they are different roots and words, 'Bhārata' is the self-ascribed Sanskrit name for the old Indian subcontinent, Bhārat Gaṇarājya or simply "Bharat" is the official name for the Republic of India, and Bhārata Mātā (Mother India), is the national personification of India as a mother figure.
In Sanskrit, 'Bha' means light, brightness and sun (surya) among other things.
The people of Bharat speaking Bhasa is very suggestive.
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Tropicana312in reply to NonPseudo SecularistMay 5th, 11:21
Interesting. National language of Indonesia is 'Bahasa'
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Communal AwardMay 2nd, 18:58
Humans learned how to write just 5000 years back https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_history
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KarayaMay 2nd, 11:41
//Hindi, as it happens, is also split between the Sanskrit-heavy shuddh, “pure”, Hindi, popular in government and academia, and colloquial Hindi, which makes greater use of Arabic and Persian borrowings.//
Except that the split in Hindi happened in modern times. The first proper Hindi novel (Chandrakanta) is not more than a 100 years old. Also, it's not so much a split as purposely replacing Persio-Arabic words from Urdu with its Sanskrit equivalents.
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HibroMay 2nd, 10:49
According to this source
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/sars238/encybrit.html
"Of the Dravidian languages, Tamil has the greatest geographical extension and the richest and most ancient literature, which is paralleled in India only by that of Sanskrit. Its phonological and grammatical systems correspond in many points to the ancestral parent language, called Proto-Dravidian."
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ashbirdin reply to HibroMay 2nd, 22:37
Thanks for this link. It's a great one.
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thelordofbacklandin reply to HibroMay 5th, 20:23
If you read complete article, you can see Tamil has everything same as Sanskrit. Even the complex rule of "sandhi". If everything is same, only logical conclusion is either Sanskrit is derived from Tamil or Tamil is derived from Sanskrit. How any one conclude that they are of two different descendant and tradition is beyond any class of logic.
KanjeeMay 2nd, 10:16
Very interesting insight. I noticed a typo though. "Folskier" should be "folksier".
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S.A.P. - The Economistin reply to KanjeeMay 2nd, 20:32
Thanks - fixed.
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ballymichaelMay 2nd, 07:48
Also, there were several waves of linguistic influence from latinate languages on english - though the norman french influence, agreed, was the most deep-reaching and long-lasting.
But from the period (17th-18th century particularly) where french was THE language of culture and diplomacy, and often spoken by preference by the nobility in place of their native language, there's been a whole range of loan-words into many different languages.
That, as least, is my suspicion. One can certainly sound very prissy in german by using a lot of french-derived words - I suspect there will be a similar mechanic going on in other languages.
My favourite version of this mechanic (attributed to Emperor Charles V, though it's uncertain):
"I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men and German to my horse."
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ballymichaelMay 2nd, 07:08
Irish (neu-gälisch, as the germans refer to it) has the same diglossic relationship. A huge number of norman french loanwords.
What's interesting is that they don't follow the same pattern as in english, where they reveal a refined/coarse social split.
In irish, the loanwords from norman french cluster in words for buildings and rooms (seomra, from chambre, for example. And also in the numbering system.
Compare:
a Haon, a dó, a trí, a ceathair, a cúig, a sé, a seacht, a hocht, a naoi, a deich
un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq, six, sept, huit, neun, dix.
But the norman french in ireland started being "Gaelicised" in the 12th century or so. It was never a complete conquest, so the social split wasn't as pronounced.
But they did have a far more clearly organised social system based around castle-building to hold down the conquered territory than the native irish, so I suppose it's understandable that it's in buildings and systems of organisation, that the left their mark.
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ballymichaelin reply to ballymichaelMay 2nd, 07:11
sorry, mistake, gaelicisation from the 14th century or so, as evidenced by:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statutes_of_Kilkenny
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briggslawin reply to ballymichaelMay 3rd, 12:04
I don't believe the similarity of French and Irish numbering means that the Irish words were borrowed from French. All it means is that the languages have a family resemblance that traces back much further than the Norman conquest. Take a look at this: http://rjschellen.tripod.com/CelticNums.htm
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Masha BellMay 2nd, 06:06
My favourite part of the history of English is the second half of the 14th century when English was becoming re-established as the official language of England again. The language had become very different from the English of pre-conquest times. The three centuries of Norman rule had expanded its vocabulary enormously by adding hundreds of French words to it, although often with slightly changed pronunciations.
Writers like Chaucer were trying to give this new language a simple and consistent spelling system (erth, frend,lern; beleve, reson, seson). French words which had become part of ordinary English vocabulary had their spellings modified to conform to English rules: beef, pork, mutton, battle, risk (from: boeuf, porc, mouton, bataille, risque).
Sadly, in the 16th century printers made an almighty hash of Chaucer's more consistent spellings. In the 18th century Johnson then aggravated matters still further by greatly expanding the number of heterographs like 'there/their, feet/feat, bred/bread', and worst of all, by exempting words of Latin origin from English rules, leaving us inconsistencies like 'arrive -arise',
'copy – poppy' and 'rabbit - habit' - http://englishspellingproblems.co.uk/html/history.html .
I wish we would resume the 14th century habit of making words which have become part of ordinary vocabulary conform to the main patterns of English spelling. This would make learning to read and write English much easier and less costly than it is (http://improvingenglishspelling.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/costs-of-english-... ). Masha Bell
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wenchwMay 2nd, 05:52
Actually I would disagree about Dravidian languages being separate from Sanskrit. The Indo-Aryan invasion myth is a fairy tale spun during the colonial era in India to explain the similarities between Sanskrit and Latin, it wasn't that some Europeans came to India, it was that Indians went to other areas in search of better resources and eventually created latin and so on. Even the genetic make up of most Europeans and Indians gives a hint at this as the amount of Indian genes in people of caucasian descent is higher than vice versa. Basically India suffered through cultural isolationism after around 16th century, giving local slangs and low developed languages higher importance and even making them the language of an entire kingdom, now most Indians who grew up in such sub regional culture don't want to leave those and re-integrate.It's a huge mess that will take decades to sort out.
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Mantonatin reply to wenchwMay 2nd, 20:34
Except that the proto-Indo-European language didn't begin in what's now Europe, so it couldn't have spread from Europe to India. It's roots are in the area just north of the Black Sea, where it spread primarily south and west. Indo-European languages that exist in what is now Iran and India may have skirted Europe by way of Anatolia or may have spread along the Eastern shore of the Black sea, which seems possible considering languages like Armenian, which show a very direct link to the original proto-language. So, I think Sanskrit and its children are still safe from European taint by this reckoning.
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ashbirdin reply to MantonatMay 2nd, 22:48
... So, I think Sanskrit and its children are still safe from European taint by this reckoning.
Thank God that is the case! Somebody has to stay pure! (only 3% facetious):)
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joski65May 2nd, 05:19
Interesting. But even Kannada does not penetrate deep, in Dakshina Canara it's Tulu that's the local language, and 100 kms south east is the strange language Of the Kodagu people, the next 100 km and you're in Mysore which speaks in its own language.
Why bother with syntax? because the words that touch us are those that issue out from the heart...
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bampbsMay 2nd, 04:21
Having two whole vocabularies to choose from is great! My favorite example is from Macbeth:
.
No; this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.
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VarqMay 2nd, 04:20
'In informal chat, for example, we might go on to ask something, but in formal speech we’d proceed to inquire. There are hundreds of such pairs: match/correspond, mean/intend, see/perceive, speak/converse.'
I agree that there are at least two "levels" of language, but the difference is not between informal and formal or lower and higher status language. Rather it is the difference, in many cases, between natural language and the inflated and pompous.
The difference between, "I see what you mean", and "I perceive what you intend," is that between clear, direct, unequivocal language and that of pretentious wafflers, the semi-educated trying to make themselves sound important.
The self-important jobsworth who uses such language is a staple of English comedy. Police constables, bus inspectors and bureaucrats who speak like this are always good for a laugh.
We are taught, and shown by examples in literature, that clear, simple concise language almost always serves best. This is worth remembering.
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Mantonatin reply to VarqMay 2nd, 20:22
You say that the dichotomy is not a result of formality or class, but rather of natural vs. pompous. But how did this notion of natural vs. pompous arise? Because of distinctions between the language of the common and the language of the upper class. So really, you're saying the same thing even though you're trying to disagree with it.
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Varqin reply to MantonatMay 3rd, 05:36
Agreed, with one proviso. Formality or class implies that the more formal or higher-class is a "good", "pure", higher-status or "better" usage.
In English, certainly with the examples that were given, this is not what is actually conveyed.
The person who says, "I perceive what you intend", rather than, "I see what you mean", is not regarded as of higher status but is thought a pompous twit.
So, the distinction may be the same, as you say, but the impression given is very different.
If, on the other hand, the language becomes crude or ungrammatical, the speaker is simply thought ignorant and uneducated.
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Swiss ReaderMay 2nd, 03:40
The Thai language is another example. Here an Asian, tonal and largely monosyllabic language has been heavily influenced by the completely unrelated (Sanskrit-derived) Pali of the classic Buddhist texts. The higher the social context, the more prevalent is the use of words derived from Pali, and I believe the social diglossia is still much more pronounced than in England. "Market Thai" is completely different from the language used in court circles.
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KouroiMay 2nd, 02:21
The English raised chickens, pigs, and cows, and the Normans ate poultry (poulet), pork (porc), and beef (boeuf).
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x2y2in reply to KouroiMay 6th, 03:00
This is the only thing I remember from 9th-grade Ivanhoe.
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ashbirdMay 1st, 20:47
I don't know that Chinese (pronunciation and written characters) can be "paired" with "Japanese" in the same way as described in this article. I don't that Chinese is "paired" with anything since the first pictogram was drawn multiples of millenia ago and went on to develop as a distinct language, with nothing in commonality with another. Were it otherwise, Chinese would have been such a "difficult" language to learn for "Westerners" or for "Western Linguist" to decipher.
There has been translation of the Buddhist scripture from Sanskrit into Chinese. The translation is very difficult to read. Not because of the way the text is written in Chinese, but because of the concepts embodied in Buddhism, which are very abstract and the translation attempts to do it all in Chinese, without incorporating the orginal Sanskrit.
Perhaps my learned friends on this blog Anjin San (Japanese) and New Conservative (American who knows a great deal about Chinese), both having shown a great deal of knowledge on the subject can help with more accurate knowledge than this article suggested. Not kosher to talk outside your scope of knowledge, generlizing what is in an apple to what is in an orange.
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ashbirdin reply to ashbirdMay 1st, 20:49
Oh! And certainly any other linguistic scholar erudite on the subject. I seek to learn.
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ashbirdin reply to ashbirdMay 1st, 20:55
Several typos and omission errors in first post Edit Button failed to catch -
- I don't know that Chinese is "paired"....
- Were it otherwise, Chinese would not have been such a "difficult"....
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JinteloMay 1st, 20:40
I was surprised when I learned we were Germans,
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wælcyrigein reply to JinteloMay 2nd, 02:31
The English are not in fact German. 'Germanic', while encompassing the modern Deutsch, includes a greater breadth of people (the Scandinavians, Danes, the Dutch, the lowland Scots, the Frisians) than the word 'German' conveys.
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abxtransin reply to JinteloMay 2nd, 09:40
By the time of the Norman Conquest the people in Southern England and Northern Germany spoke the same language, only with slightly different regional accents. From a linguist's point of view German grammar hasn't changed significantly in the past 1000 years whereas English has changed dramatically after 1066. Courtesy the frogs, English has become the truly modern language as of today that, ironically, has replaced French as the international working language since World War II.
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TachybaptusMay 1st, 20:30
The Norman invasion did something else useful for English. By relegating it to a low-caste status, it made the English of illiterate people the norm. Out went the complex Germanic grammar, to be replaced with something much simpler. We almost completely lost case, gender, and verb conjugation, and to a slightly lesser extent the tiresome subjunctive.
On the other hand, Old English was spelt phonetically. A combination of Norman interference and the Great Vowel Shift has wrecked that.
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holverin reply to TachybaptusMay 1st, 21:56
That actually had nothing to do with the Normans. It was already beginning to happen in Old English as the case-endings were becoming all too similar.
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Tachybaptusin reply to holverMay 1st, 22:58
Many case-endings have become similar in German, but the process has not been carried right through. I think this would not have happened fully in English if the language had not been given a good kick.
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MATT1970May 1st, 20:20
Never ever stop doing this blog.
And in my half-assed hobby-esque approach to improving my French, and learning German, and playing with Latin, it is quite clear where English came from.
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http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2013/05/english-and-dravidian