Timeline for Is Sanskrit really the mother of all languages?
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26 events
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| Dec 12, 2023 at 10:20 | comment | added | Araucaria - him | @Draconis I don't know JL well enough, but maybe we could find a linguist who did to give us a v brief bio? Also am on hard deadline and won't be signing in for a couple of weeks. Can I hand this over to you folks? | |
| Dec 9, 2023 at 17:04 | comment | added | Draconis♦ | @Araucaria-him Oh no, I hadn't! Yes, I think we should say something about that. | |
| Dec 9, 2023 at 12:23 | comment | added | Araucaria - him | I assume that you've heard the sad news that Prof Lawler passed away a couple of weeks ago? They've got a meta post on EL&U about him. Don't know if you might want to link to that as a featured post here,or maybe do a more linguisticky post either on the site proper or on META, here? [Didn't know how best to ping you, but Sanskrit was one of JL's areas of interest, I believe. So maybe fitting. | |
| Nov 13, 2021 at 23:25 | review | Suggested edits | |||
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| Jun 17, 2020 at 9:49 | history | edited | CommunityBot |
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| Nov 8, 2019 at 16:49 | comment | added | Draconis♦ | @vectory "There are dozens and dozens more correspondences like these, where features disappeared in one branch but survived in another, or were innovated in one branch but not in another, and so on. So while it's clear that Ancient Greek, Sanskrit, Hittite, and so on are related, it's also clear that none is "mother" to the others: they're more like "siblings" or "cousins", with a common ancestor." | |
| Nov 8, 2019 at 16:49 | comment | added | Draconis♦ | @vectory As I said in my answer, "Sanskrit preserves some features that disappeared in other branches: for example, the injunctive is well-attested in Vedic Sanskrit, but is uncommon in Homer's Greek, and disappears entirely by Plato's time. And other branches preserve some features which have disappeared in Sanskrit: Hittite retains a phoneme that disappeared entirely in Sanskrit (but left plenty of traces showing that it must once have existed)." | |
| Nov 8, 2019 at 8:58 | comment | added | vectory | ... important change in the Interpretation of Devas, small gods deemed bad in one branch, but good in another, so these devas might reflect or even embody the cause for the Indo-Iranian lineages to repell. So it's not only the phonology and a typologically more likely but nowhere certain direction of phonetic development, but the semantical and cultural artifacts. Nevertheless, I'm mainly asking for this evidence of the alleged developments as is used for reconstruction, that is, the sound laws, and why we a Family-tree with Sanskrit at the root would not be an invariant of the established one | |
| Nov 8, 2019 at 8:44 | comment | added | vectory | I could not give a better answer, but I can criticize. It should be economic to criticize only the accepted answer. It drew an argument from authority, merely implying that it amounts to evidence, which I understand rests mainly on phonologic. These aren't obvious, perhaps too complex for a short answer, but it would have been desirable to show, by example, that they don't have it all backwards. While, the distribution of IE people and later Indo-Iranian (whence Indo-Aryan whence Sanskrit) is not perfectly understood in Archeology, the textual comparison with the Avestas shows an ... | |
| Nov 8, 2019 at 2:35 | comment | added | Draconis♦ | @vectory There's a difference between a myth and a specific sequence of words. While some myths are thought to go back to Proto-Indo-European times, the specific sequences of words relating those myths are not; when those specific words were put together in a specific sequence, we say the text was "composed". Normalization and redaction happened much later, but that's not what I'm talking about here. | |
| Nov 8, 2019 at 2:30 | comment | added | vectory | since the rigveda contains myths that some are thought to reflect indo european myths, it is not meaningful to say when the "majority" was "composed" because that gives undue weight to an irrelevant measure of normalization (like, the majority of your extremities is under a meter, so it's fair to say you are probably between 1500 and 1250 mm tall) and it also lacks any understanding what "composition" means in the context of oral tradition (like, measuring your shaddow). | |
| Sep 7, 2019 at 12:26 | comment | added | Kaz | If humans trace back to a single great-great...-great grandmother, and she spoke one language, then that would be it. | |
| Sep 5, 2019 at 17:04 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | @LjL While proto- does not directly mean ‘reconstructed’, that is an inherent property of it. We do not call the ‘first of its kind’ language a proto-language if the split from a parent language (and thus the terminus post quem of a language with that name) happened within the recorded history of that language. We don’t speak of a ‘Proto-East Norse’ or ‘Proto-Brazilian Portuguese’, for example. | |
| Sep 5, 2019 at 14:21 | comment | added | jlawler | Though the Vedic texts had inter-coder reliability, while surviving texts were riddled with scribal corruption. | |
| Sep 5, 2019 at 14:14 | history | edited | Draconis♦ | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Sep 5, 2019 at 14:11 | comment | added | Draconis♦ | @fdb Good point! | |
| Sep 5, 2019 at 12:18 | vote | accept | Jvlnarasimharao | ||
| Sep 5, 2019 at 10:45 | comment | added | fdb | In your first paragraph you should have distinguished between the "surviving texts" in Egyptian, Sumerian, Akkadian, Mycenaean Greek etc., which are actual physical documents, and the Vedic texts, which were not written down until many centuries after their assumed time of composition. | |
| Sep 4, 2019 at 22:27 | comment | added | Carly | @Draconis scare quotes because those are such loaded terms that I am using them broadly for convenience so as to not unpack subtleties, not definitively | |
| Sep 4, 2019 at 22:27 | comment | added | Carly | well put @LjL . | |
| Sep 4, 2019 at 22:26 | comment | added | Draconis♦ | @LjL Agreed. I have also seen "proto-" used specifically for hypothetical reconstructions, and "common" used instead when talking about the actual language—as in, nobody ever spoke Proto-Indo-European, they spoke Common Indo-European, and Proto-Indo-European is our model of that. It doesn't seem like a very useful distinction, though. | |
| Sep 4, 2019 at 22:22 | comment | added | LjL | It's also not automatically true that we can't verify our theories about protolanguages (I don't think this was claimed, but I just thought it was worth noting). Actual Proto-Indo-European is extremely unlikely to ever be attested, but for example, we suddenly found ourselves able to read Hittite and to suddenly verify some hypotheses about Indo-European that we had made. I think this shows that there is no need for scarequotes because in this way, comparative linguistics is or can potentially be an experimental science, although it's rare to find precious texts that verify our theories. | |
| Sep 4, 2019 at 22:18 | comment | added | LjL | That's not what "proto-" means though, even though it's definitely true we don't have direct evidence (written material). "Proto-" as a prefix comes from Greek and means "first" as well as being used to refer to "original" or "ancestral". It simply refers to the fact that we assume these languages to have the "first of their kind", as in, for instance, the first Indo-European language, all the others of which are derived from. If we had direct attestation, well, we'd probably use its own name, and not "Proto-Something", sure. It's just not what the "proto-" refers to. | |
| Sep 4, 2019 at 21:35 | comment | added | Draconis♦ | @Carly Why the scarequotes? It's true, we have no way to directly verify our reconstructions, and they're reasonably well-founded assumptions. | |
| Sep 4, 2019 at 20:22 | comment | added | Carly | for those keep score at home: "proto-" means here hypothesized. we do not have kindles or youtube channels from 5000 BC to "directly" "verify" the extrapolation (cf: how to pronounce latin). it is a "reasonable" "assumption" of the precursor to the INDO-EUROPEAN tongues | |
| Sep 4, 2019 at 19:16 | history | answered | Draconis♦ | CC BY-SA 4.0 |