I’ve founds that I really enjoy learning another language. It’s been a fun mix of language learning and cultural exploration and all of it’s been very interesting. Even the difficult parts were still interesting and held my attention. I really enjoyed being able to explore a non-traditional language and I will continue this Sanskrit practice as I dive further into language acquisition and yoga practice which will solidify this cultural, language based  immersion.

The format of being able to post blogs and discuss in class about our learning experiences has been really beneficial. In the past I’ve found it really difficult to stay focused or stay on track but by having a language learning community it’s a lot easier to stay motivated. It’s been so impressive hearing all of the wonderful things others have been learning this semester. I’ve really enjoyed being able to learn about other cultures that are really diverse and different. It’s been cool to see the number of Korean learners and to hear the different ways that they’ve been tackling language learning. I enjoyed the cultural blog posts especially and it gave me excuses to explore parts of the language and culture that I knew very little about. Overall it’s been a really positive experience being able to take part in this community of language learners. I will continue my language acquisition through continuing my online and book learning and by eventually getting to read primary Sanskrit sources.

I found some parts difficult in language learning such as keeping on track with the speed of language acquisition or the completion of tasks. In some ways Sanskrit was much more difficult to learn than other languages I’ve learned, such as French, because the resources and ways of learning are much difficult. There aren’t TV shows, movies, or modern novels to practice language skills with. Most of the learning comes from ancient texts that are usually religious or poetry based, and then there are a lot of cultural focused resources and grammar guides. I learned a lot from studying the yoga books and vocabulary, and it was really interesting to see the words that I’ve been familiar with in the past but am studying them under a different linguistic lens now.

I liked some of the classes/activities that focused on morphemes and word building. There was one activity where we were piecing together meanings of morphemes and entire words in a very agglutinative language (I think it was a Native American one). I’ve done similar exercises in the past and it was cool to see how fast I could do it after learning it over a year beforehand originally. I really enjoyed some of the readings on language acquisition and the readings on bilingualism: the one from the New York Times and the other from ScienceLine. I remember studying about bilingualism in my intro to psychology course and it was cool to see the concepts all come together across departments. I’d like to know more about the disappearance of languages and efforts to preserve these dying languages, since I don’t think we talked about that too much.

• Learning Journal 14:  Summarize your work this semester, the progress you made and the difficulties you encountered.

This semester’s been really interesting and tough! It was really cool to be able to try and tackle a language which which I am familiar, but still feels so foreign. I discovered that in many ways Sanskrit is more similar to English that learning a language of a different origin (like Sino-Tibetan). I discovered/confirmed that Sanskrit is still really similar to Nepali and I was able to expand my vocabulary in both languages. Overall I immensely expanded my vocabulary, have a grasp of noun declension, increased my cultural knowledge, and expanded my yoga undertakings. I think my format of focusing on both grammar and traditional structure and also yoga vocabulary has been really impactful for me. Sanskrit studies are increasing as Westerners become more interested in yoga practice, and I succeeded in being more able to understand the culture and meaning behind these mantras, aasanas (poses), and general spiritual terms. I found some of the grammar pretty difficult, and I still feel like I have so much to learn. The noun declension was really hard since I’ve never had to study a language with that structure before. The sandhi/vowel agreement rules are also difficult and sometimes when I’m writing my own sentences I slip up. Overall though, it’s been fun and meaningful and I will definitely continue my Sanskrit studies!

This is an example of a Sanskrit Hindu mantra. I've been studying yoga terms in conjunction with my Sanskrit study, and the mantras are part of my Sanskrit yoga book. My handwriting's still pretty messy (in both English and Sanskrit) but I've definitely become a lot more confident with it and can just transliterate directly from English-Devanagari usually. Sometimes the conjunct consonants still trip me up though if I'm not used to writing them. A lot of Eastern and Western yoga practitioners use these mantras during their practice to help with clarity and focus. 

For this cultural post I am focusing on Sanskrit and Hindu classical poetry. Although Sanskrit is most known to be studied for its purely religious text in the forms of the vedas or epics of the Ramayana or Mahabarata, there is a great repository of Sanskrit poetry that is not purely part of the religious canon. I found a book of Sanskrit poetry in the library and I was really surprised by some of the subject matter and quality of the writing. Much of it is heavy in nature and eroticism. In this post, I’ll focus on the section “spring” which captures a description of the season and a woman’s gaze. The book only gives the English translation, which is a bit disappointing since I’d really like to see the original Sanskrit verses. I’ll copy some of the verses here:

Methinks that fire stole into the flame trees

In guise of winter frost

And it is he who made the forest dark

With smoke of burgeoning twigs.

How else, to tortue the poor hearts

Of absent travelers’ wives

Could he produce in guise of flowers

These blood-red rows of flame?

Bright chains of amaranth about their hips,

Fresh mango blossoms at their ears,

The red ashoka on their breasts

And maadhavii within their hair,

Their bodies rouged all over

With yellow pollen of the baluka:

Such is our lasses’ costume; may its advent bring joy to lusty lads

I’m not that familiar with non-religious Sanskrit poetry, so I found these verses interesting and surprising. The first stanza feels so cross cultural. I’ve read a lot of European renaissance and middle ages poetry, and these lines feel like they could easily fit in by any of those famous poets. The nature imagery and lines about flame, forests, and wives feel very universal. The next stanza was more surprising. There are a few Sanskrit specific words , italicized here. These lines are so sensual and beautiful and I was surprised with the intimate descriptions of women’s bodies. I find it so interesting how erotic Indian/Hindu art often is, but the culture today is still very repressive of the outward expression of women’s bodies or sexuality.

Here's my slides from my Sanskrit Baghavad Gita presentation: 

Sanskrit%20Presentation.pptx

Here's my slides from my Sanskrit Baghavad Gita presentation: 

Sanskrit%20Presentation.pptx

Resurgence of Sanskrit in Modern India 

Indian president Modi and other Indian politicians have pushed for a resurgence in Sanskrit learning in modern India. The new government mandates the study of Sanskrit in many of India’s schools. Many hail this as a way to preserve tradition and keep Indian and Hindu culture alive. Sanskrit is also useful as a building block to learning other Indian languages from which it was derived, such as Hindi, Bengali, or Marathi. Sanskrit is not widely spoken, but over 10,000 Indians claimed to fluently speak Sanskrit as a main language on India’s last census. The language is also kept alive by religious ceremony and Hindu priests who must memorize the language or at least parts of it. Some Indians think this is a great move that will promote nationalism, unity, and a passion for tradition. Others claim that a focus on teaching the language in schools takes away from students who could be learning more practical foreign languages such as French or Spanish.

https://www.thoughtco.com/the-concept-of-time-1770059

Hinduism has a very different releationship with time than the traditional Western, linear tradition. Much of Hinduism relates to a circular view of time and life overall, as seen in the various reincarnations of the main Hindu gods, and of the cycle of moksha (reincarnation). Time in Hinduism is cyclical and constantly revolves around creation and destruction. Everything is timeless and exists simultaneously. This all gets a little more metaphysical than the average Western understanding of time, though! On a more literal note, it is possible to just tell time in a normal conversation without getting into deep philosophical conversations. The Sanskrit way of telling time involves saying the number and then adding “vaadanum” to it to mean “o’clock”. For example, ekam is 1 and ekavaadanam is 1 o’clock. The ‘m’ is dropped because this is initially nasalized and it follows the rules of sandhi, which basically mean adding/dropping letters with combinations to be easier to say. There’s a lot of sandhi rules but lets not get into that now!

There tend to be more estimations in time and people tend to be less strict about being on time in modern Indian culture, from what I’ve experienced/read about. For example I’ve found that people are more likely to round the time to the nearest half hour or quarter hour than an American or European. So they would round 5:10 to 5 whereas a Westerner might be more likely to give the precise minutes. There’s also less of an obsession with being precisely on time or early and it’s much more acceptable to be late without worrying about giving a grandiose excuse. In Nepal, I found that people often blamed traffic for being even an hour or two late, even if they were walking there! I don’t know how much this plays into the nonlinear concepts of time, but I suspect it has something to do with it.

Learning Journal # 13

One interesting thing I learned this week: Sanskrit doesn't have stress on a syllable/word like English or most European languages have. For example, in English, you will read this sentence with an emphasis on 'you' because it was italicized. But Sanskrit doesn't have that grammatical/linguistic structure. Instead if you want to emphasize something, you must use a separate word, "eva" after the word you want to add emphasis to.

In English, you could use the phrase "that is my horse and "that is my horse" and there would be a different connotation to these sentences. In Sanskrit you have to add additional bits of meaning.

Ex.

naaro viira eva = That man is a hero.

naara eva viira = That man is a hero.

Learning Journal # 12

This journal talks about the tatpurushah, a type of Sanskrit compound. Sanskrit is in love with compound words. We’re familiar with these in English, but Sanskrit takes it way farther, to the point where you basically can have limitlessly long words. There’s some poems that have words that take up dozens of lines because the compound rules were enacted to keep on adding adjective to noun to sound poetic. Anyways, the tatpurushah is basically a rule for creating compounds. An English example is “singer-songwriter”. In Sanskrit, it’s seen in the combination of “krsno hastah” (black hand) into “krshnahastah”. It involves a lot of samdhi changes (shifts in vowels to make a word easier to say). There’s pretty standardized rules though, so all it takes it practice to be able to recognize and form the tatpurushah words.

Ex. “sundaraa ashvaah” (beautiful horse) → sundaraashvaah

“Niilaani phalaani” → nilaaphalani

Learning Journal # 11

I’ve been learning about the 8 limbs of yoga from a philosophical/spiritual approach that incorporates the Sanskrit terminology. Ashtanga refers to the 8 total limbs of yoga. Yoga is defined as a practical way of living happily in the world while gradually moving one’s consciousness inward. Yoga is NOT just a workout class; this is only a small segment of the larger practice of yoga that is ultimately a spiritual pursuit. These are the limbs of yoga:

• Yama- social ethics, “restraints”

• Niyama- personal ethics, “internal restraints”

• aasans - posture, sitting (what most westerners think of Yoga)

• Praanaayaama- breath regulation

• Pratuaahaara- internalization of the senses, “drawing back”

• dhaaranaa - focus, concentration

• Dhyaana- complete absorption

I will go more in depth into these practices and Sanskrit/English meanings behind these in later journals.

Learning Journal # 10

I’ve switched into my focus on Sanskrit and yoga terms. A lot of this is vocabulary, cultural, and context based rather than just a focus on pure grammar. A quote from my textbook says “key Sanskrit terminology/pronunciation can deepen knowledge of the yogic path and give deeper understanding of yoga aasanas”. Although Western yoga is often focused on the physical postures (aasanas), there are actually 7 other limbs of yoga. I want to understand the Sanskrit names for yoga terms and poses (aasanas) because it keeps a deeper, core understanding of the yoga practice and because English translations often differ. My book gives what I think is a great description of this perspective: “The Indian process of learning is largely based on viewing an object from a variety of angles, thus seeing it in its complete form”. This perspective is driving my desire to learn Sanskrit.

Learning Journal 7

It’s been so weird finding out how similar the vocab of Nepali and Sanskrit is. I have a small/moderate vocab understanding of Nepali, but it’s definitely been helping me with understanding the roots of so many words. It’s crazy that language could change that little, since Nepali was derived from Sanskrit thousands of years beforehand! I’ll give a few examples from words that are very similar or the same between the two languages. Pardon my spelling, since I’m going off the Nepali from memory and I learned a lot of it orally.

Sanskrit Nepali

deva/devi (god)

chandra/chandramaa (moon)

hasta/haat (hand)

sarpa/sarpa (snake)

chaura/chera (thief)

phala/pharphul (fruit)

duhkha/dukha (pain)

agni/aago (fire)

There’s also so many religious words that are directly the same still, but I won’t list those. It’s just amazing to me that these seemingly random, basic words have changed so little. In these ways I find learning Sanskrit to be almost easier than learning other languages because it’s so easy to derive the root and find the derivative words as well. I’d like to know more about how quickly other languages change. I know that Old English is entirely a different language to modern English and that change happened in only a couple hundred years. Is it geography or a lack of migration that has kept Sanskrit/Nepali so similar?

Learning Journal # 8

Sandhi, Sandhi, Sandhi. This will be the bane of my existence.

Sanskrit has so many rules!

Sandhi basically refers to the vowel and consonant shifts that occur when certain letters are next to each other. It’s kinda like how a/an works in English, or how le/l’ works in French. The vowels will be modified or dropped to become easier to say, or to flow better. Most of the time these changes make sense, but there’s just so many of them! There are both external rules (changes between words) and internal rules (changes within a word). A common rule would be that no two vowels should be next to each other.

There’s a lot of changes that I find make it harder to locate the case or gender/number of a word. For example, a rule is that in front of any vowel except ‘a’, the ending ‘h’ is dropped. Ex. narah icchati → nara icchati. Then you just keep adding rules for each vowel and type of consonant. It’s definitely going to take a lot of memorization!

Learning Journal # 9

Pronouns!

These aren’t really used that often from what I can tell. But when they are, it’s confusing. My journal page above lists the different forms of mad (me)/tvad (you)/tad(it/that/this). We have these in English too, but it’s been tricky learning them all over especially when the forms are so different. For example, “mad” in the singular object form is “mam” in the dual is “aavam”, in the plural is “asaman”. Tvad also takes some pretty big changes. In the singular, it is “tvaam”, dual “yuvaam”, and plural “yuusman”

Also I recently discovered this declension table maker and it’s so helpful! http://sanskrit.inria.fr/cgi-bin/sktdeclin?q=tvad;g=Any

• Reflect on how knowing a language's history can help you learn the language. To what family does your language belong? What sounds, words, or structures exemplify periods of contact with other cultures?

I find the origins of Sanskrit very interesting. It derives from Indo-European, just like English and many other European languages. It has been compared to Latin and (Ancient) Greek because of its similar linguistic derivations and its ancient history. Here’s a language family chart that includes Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin:

Sanskrit is derived from the Indo-Iranian language family just as English is derived from Germanic. Many Indian and South Asian languages remain very similar to Sanskrit still in both vocabulary and structure. Hindi is the largest native language of India and it shares many similarities with Sanskrit. There are many words from Sanskrit which overlap in English sounds or meaning, which might reflect the Proto-Indo-European roots or other cultural contact. Some words are strikingly similar between English and Sanskrit, including “Jangala”-Jungle; “Manas”-Mind; “Manu”-Man; “Gau”-Cow; “Matr”-Mother; “Naas”-Nose. There are so many of these similarities, and it still feels really weird to recognize them in their modern English form when I’m trying to read a Sanskrit sentence.

Learning Journal 5

In all the Sanskrit resources I’ve used, it’s been a really different experience than in my learning any other language. Since Sanskrit is an ancient language and often used in religious, poetry-like epics, its structure comes off as more nature oriented than my other language experiences. For example, in each text I’ve learned the word for “elephant” (gajah), “horse” (ashva) and “deer” (mrgha) in the first few lessons. I think this must be representative of the frequency of these words in Sanskrit nexts. I don’t remember learning those animal words at first when I was taught French, which more focused on food or school. This seems to be an interesting cultural reference. I don’t know how much of that is because Sanskrit is ancient and often used for religious purposes or how much is related to the culture that used the language.

Image: "Sanskrit" as it's traditionally written. Directly translated into English, it would be "Sam(nasalized 'a')skrtam

To linguists, Sanskrit is often an origin of controversy. South Asian and Western scholars have different ideas on the geographic origin and significance of the origin. When Sanskrit was first largely opened to the Western world by William Jones, ‘father of linguistics’ in the mid 1700’s, he admired it at the greatest language he has ever seen:

“The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and 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 a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanscrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family (William Jones).”

At the start of Western Sanskrit study, the language was admired as the pinnacle of language, culture, and religious expression. But some Indian linguists claim that over time, the West has lost its admiration and respect for Sanskrit and India. This is shown in the term “Indo-European”, claims Indian linguist Varun Singh, which places the “Indo” in a marginalized position to the “European” (Singh 2017):

“Sense of European superiority, which guides and drives the present status, has undivided support of Western scholarship spanning several disciplines, particularly those devoted to the Indo-European cause, study of ancient languages including Sanskrit, the practitioners of Indo-European or historical linguistics and more recently the rapidly evolving field of genetics. Sadly, India has so far lacked specialists in these fields who could take on and redress the kind of imbalance generated by the specious Western scholarship (Singh 2017).”

Colonialism and politics brought the concepts of the nordic looking “aryan” to the forefront of 20th century European ideals, although the term aryan is heavily distorted in this sense. The origins of Sanskrit/Hinduism are still debated as either coming from Syria, the Mongolian/Russian steppes, or India itself. These conflicts in scholarly opinion are likely to continue with the resurgence in popularity of Sanskrit across India.

Sources: 
Singh, Varun. Origin of Hindu religion and Sanskrit in Central Asia: A recent claim and its rebuttal. 2017. Indian Historical Review, 44.1, pp. 1-20.

Although Sanskrit is generally written in either Devanagari (the same script that Hindi is written in) or in transliterated roman alphabet, Sanskrit has no official script of its own. It was originally an oral language and thus had no written needs. Its first written evidence comes from the Rigveda from around ~1100-1700 BC.  Historically, it has also been written in a number of Brahmic scripts, which is a family of loosely related scripts used across Asia. Here's an example of some, which includes Devanagari: 

In this blog post I will discuss formality and informality in Sanskrit. 

Sanskrit is a unique language to learn since it is taught in a formal context with very structured grammar. I am not diving into the vernacular of spoken word since my main goal is to understand Sanskrit as it is written traditionally. I have not been able to find a large amount of information on written Sanskrit and the role of honorifics. I have found the role of pronouns very interesting and confusing! Most of the time a pronoun isn't directly needed since it is built into the verb ending as an inflection. Consider the following sentences and the English translation: 

gacchaami --> I go. 

gacchamah --> We go. 

gacchaavah --> The two of us go. 

gacchati --> He goes. 

etc. 

First and second person pronouns do not mark for gender, and an independent third person pronoun doesn't really exist since it is always built into the verb, and also does not account for gender. The words for "that" or "it" are still there though if needed. 

There is a kind of polite prounoun/title, "bhavant" which means directly "your honor". It seems like this mostly acts as a 2nd person polite pronoun. It will be interesting to see if I run into any honorifics while furthering my reading skills.