Sanskrit As A Language Of Science(kgfindia.com) |
Sanskrit As A Language Of Science(kgfindia.com) |
Everyone likes to claim that their old sophisticates were scientists before the scientific revolution in Europe. The basic insistence on repeatability, independent of any individual, and trumping any logical system, wasn't there, though. Thus mathematics flourished throughout the world for thousands of years, and philosophy, too, but not science. Vaisheshika had atomic theory? So did Democritus, several centuries earlier. Nyaya was doing logical syllogism? Yeah, Aristotle was doing that, again a couple centuries earlier. We don't think of Aristotle or Democritus as scientists, though, because they wouldn't test their ideas.
The whole thing is the ill informed cant of a bigot who wants to ensconce his particular folk tale that glorifies his heritage and denigrates all others.
Modern linguistics owes quite a lot to Sanskrit, e.g. Chomsky's famous notation, thematic roles in semantics, controlled grammar, compositional semantics etc.
I suggest the following article in the AI magazine which merely touches the surface of what makes Sanskrit stand out.
http://www.aaai.org/ojs/index.php/aimagazine/article/view/46...
The vitriolic tone of your comment sounds much the same as what you wrote above, which in turn makes me ignore it. Not sure if you disagree with the article, or are merely offended that it denigrates your heritage.
http://www.historytoday.com/mihir-bose/india%E2%80%99s-missi...
Readers from India who read widely are probably already well aware of the controversy about many of these issues (which have considerable influence on domestic politics in India and on foreign relations between India and neighboring countries). I point this out for the benefit of readers of HN who haven't read much about the history of India and who may not be aware that not all statements in the 2009 speech kindly submitted here enjoy agreement even within India.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_India#Historiography
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aryan_Invasion_Theory_(history_...
In particular, the person who gave the speech
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markandey_Katju
has wide-ranging interests but has no specialized training as a linguist or any kind of scientist, but rather is a former judge and political commentator
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/ten-ways-of-being-foolish/...
from a long family line of lawyers and politicians. The speech is not really about language, nor is it about science, but it is about politics, and I am aware that some readers of Hacker News take great care to keep discussions of politics off Hacker News, in the interest of finding more articles about the core subjects of Hacker News here.
Her book and articles on Somnath are very interesting.
"India" was an extremely advanced civilization that suffered under the Mughals and the British. Before these "foreign invaders" arrived, there existed a body of knowledge that remains unsurpassed.
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This is a revisionist version of history based on cultural supremacy. It has become a compelling political argument, since it contains truisms that are either difficult to test, or jingoism that's hard to resist.
The controversy stems from the truisms, many of which are repeated in Justice Katju's speech. At it's heart however is this idea of India as an ancient nation.
The modern nation state as we know it today was stitched together from multiple nations by the British. Before them, the Mughals also ruled a vast area, but the ruling classes were completely separate (culturally, linguistically etc.) from the people they ruled. And the Mughals never ruled the south, where the Tamils continue to represent one of the last surviving classic (comparable to the Greek etc.) civilizations in the world.
There are those who choose to pick a particular culture as the dominant culture and present that as "India". However, that isn't necessarily true.
India is a very diverse country with many languages and complicated ethnic politics. English would be a convenient national language, but is untenable for obvious historical political reasons. Some people in India feel the same way about Hindi. This person is arguing for Sanskrit as a neutral alternative, but language is political in India. (By contrast, Latin and Ancient Greek aren't things anyone argues about in Europe today.)
The prevailing theory is that the IVC bequeathed culture (religion, customs, knowledge, architecture, etc.) to all parts of the region. It is believed that the IVC inhabitants spread east and southwards to fill all parts of India. The IVC collapsed (1900 BCE), and around 1000 years afterwards (1000 BCE), a branch of proto-Indo European language speakers is believed to have moved south from the Caucuses into Iran/India. The language they spoke (Sanskrit) is believed to have taken on influences by the indigenous language taken hold in the northern parts of India, but considering their much fewer numbers and nomadic lifestyle at the time of their arrival, their genetic contribution is thought to be minimal. After the British colonial scholar Robert Caldwell, a scholar in Sanskrit, noticed the difference between the languages of north India (Indo-European > Sanskrit derived) and southern India (a distinct language family, of which Tamil has the least influence of Sanskrit), he used the term "Aryan" to describe the northern languages and "Dravidian" to describe the southern languages. (side note: Caldwell was opposed to and upset with attempts by people to project the terms Aryan and Dravidian for the purposes of racism and hegemony; he personally believed in the opposite) It is also believed that at the time of arrival of the Sanskrit speakers to India from the north, the existing indigenous culture (i.e., of the people from IVC) heavily influenced that of the arriving people. Among the first writings in Sanskrit (Veda scriptures), the earliest shows the most indigenous influence (e.g., water-based imagery), and the later Veda writings show a diminishing influence towards a more Sanskritic one (e.g., fire-based imagery). In light of all of this, scholars say that pretty much the only evidence we have that "Aryans", as a distinct group, existed is their language.
It is widely believed that the language of the IVC is most closely related to Dravidian languages, and the best attempts to decipher their writing comes from using Tamil as the starting point. An interesting, recent paper from last year puts forward a very compelling advancement in interpreting the script, and in the process, it further fleshes out the relationship between IVC, the culture of Indian peoples, Sanskrit writings and Dravidian languages:
http://harappa.drupalgardens.com/content/indus-fish-swam-gre...
Because of Caldwell's linguistic analysis and the convenient role it played in political maneuvering for accruing power in British colonial India (by the British, and by people in India regionally and caste-wise), the division along "Aryan"/"Dravidian" lines became seen as a racial one. (If there is a difference genetically today, it may be from the occasional invasion by empires from the Middle East in the north of India over the millennia, from which the south was largely insulated by the Deccan Plateau). As the idea of this racial divide survives while India is now divided into states based on language (and the southern states are a minority), and given the roughly 90/10 split of Hindus and Muslims, chauvinism along religious, geographic, and linguistic lines has gradually coalesced. It's to the point where some Indians want to portray the IVC as Sanskritic/Aryan (and Sanskrit-speakers as the originators of Hinduism because the oldest known Hindu writings are in Sanskrit), even if they have to blatantly distort facts: http://safarmer.com/frontline/horseplay.pdf But more commonly, you'll find resistance among such people from accepting a proto-Dravidian language hypothesis of the IVC in favor of interpreting the IVC in a Sanskritic light: http://www.sanskrit.org/www/Hindu%20Primer/induscivilization...
2. Direct Quote "A language was created by the great grammarian Panini, namely Classical Sanskrit, which enabled scientific ideas to be expressed with great precision, logic and elegance. Science requires precision. "
This is when i stopped reading. Not because i disagree with sanskrit having provided precision so many years ago(i have no clue). But whatever sparse sanskrit i picked up living in Allahabad, India is very imprecise for modern science.
I'll add that at the University of Chicago, someone noted that modern linguistics really had its launch when German philologists in the 19th century encountered Sanskrit and the Sanskrit grammarians. Not just in grammar itself, but in phonemics as well.
Wikipedia appears to verify in part:
"This body of work became known in 19th century Europe, where it influenced modern linguistics initially through Franz Bopp, who mainly looked at Pāṇini [most famous Sanskrit grammarian]. Subsequently, a wider body of work influenced Sanskrit scholars such as Ferdinand de Saussure, Leonard Bloomfield, and Roman Jakobson. Frits Staal discussed the possible European impact of Indian ideas on language. After outlining the various aspects of the contact, Staal posits the theory that the idea of formal rules in language, first proposed by de Saussure in 1894, and finally developed by Chomsky in 1957, based on which formal rules were also introduced in computational languages, may indeed lie in the European exposure to the formal rules of Paninian grammar. In particular, de Saussure, who lectured on Sanskrit for three decades, may have been influenced by Pāṇini and Bhartrihari; his idea of the unity of signifier-signified in the sign is somewhat similar to the notion of Sphoṭa. More importantly, the very idea that formal rules can be applied to areas outside of logic or mathematics, may itself have been catalyzed by Europe's contact with the work of Sanskrit grammarians." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_linguistics#India
More interesting reading:
http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/
Esperanto is actually full of linguistic and cultural bias, as this website carefully demonstrates, and Esperanto is not a successful language for international scientific communication.
Whenever I make this point to others, I encounter a lot of anger. A lot of people seem unable to comprehend the fact that the modern nation state was stitched together, and they demand that we should have a monolithic state that speaks the same language.
Independent India has already gone through this once. The original constitution mandated that Hindi should be made the national language. For obvious cultural and political reasons, when the time came to implement it, there was a backlash from states where Hindi is not spoken. This is especially true in Tamil Nadu, where the pro-Tamil movement altered the political landscape for ever. Congress, the largest political party in India has never won an election in Tamil Nadu after the pro-Tamil movement. in 1963, the constitution was amended to make it explicit that English and Hindi could be used for communication between state and central governments.
I think the status-quo works out well for everyone. I see no reason to impose a langage on people who does not speak or identify with it.
Not that true. There is a growing political problem with the use of English in EU, also at the technical level (XML element names, for examples). At the same time, using any of the other national languages is a no-go. One of the proposed solutions is to use Latin for technical details and leave national languages for the documentation and other user-facing documents.
An example of Latin-as-neutral-language is LexDania, an old Danish XML format for laws; in LexDania you have _arca_, not container, _linea_, not paragraph.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4061784
for previous discussion here on HN about how little is actually known about the Indus Valley civilization, which may have had very little influence indeed on subsequent civilizations. The language spoken in the Indus Valley cities is unknown, and may not be recoverable, as there is not even general agreement that the Indus Valley inscriptions are writing (as contrasted with proto-writing ornamentation, a phenomenon attested in several other centers of world civilization).
And as far as the Heras/Parpola Dravidian-based deciphering briefly mentioned in the talk, a much more expanded (and more compelling) deciphering is provided in the paper I linked above, called "The Indus Fish Swam in the Great Bath" by Iravatham Mahadevan. Ira. Mahadevan and Asko Parola are the the top 2 scholars of the IVC script. The paper also indicates several parallels to its other contemporary civilizations. That paper comes from the official website of the scholars involved in excavating and interpreting IVC sites.
On an interesting side note, according to Wikipedia, Müller also said, "the blackest Hindus represent an earlier stage of Aryan speech and thought than the fairest Scandinavians". That statement is true, even though Müller was not alive when the IVC was discovered -- swastika symbol clay seals have been found in the IVC, meaning that the swastika predates anything 'Aryan'. And there's similar irony with the red-and-black colors, in case you're wondering.