Date: Sat, 25 May 2002 15:05:19 +0930 From: Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog@FreeBSD.org> To: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@online.fr> Cc: Marc Ramirez <mrami@mrami.homeunix.org>, Brad Knowles <brad.knowles@skynet.be>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Aryan and Dravidian (was: French, Flemish and English (was: cvs commit: src/sys/alpha/alpha clock.c)) Message-ID: <20020525150519.D84264@wantadilla.lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <20020525045236.GA1722@lpt.ens.fr> References: <20020522182914.I45715@wantadilla.lemis.com> <20020524110009.T21090-100000@mrami.homeunix.org> <20020524173331.A5683@lpt.ens.fr> <20020525103645.A52737@wantadilla.lemis.com> <20020525032513.GA1425@lpt.ens.fr> <20020525140432.B84264@wantadilla.lemis.com> <20020525045236.GA1722@lpt.ens.fr>
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On Saturday, 25 May 2002 at 6:52:37 +0200, Rahul Siddharthan wrote:
> Greg 'groggy' Lehey said on May 25, 2002 at 14:04:32:
>>> Many Hindi speakers today have problems saying "sh" and convert it
>>> to "s"; they also have problems with two consonants succeeding each
>>> other. So they not only convert English words like "school" to
>>> "ischool", but also Sanskrit-origin Hindi words like "stree"
>>> ("woman") to "istree"
>>
>> Interesting. The Malays have gone one step further and pronounce it
>> "isteri" (meaning "wife"). Again, the voiceless "e".
>
> The Malay language is also called "Bahasa" I believe, and so is the
> related Indonesian language.
Well, no. I don't know where people got this idea from.
> "Bhasha" means "language" in Sanskrit and most other Indian
> languages. I found that a semi-Malay relative of mine was unaware
> of that origin.
As I said, Malay (and Indonesian, which is really the same language)
have a large number of Sanskrit-derived terms, probably via Pali or
some other newer language. "Bahasa" means "language" in Malay and
Indonesian as well, so "Bahasa Melayu" means "Malay language".
Dropping the "Melayu" makes the name completely ambiguous.
Of course, this isn't only the fault of people who don't speak the
language. When I was a kid, it was called "Bahasa Melayu". After
independence, they started calling it the national language (bahasa
kebangsaan, derived from another Sanskrit word which I can't find in
my vocabulary; the Malay word is Bangsa, meaning nation). Later still
they decided to make it clear that everybody should speak Malay
(though the majority of people in Malaysia did not speak it natively)
and called it Bahasa Malaysia. Since the Indonesians call their
language Bahasa Indonesia, it's easy to see how people might think
that the language itself was called Bahasa.
>> Hmm. There are other issues apart from pronunciation. I believe the
>> grammar has diverged considerably both in India and in Europe
>> (interestingly giving rise to excessive use of the present participle
>> both in English and in Hindi IIRC).
>
> True, I don't know much about Sanskrit grammar but it seems totally
> different from any modern language.
There are strong similarities in Greek, German and Russian.
> There aren't separate words for prepositions, declensions, etc,
> they're all modified forms of the noun.
Right, all Indo-European languages were like that until about 1500
years ago.
> Also, as in German, compound words are formed from simple words, and
> indeed an entire line is frequently written as a single word.
This is just a matter of orthography. The German word
"Elektronenaufenthaltswahrscheinlichkeit" could be translated into
English as "Electron Location Probability". That's three words in
English and only one in German, but in reality it wouldn't make any
difference to the German pronunciation if it were written "Elektronen
Aufenthalts Wahrscheinlichkeit", and people often do write things this
way out of habit with English. I think it looks terrible, simply
because it's in conflict with spelling rules, but it has nothing to do
with the way things are pronounced.
> It seemed initially strange to me that in French there is no
> distinction between "I go" and "I am going" -- both are "je vais"
> but now that I think of it, the same is true of Sanskrit.
And just about all Indo-European languages except (I think) English,
Hindi and Russian. Verbs have developed considerably in the last 2000
years, which is one of the reasons why they're so different in
different languages.
Since you've taken "to go" as the example, let's look at the various
forms, though it's not the most regular of verbs in any language:
Sanskrit Greek Latin German English
emi eimi oo gehe ga
eshi ei is gehst gæst
eti eisi it geht gæþ
ivah
ithah iton
itah iton
imah imen imus gehen gaþ
itha ite itis geht gaþ
yanti easi eunt gehen gaþ
The dual forms don't exist in the other languages. You can see what's
happened here: in Sanskrit, Latin and Greek the endings are enough to
tell you the difference between "I go", "we go" and "they go". In
German, it's almost possible, but not quite ("we go" and "they go" are
the same), while even in Old English the situation is even worse.
You'll also note a considerable similarity between Sanskrit, Latin and
Greek.
>> language spoken in Tamil Nadu. In particular, it retains more Aryan
>> words, whereas in Tamil Nadu they try to replace them with
>> Tamil-derived words. It rather reminds me of the difference between
>> Flemish and Dutch :-)
>
> Hm, I've heard that Sri Lankan Tamil is much "purer" than the Tamil
> Nadu version because it has *less* Sanskrit influence...
Yes, this would make sense too.
> There is indeed a movement to get rid of the non-Dravidian words in
> Tamil, but I don't know to what extent it has been successful,
Well, Kumar told me that there's a noticeable difference. I don't
know if he's been to Sri Lanka.
> and certainly I don't think it looks like a worthwhile exercise.
Nor I.
> The other thing about Tamil in Tamil Nadu is that the written
> language, or the formal spoken language, is *very* different from
> the informal spoken language; I'm reasonably comfortable in the
> informal version but can barely understand the formal version,
> having always lived in non-Tamil-speaking regions.
Hmm. You sound like Kumar. What's your native language?
Greg
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