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4321go said:What I think about is the "Buddhism" .It is a GREAT Religion. But I don't know why Buddhism have been fade away from India.
In a way yes; I tried to find a link to Indo-European scholar Paul Thieme's 1958 Scientific American article, The Indo-European Language, but to no avail, so I am going to type it 'cause it's a vastly better summary compared to wikipedia info. It involves three figures the Italian Filippo Sassetti, the British Sir William Jones, and the Indian grammarian Panini.Tsuyoiko said:That's a good point about the scripts Lex - I never thought of that. Aren't most European languages descended from Sanscrit?
So in the sense that India not only provided the language material to spark the long distance, genetic relationship between the languages of Europe and India, but also provided a vastly different, scientific method of language analysis, Panini's Indian Grammar as a scientific model of language should be mentioned as a major contribution to humanity as well. Here are some additional links that you might find interesting.Paul Thieme said:Romance languages and Teutonic, plus Greek-these were once the center of our linguistic universe. During the past 200 years, however, linguistics has been undergoing a kind of Copernican revolution. Now the familiar European tongues have been relegated to minor places in a vaster system of languages which unites Europe and Asia. Known collectively as the Indo-European language, this superfamily is far and away the most extensive linguistic constelleation in the world. It is also the most thoroughly explored: while other language families have remained largely unknown, the Indo-European family has monopolized the attention of linguists since the 18th century. The modern discipline of linguistics is itself a product of Indo-European studies. As a result of these intensive labors we have come to know a great deal about both the geneology and the interrelationships of this rich linguistic community.
If we look at the family as a whole, several questions spring to mind. Where did these languages come from ? Every family traces its descendent from a common acestor: what was our ancestral language ? What did it sound like ? What manner of men spoke it ? How did they come to migrate over the face of the earth, spreading their tongue across the Eurasian land mass ?
Lingusitics can now provide definite-if incomplete-answers to some of these questions. We have reconstructed in substantial part the grammar and sound system of the Indo-European language, as we call this ultimate forebear of the modern Indo-European family. Although much of the original vocabulary has perished, enough of it survives in later languages so that we can contrive a short dictionary. Fro the language in turn, we can puzzle out some characteristics of Indo-European culture. We can even locate the Indo-European homeland.
We can never hope to reconstruct the Indo-European language in complete detail. The task will be immeasurably easier if the Indor-Europeans had only left written records. But the Indo-Europeans, unlike their Egyptian and Mesopotamian contemporaries, were illiterate. Their language was not simply forgotten, to be relearned by archeologists of another day. It vanished without a trace, except for the many hints that we can glean and piece together from its surviving daughter languages.
[The Discovery of the Langauge]
The first clue to the existence of an Indo-European family was uncovered with the opening of trade with India. In 1585, a little less than a century after Vasco da Gama first rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and Italian merchant named Filippo Sassetti made a startling discovery in India. He found that Hindu scholars were able to speak and write and ancient language, at least as venerable as Latin and Greek. Sassetti wrote a letter home about this language, which he called Sanscrutta (Sanskrit). It bore certain resemblances, he said, to his native Italian. Fore example, the word for "God" (deva) resembled the Italian Dio' the word for "snake" (sarpa), the Italian serpe, the numbers "seven," "eight," and "nine" (sapta, ashta, and nava), the Italian sette, otto, and nove.
What did these resemblances prove ? Sassetti may have imagined that Sanskrit was closely related to the "original language" spoken by Adam and Eve; perhaps that is why he chose "God" and "snake" as examples. Later it was thought that Sanskrit might be the ancestor of the European languages, including Greek and Latin. Finally it became clear that Sanskrit was simply a sister of the European tongues. The relationship received its first scientific statement in the "Indo-European hypothesis" by Sir William Jones, a jurist and orientalist in the employ of East India Company. Addressing the Bengal Asiatic Society in 1786, Sir William pointed out that Sanskrit, in relation to Greek and Latin,Sir William's now famous opinion founded modern linguistics. A crucial word in the sentence quoted is "roots." Jones and his successors could not have done their work without a knowledge of traditional Sanskrit grammar. Jones like every linguist since, was inspired by the great Sanskrit grammarian Panini, who sometime before 500 BC devised a remarkably accurate and systematic technique of word analysis. Instead of grouping related forms in conjugatios and declensions-as European and U.S. school-grammar does to this day-Panini's grammar analyzed the forms into their functional units: the roots, suffixes, and endings."bears and stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident: so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which perhaps no longer exists; there is similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothick and the Celtick, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanskrit."
Comparative grammar in the strictest sense was founded by a young German named Franz Bopp. In 1816 Bopp published a book on the inflection of verbs in a group of Indo-European languages: Sankrit, Persian, Greek, Latin, and the Teutonic tongues. Essentially Bopp's book was no more than the application of Panini's technique for the analysis of Sanskrit verbs. But Bopp's motive was a historicl one. By gathering cognate forms from a number of Indo-European languages he hoped to be able to infer some of the characteristics of the lost language-the "common source" mentioned by Jones-which was the parent of them all.
In the course of time Bopp's method has been systematically developed and refined. The "affinities" which Jonese saw between certain words in related languages have come to be called :correspondences," defined by precise formulas. The "Indo-European hypothesis" has been proven beyond doubt.
Tsuyoiko said:I never thought of that. Aren't most European languages descended from Sanscrit?
Yeah, when I wrote it I knew I wasn't remembering exactly right. But isn't Sanscrit closer to that root language than any of the others?Maciamo said:No. Sanskrit is related to Latin, Ancient Greek, etc. but only because all of them descend from a older Aryan language.
Tsuyoiko said:Yeah, when I wrote it I knew I wasn't remembering exactly right. But isn't Sanscrit closer to that root language than any of the others?
I wonder if it's the oldest language that is still in use? The other obvious contenders (that I can think of with my very limited knowledge!) are Hebrew and Chinese.Maciamo said:Nobody knows that. What's interesting is that Sanskrit still has native speakers in India, although it has also evolved into numerous new languages like Latin, but it's quite a long time that nobody speaks Latin as their mother-tongue anymore.
Zauriel said:Hey, How come Kama Sutra--the world's greatest lovemaking manual isn't included in the poll?
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