Talk:Sanskrit

In fact, students of both German and Sanskrit say that the similarities are sometimes quite striking [I have this on good authority, but I have no examples].

I'm a German native speaker, but unfortunately I know nearly nothing about Sanskrit. Nevertheless, I deem it very unlikely that there is any significant similarity. Sanskrit has a full-fledged flectional system featuring about 700 conjugated verb forms, I think - German has exactly two conjugated tenses and only a handful of conjugated forms. Sanskrit has eight declensional cases, German three or four. -- This list could be continued, I guess, but perhaps your authority could set me straight there.

Really striking similarities exist (AFAIK) between Sanskrit and the classical European languages like ancient Greek or Latin. For example, Sanskrit has an optative mode and an aorist tense - like Greek, but unlike most other European languages (I don't know about Farsi). Then, I once found a Sanskrit conjugation table giving some forms of the verb "ni", "to lead" - the present has the forms "nayami", "nayasi", "nayati" (...) "nayamah", "nayatha", "nayanti". This reminds me stronlgy of Latin "eram", "eras", "erat", "eramus", "eratis", "erant". These forms aren't present forms, I know, but the principle is the same.

Finally, I think it is wrong to speak of a Sanskrit "influence" on European languages. It would be better to say that they are of common origin.

---

I agree that the sentence quoted above is misleading. There are quite a few similarities between Sanskrit and the Germanic languages that you don't see in Latin or Greek (unless you know what to look for), but they are tremendously outnumbered by the similarities that Sanskrit does share with Latin and Greek.

One example of a German-Sanskrit similarity is in family member names not mentioned in the article: bhratr and duhitr (brother/bruder & daughter/tochter) do not have as obvious a relationship to the words that mean the same in Latin and Greek. Of course as you point out, the similarites are much greater between Sanskrit and, say, Greek when you look at grammatical endings. In particular, forms like the reduplicated prefix in the past perfect stem were innovations that came into PIE after the Germanic family had parted ways from what came to be Greek, Indo-Iranian, and Armenian.

Perhaps the author's informants had been unacquainted with any language with an inflectional system, other than German and Sanskrit. If they were native English speakers, the entire notion of grammatical cases and genders (and even verb conjugagtion!) is so difficult to acquire that the fact that both German and Sanskrit have such might make them seem similar.

This reminds me stronlgy of Latin "eram", "eras", "erat", "eramus", "eratis", "erant". These forms aren't present forms, I know, but the principle is the same.

It reminds you of that for a reason. As I remember from my Greek and Sanskrit classes (taken quite a while ago), PIE had two classes of verb ending suffixes -- one in which the first-person singular ended in 'o', and another in which it ended with 'mi'. Ancient Greek retained this for a while, and the first-person singular of "to be", eimi will be very familiar. In Sanskrit, the -mi ending came to replace the -o ending as a productive verb form, whereas in Italic and Germanic languages -o won out. Many, however, retained something like the 'mi' as an irregular first-person singular form for "to be", so that this provides the -m ending in Latin "sum" and English "am".

Finally, I think it is wrong to speak of a Sanskrit "influence" on European languages. It would be better to say that they are of common origin.

I totally agree with this, with the caveat that English has acquired a few Sanskrit loanwords through Hinduism.

Basically, though, I agree with all your criticisms and just wanted to shoot my mouth off.

-Ben Brumfield

---

"Sanskrit" has a link to "Prakrit". When you go there, all it does is says "See Sanskrit." Nowhere is Prakrit defined. -- corvus13

---

Corvus, thanks for pointing that out. I made a stub; if you can add more, please do -- Be bold in updating pages.

---

Language naming convention talk moved to Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (languages)

---

second language

What is meant by calling Sanskrit a "second language"? Is this a technical term, and if so, what does it mean? -Chinju

It means that it is not learned as a child was born and raised by his/her family. It is later taken on by the offspring, on his/her own, usually after adolescence, as a secondary language. It is "second", because it is in addition to his/her familial/first/native lanaguage. The first language is also called "mother tongue." --Menchi 00:33 21 May 2003 (UTC)