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?
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