
Sanskrit and Lisp (2011) - yati
http://ifacethoughts.net/2011/03/15/sanskrit-and-lisp/
======
Jd
So there are several things in this article that are flat out wrong:

    
    
      (1) "No wonder so many languages are derived from it."
    

Not sure what he is referring to exactly, but Sanskrit itself is a descendent
of proto Indo-European, from which many other Western languages were derived.
So it is a near cousin to the original language of the Indo-European people,
but not the direct ancestor of Western languages (this was a misconception of
the 19th century linguists that "discovered" Sanskrit).

    
    
      (2) "It is more expressive"
     

I assume by this he means you can do more with less. To a certain extent this
is true.

    
    
      (3) Very systematic
    

This is only true to a certain degree. Classical Sanskrit is itself not the
original language, and probably the largest single pain point is the "sandhi"
rules, in which words are combined together. Although someone eventually wrote
down a large number of rules that shows how these changed together, they are
more the product of slurring of speech over time, rather than "design" per se.

    
    
      (4) "Excellent grammar"
    

Is a lot of grammar "excellent grammar" ? In Sanskrit, it does allow certain
structures that are not available elsewhere (like the existence of a dual
case), which presumably facilitate density, and, consequently, presumably also
facilitates efficiency. If so, one could argue that the grammar of Attic Greek
is more "excellent" than that of English. However, to me "excellence" is
something that depends more on the specific use case -- a language that
someone can speak and use is better than one that one cannot.

~~~
amalag
The imaginary "proto indo-european" language is a very deep seated racist
brother of the Aryan invasion theory. You can read the wikipedia article and
the start of this mythical language construct with Sir William Jones who
wanted to make his study of Sanskrit fit within his Christian worldview. He
found the Sanskrit, Latin and Greek related and decided that there is some
mythical imaginary language that preceded them. How could well educated
Britishers and Europeans come to the conclusion that Sanskrit was indeed the
ancestor of Greek and Latin.

~~~
crux
You seem to agree with the linguistic consensus that Sanskrit, Latin and Greek
are all related. You seem to depart from the consensus with the conclusion
that because they are all related, they must share an ancestor.

If that's so, how do you account for the relation between Sanskrit, Latin and
Greek (and Russian, and English...)?

Or do you deny the relation altogether? Do you have a competing theory that
you could point me to?

~~~
amalag
You want me to compete with a theory that made up an imaginary language?

~~~
gngeal
How come that "the theory that made up an imaginary language" correctly
predicted the existence of laryngeal phonemes in the Hittite language before
the Hittite language was even known to exist? Stroke of luck, that a group of
unknown consonants from an "imaginary language" appeared in a real language in
exactly the right place in the right words?

Also, the notion that the PIE reconstructions describe a "language" in the
sense that we usually understand it (a vernacular tongue of a group of people
in a single time and place) is a false one: even though the reconstructions
with very high likelihood represent individual IE language features in an old
form thereof, it would be a folly to try to slap them together and say "this
is a language that someone spoke", for the same reason you can't reconstruct
individual genes from the tree of mammals, slap them together and say "this
was the first mammal". It doesn't work like that. What you get is a
constrained probability function over possible languages, not a single
solution with 100% probability.

------
lcedp
> Here is what I came up with during our discussion...

You are looking for reasons where there is none.

* Why Brazil speaks Portuguese? * Why do we speak English now? * Why do people in Ukraine speak Russian instead of Ukrainian?

Not because Russian is more expressive. But because they were killed for doing
otherwise. It's not about language features, it's about politics, wars,
colonization, economics.

~~~
temp453463343
People primarily speak Russian in Ukraine not because they were afraid of
being killed but because it was the lingua franca of the region and it was
taught in Soviet schools. There was a lot less literature available in
Ukrainian because Ukrainian was a language spoken primarily by serfs (educated
people spoke a mixture of French and Russian).

~~~
lcedp
Maya people in America primarily speak Spanish not because they were afraid of
being killed but because it was the lingua franca of the region. Oh, wait...!

------
contingencies
Sanskrit is a festidious language that agglutinates huge numbers of tenses and
forms in to a festival complexity that is a classical feature of the Indo-
European language family. It might be great if you _feel like being really
damn specific_ , but it might also _suck_. It depends what you want to do with
it.

I would posit that Sanskrit is more like _assembly language_ (for its unique
combination of specificity, table-thumping traditionalism, and verbosity). On
the other hand, classical Chinese, which presents a roughly similar vintage
literature, is a more fluid and combinatory system for type-indistinct
component thoughts ... sort of like an extreme version of _perl_.

~~~
arnsholt
Your view of Sanskrit is probably skewed by a few things. First of all, nearly
the entire corpus of Sanskrit literature was written after (and in many cases
long, long after) it was used as a day-to-day language. It was probably
already losing ground at the time of Panini, roughly 500 BCE.

Second, what Sanskrit literature we have is highly artistic and edited
literary text, replete with hard-to-get cultural references, not ordinary
spoken language.

Finally, it's probably just plain different from whatever language you're used
to, not intrinsically harder or more complicated.

~~~
contingencies
IMHO Sanskrit _is_ both harder and more complicated than Latin, which I spent
years on before coming to a dalliance with Sanskrit and Pali. Then again,
other than Latin (which I aced), I've never had much success with Indo-
Europeans (except basic French, through drink).

~~~
gngeal
_I 've never had much success with Indo-Europeans_

Did you compose this text with the help of Google Translate, then?

------
mathattack
One could take the analogy further - for the same reason people choose C
versus LISP. :-) Sometimes structure isn't the best (or quickest) solution for
the problem at hand.

------
sravfeyn
Here's the Google Cache
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:XaBQEvN...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:XaBQEvNdzwEJ:ifacethoughts.net/2011/03/15/sanskrit-
and-lisp/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=in&client=ubuntu)

------
zeckalpha
It's quite likely that natural Sanskrit did not have those properties, and all
that has survived is the well documented formalizations of its grammar.

EDIT: By natural, I meant Vedic. Speaking as a linguist, I doubt that all of
Sanskrit was accounted for when it was formalized.

~~~
anuraj
There is nothing called natural Sanskrit(refined) - Sanskrit is a specialized
language built and used for only scholarly purposes - ordinary people always
used to communicate in Prakrit(unrefined)

------
dkeskar
Sanskrit is considered a "refined" language, implying serious effort to
systematize phonemes, grammar, declension and even verb classification
distinguishing recipient of actions (1-10 ganas, PP/AP padas, etc.).
Refinement can give subtlety, accuracy, concision etc. but does not
automatically and objectively mean "universal", "perfect" or "excellent", even
though proponents conflate those aspects.

IMO, Sanskrit persisted as the language of metaphysical and scientific
treatises for a long time because of practical advantages. A large library of
concepts, allowed easy reuse and concision [1]. Being trained in Vedanga
(phonetics, metre, grammar, etymology, etc.) allowed practitioners to compose
new sutras easily, much like PhD students using mathematical notations and
proofs in papers.

It was used conversationally, at least in courts and debates. Its decline into
a quasi-venerated read-only language over the last 1000 years would be an
interesting (and contentious) topic for dissertation.

[1] Patanjali Yoga Sutras [http://www.arlingtoncenter.org/Sanskrit-
English.pdf](http://www.arlingtoncenter.org/Sanskrit-English.pdf)

------
redofrac
Much like Latin, a good deal of the regularity is _because_ Sanskrit is only a
written language.

~~~
statictype
Not sure what you mean but I believe Sanskrit was a spoken language, written
down in each region's local script before being formalized in Devanagari.

~~~
gngeal
I think what he means is that what people actually spoke every day was as
different from our bookish notions of what Sanskrit is as the language of a
poor farmer or a slave in Ancient Rome was from the writings of Cicero. You
really can't equate the two things.

~~~
yati
I completely agree here. The moment common people start speaking a language -
any language - there will be irregularities and native elements introduced
into the spoken variant. This will especially be true if the language is as
tough to learn as Sanskrit or even Classical Chinese and Latin.

------
eksith
Very apt comparison considering I have the same problem with Lisp (and Erlang)
as Sanskrit

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5452038](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5452038)

------
scotty79
Expressive, systematic, powerful - it looks atractive but none of that counts.
What counts is ease of being copied and easy assimilation of unprecise copies.
That's why PHP rules the web and DNA rules the life and english rules the
world despite their messines.

~~~
yati
English is _not_ popular because it is "easy to copy" or any nonsense like
that. As already mentioned, people who didn't speak English were killed.
Likewise in the PHP boom, people who did not write PHP were underpaid(not all,
but you get my point) - and BTW, the Web is not all a programmer has to/can
hack on. Not sure why you put DNA in there, but I think the DNA is pretty
expressive, powerful(packs a lot in a lot less) and Darwin has helped us
understand evolution as a pretty systematic process. At least do some basic
homework before making bold claims.

~~~
gngeal
_English is not popular because it is "easy to copy" or any nonsense like
that._

English may not be easy to copy but it's comparatively "bland". "Bland" in
this case means "has a smaller number of marked features". For example, it has
no tones. It's always easier for someone speaking a tonal language to learn a
toneless language than the other way round. Sanskrit has a complex system of
synthetic inflection, which is a rather marked feature, and all speakers of
analytic languages would hate your guts for forcing it onto them if you tried
to make them learn it. In many ways, Sanskrit is like Ancient Greek. You spend
a year learning something that other languages can do without (and do so
without muddling the meaning of the text), and even if you learn it, you'll
still be doing mistakes quite a lot of the time. Such a language would never
have a chance of spreading as an international medium of communication.

------
pramalin
Sanskrit is an artificial language. No wonder why it resembles programming
languages.

~~~
ankitml
At the level you are talking about, All spoken/written languages are
artificial.

~~~
X4
haha, that's true (1:0 for @ankitml)

