Skeptical Humanities

Hi again, everybody! Next entry on Folk-Linguistics follows.

3 SANSKRIT

When a known language is identified by non-mainstream thinkers as the Ursprache /‘Proto-World’, the ultimate ancestor language of humanity (see my earlier posts), it is often a classical language highly regarded in the writer’s community for religious or similar reasons. A favourite is Sanskrit, the great classical language of Northern India and, as the vehicle of the Vedas and other such texts, the main classical language of Hinduism worldwide.

When Sanskrit first came to the serious attention of Western linguists and its deep-time ‘genetic’ relationship with Greek, Latin etc. became clear, the notion of the Indo-European language ‘family’ began to develop (a key date is 1786). It was initially imagined that Sanskrit, ‘older’ than Greek or Latin and displaying archaic features and high levels of phonological and morphological systematicity, was especially close to Proto-Indo-European.

This idea was soon superseded as Indo-European studies developed further during the 19th Century; Sanskrit is now regarded by linguists as an elaborated literary form of the North Indian branch of early Indo-European (see below), which also included the ancestor of later ‘Indic’ languages such as modern Hindi. But the initial view remains popular with non-mainstream thinkers, especially but not only those with North Indian or (most of all) Hindu connections. The more moderate such thinkers see Sanskrit as close to or identical with Proto-Indo-European, the more extreme see it as a world Ursprache.

Indeed, this has become almost a popular ‘myth’. Many non-linguists who would never seek to publish non-mainstream ideas have come to hold folk-linguistic views about Sanskrit similar to those outlined above. Most such people (unaware of Indo-European or of language ‘families’ generally) seem to regard Sanskrit as a general Ursprache.

Although some 200 years out of date even in its moderate form as applying only to Indo-European, this idea is very widely shared among disparate groups of thinkers: for example, David Oates, the originator of ‘Reverse Speech’ (see my earlier posts), apparently believes that Sanskrit is [regarded as] the Ursprache, and so did two members of my local philosophy discussion group until I told them otherwise.

Another common error involves the idea that the -skrit in the word Sanskrit is connected with the Latin-derived English word script. Some people actually spell the word as Sanscript (I saw this recently on a panel in a Glasgow church where the words meaning ‘peace’ were set out in several identified languages). When questioned, some report that they have assumed or imagined that the name meant ‘sacred script’ (because of Sanskrit’s links with Hinduism).

Sanskrit is, of course, a language and not a script (this crucial contrast is obscure to many non-linguists, and disastrous mis-conceptualisation ensues). The name of the abjadic-alphabetic script usually used to write Sanskrit and other North Indian languages is Devanagari or Nagari. And the word Sanskrit itself originally means ‘elaborate’, as opposed to the term Prakrit (‘simple’) which is used of the spoken North Indian Indo-European languages from which classical Sanskrit was developed.

More next time (when pos)!

Mark

For my book Strange Linguistics, see:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/books/get-book.cfm?BookID=64212

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