Date: Thu, 23 May 2002 14:45:50 +0930 From: Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog@FreeBSD.org> To: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@online.fr> Cc: cjc26@cornell.edu, Brad Knowles <brad.knowles@skynet.be>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Sanskrit numbers (was: French, Flemish and English (was: cvs commit: src/sys/alpha/alpha clock.c)) Message-ID: <20020523144550.C230@wantadilla.lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <20020522215236.GA1640@lpt.ens.fr> References: <20020522192335.P47352@lpt.ens.fr> <Pine.SOL.3.91.1020522160649.23407A-100000@travelers.mail.cornell.edu> <20020522215236.GA1640@lpt.ens.fr>
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On Wednesday, 22 May 2002 at 23:52:36 +0200, Rahul Siddharthan wrote: > cjc26@cornell.edu said on May 22, 2002 at 16:46:30: > [proto-Indo-European] >> There's no written evidence for it, as it was spoken well before the >> invention of writing, but any claim that it never really existed would >> have to explain where all these sound correspondences come from (and >> no, "mere coincidence" doesn't count as an explanation :) > > I suppose that makes sense. There are a few "Hindu nationalists" in > India who try to claim that Sanskrit is the mother of all languages > and spread from India westwards, but their scholarship is in general > quite shoddy. The fact that Sanskrit and Latin have totally different > scripts suggests that they both originated from some earlier language > which had either no script, or a very inadequate one... It definitely had no script. Latin, Greek and Sanskrit also had no script in the early days. The Greeks tried one particularly unsuitable version early on and dropped it, then, like the Latins, adopted the Phoenecian alphabet (as did the Hebrews). The current Devanagari script used for Sanskrit is also at least the second attempt, and it's much newer than the language. >>> How do people arrive at "Hoi(H)nos" and "h3ekteh3" (how do you >>> pronounce those "3"s?) in PIE? >> Sorry, those are supposed to be "h"s with a subscript "3", which is kind >> of an unusual sound pronounced something like "hw". > > [example of reconstruction of sounds] It's interesting how many "h"-related sounds PIE had. I wonder if it's indicative of the way human language has evolved over that period. >> (Not all of the reconstructions are this simple, of course) > > I'm still skeptical about how far you can really go with such > techniques. Sounds and pronunciations change over time, and > recordings didn't exist until a hundred years ago (in which time > span there have already been significant changes in pronunciation), > so extrapolating back 10,000 years seems far-fetched. Sanskrit has > mostly been passed on by word of mouth by the priestly classes, so > has diverged remarkably little between say the north and the south > of India, but there are notable exceptions. The first letter in the > word for "knowledge" is pronounced roughly "jn" or "gn" (somewhat as > in "lasagna") in the south, but "gy" in the north (so, "jnana" > versus "gyana"). The former is probably more accurate. The > distinction between two different forms of "sh" -- as in "krishna" > (more accurately, "krshna") and "sharma" -- is not altogether clear, > and in practice most people don't make a distinction. In living > languages such as Hindi, the divergence is much greater, as it is in > English (even within England there is a huge regional variation in > pronunciation, particularly of vowels). Yes, these are normal changes, and there are similar ones in European languages. For example, the English word "year" was spelt "gear" in Anglo-Saxon, and at some time it was pronounced with a g. > Given all this, and given that we can't confidently say what > Sanskrit sounded like as recently as the Vedic period (even the > written language then was quite different from the later "classical" > Sanskrit of 2000 years ago), or for that matter how the Romans spoke > Latin or the ancient Greeks spoke Greek, I don't see how sounds of a > proto-Indo-European language (for example, the "hw" you cite above) > can be reconstructed at all. I'm not in a position to put the arguments, but I've read them in the past and found them well-reasoned. The general method involves looking at how the words evolved in different languages. >> Well, we can tell a little about where they lived and what their culture >> was like based on which words we can reconstruct in the protolanguage. >> So, for example, we can reconstruct the words "sow", "plow", and "cow", so >> we know that they knew about agriculture and raising livestock. We can't >> reconstruct the word for "chicken", though, so that suggests that they did >> not live any farther east than Persia. Also, we can reconstruct a word >> for "metal", but not for "iron", so that suggests they lived sometime >> during the Bronze Age. Hmm, I've just read a different interpretation, which suggests that Sanskrit "ayas", Latin "aes" and Gothic "Ais" (whence German Eisen) might have meant iron. But that's not the point; this kind of research is of necessity incomplete, and it needs to be refined as time goes on. > That's pretty interesting, and much more believable than the > reconstruction of sounds... but not *entirely* believable. The > words for "chicken" or "iron" could have changed for some relatively > minor reason -- compare "iron" and "steel" in English, whose > distinction is not terribly important in practice. Indeed. I note that in some Aryan language (Hindi?), a word for goose is "Hans". In Iranian, it's "Ghans", and in German it's "Gans". This suggests that geese were known in PIE times, so why not chickens? > Or, they may not have thought a separate word necessary for "iron". > The present-day Hindi/Sanskrit word is "loha" but my Sanskrit > dictionary suggests "loha" could mean iron, copper or gold; perhaps > it's the generic word for "metal" you're thinking of? Iron > certainly existed in vedic times, so the lack of a distinct word > doesn't mean much. (There are several distinct words for gold, > which perhaps show its importance; I'm not sure about copper.) There seems to be quite a bit of confusion about metals. My book suggested "hatakam" for gold in Sanskrit. Greg -- See complete headers for address and phone numbers To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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