Sanskrit on TextKit?

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tdominus
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Sanskrit on TextKit?

Post by tdominus »

Hello,
Is anyone here interested in learning Sanskrit? I myself would like to do so once I have reached competency in Latin and Greek.

Are there any plans to include Sanskrit books on Textkit?

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benissimus
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Post by benissimus »

I am interested in it, but I doubt I will have time for it any time soon.
flebile nescio quid queritur lyra, flebile lingua murmurat exanimis, respondent flebile ripae

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1%homeless
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Post by 1%homeless »

Why stop at Sanskrit? :) Maybe there should be a seperate forum (or board?) for all other languages other than greek and latin? I mean most people here don't just like latin and greek. But there would be such a font head ache though dealing with all these languages...

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Post by mingshey »

Er, anybody know a learning tools site for Sumerian? :P

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Post by tdominus »

benissimus wrote:I am interested in it, but I doubt I will have time for it any time soon.
I am in the same situation. Still, in my view it'd be nice to know that something similar to D'ooge was available for the langugage. :)

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Post by Episcopus »

tdominus I agree wholeheartedly there...but alas so far I have yet to find one for another old language. I have some excellent Chinese, French and Italian, Armenian choices however.

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Post by Keesa »

No more lanugages for me, thanks! Not until I achieve some reasonable level of fluency in the ones I am studying. Textkit is great, though...I wish there were more of them! One for the Gaelic languages, one for the (modern) Romance languages, one for the Germanic languages...What a shame Jeff isn't a cat. Then he'd have nine lives, and he might have something approaching the time required to do all that. :D

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Post by MDS »

You can count me in on this one too. Anyone know good sites (or forums? :D) to learn Old Norse?!?

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Post by Keesa »

Are you learning Old Norse, too? That is to say...I'm not really learning it. Only glancing over the lessons now and then. And sometimes I do the exercises.

But I'm not really learning it. :wink:

And I don't know of any good forums for it.

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Post by MDS »

Are you learning Old Norse, too? That is to say...I'm not really learning it. Only glancing over the lessons now and then. And sometimes I do the exercises.
Well to be honest its "on the list." I'm sure just about everyone here has a "list" be it mental or written of languages they would like to learn in the future. The nice part is finding out peoples reasoning behind learning said "dead" languages.

But yes one day I'd like to be able to read Old Norse and Sanskrit and...

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Post by annis »

mingshey wrote:Er, anybody know a learning tools site for Sumerian? :P
I believe there are none. I did get good books about Sumerian from here. The essays at that site are deeply iffy.

The problem with Sumerian is that it seems like a magnet for cranks and lunatics who have all sorts of interesting theories about how language works, or have an occult agenda (Atlantis, anyone?)
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Post by annis »

MDS wrote: I'm sure just about everyone here has a "list" be it mental or written of languages they would like to learn in the future. The nice part is finding out peoples reasoning behind learning said "dead" languages.

But yes one day I'd like to be able to read Old Norse and Sanskrit and...
Danger, Danger, DANGER!

This is a serious danger for me at least, as even the briefest glance at my library will show.

My life got better when I made a firm - and occasionally painful - decision to focus my attention on just Greek until I can read a page of Homer or Herodotus without constantly turning to dictionary and grammar. I have a few years more on this plan.

Then I can move on to the next one, whatever that'll be. Likely candidates: Arabic, or renew my Chinese or Japanese. I keep thinking getting back up to speed in Latin would be virtuous, but I just can't generate any enthusiasm about this.

Coptic and Sanskrit (or Pali, more likely) will have to wait for retirement for serious study.
William S. Annis — http://www.aoidoi.org/http://www.scholiastae.org/
τίς πατέρ' αἰνήσει εἰ μὴ κακοδαίμονες υἱοί;

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Post by Lex »

annis wrote:My life got better when I made a firm - and occasionally painful - decision to focus my attention on just Greek until I can read a page of Homer or Herodotus without constantly turning to dictionary and grammar. I have a few years more on this plan.
...
Coptic and Sanskrit (or Pali, more likely) will have to wait for retirement for serious study.
If you have a few more years on this plan, that means I'll be in retirement before I can read Homer easily! Yikes!

Anyway, doesn't the wisdom of your plan depend on whether you're more interesting in learning languages or learning linguistics in general? Of course, they are related, but not exactly the same.

Another thing I thought of; learning modern languages with old books could be problematic in some cases. I have an old German reader that would qualify. The map of Germany within shows Ostpreuss; that is, Prussia. It's at least one spelling reform and one lexicographic reform out of date. Fraktur anyone? And it would probably be considered old-fashioned language now. Does anybody actually use "gnadige Frau" anymore? What other languages would be problematic in this way?
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Post by Episcopus »

Go for the chinese annis it will take much less time than Greek :)

I too sometimes feel a lack of enthusiasm for Latin. It's just not a real challenge any more to study it. I know things like Virgil would challenge but I didn't really want to read that kind of thing in the first place. Yet I think my newfound occasional lack of zeal is due to far too intensive study.

Chinese is so refreshing.

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Post by 1%homeless »

MDS wrote:You can count me in on this one too. Anyone know good sites (or forums? :D) to learn Old Norse?!?
Um... there was a good link that William put up before when talking about... I forgot... well, I did put up a great germanic link in the outside links forum. Anyways, I'll just post the best of what i have for old norse...

http://www.hi.is/~haukurth/norse/
http://has55.www9.50megs.com/OldIcel/Le ... Norse.html
http://hem.passagen.se/peter9/gram/index.html
http://www.northvegr.org/siteindex.php

Here's a gothic one.
http://mendota.terracom.net/~dorothea/david/gothic/
Danger, Danger, DANGER!
Oh yes... :) I'm still trying to limit my languages to something manageable... maybe if there was a language annoymous group for the hopeless.... it would be a great help...

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Post by 1%homeless »

The problem with Sumerian is that it seems like a magnet for cranks and lunatics who have all sorts of interesting theories about how language works, or have an occult agenda (Atlantis, anyone?)
Heh heh... conspiracy theorists are interested in it too. Anyways, I would still investigate this conjecture about how the bible was basically a rehashing of summerian tales. I mean I only read translated snippets of these summerian tablets and they look convincing enough... but... heh heh, I'm not a conspiracy nut!
Last edited by 1%homeless on Fri Jan 16, 2004 9:46 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Post by Kalailan »

Regarding Sumerian:

why does it atract (spelling....????..... :? ) lunatics?

and the bible and the sumerian tales do have a lot in common. i don't think that means it was entirely copied... they did live in the same enviroment.

i recently found an Akkadian learning site, but it didn't work. :cry:
i am starting to feel a need for a semitic language. all these indo europeans....
and akkadian seems like a good choice. it was, after all, the "Lingua franca" of the ancient near east.

anyone knows a site that works?

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Post by annis »

Lex wrote:If you have a few more years on this plan, that means I'll be in retirement before I can read Homer easily! Yikes!
Slow and steady wins the game! I'm sure I could speed this process up if I stopped reading anything else.
Anyway, doesn't the wisdom of your plan depend on whether you're more interesting in learning languages or learning linguistics in general?
That's true. I once heard a visiting scholar define a linguist as "someone who checks out a Swahili grammar on friday, and comes back monday an expert." But yes, looking over paradigm charts to note family resemblances and differences imposes different requirements.
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Post by annis »

Kalailan wrote:why does it atract (spelling....????..... :? ) lunatics?
Attract.

Because we know so little about it, it's easy to impose random theories. By the time Sumerian was being written out fully (with all the sounds represented) all native speakers had been dead for a long, long time. That just muddles things even more.

There are still large chunks of grammar that we simply don't yet understand. For example, the verbs have a complex set of prefixes. One set get the quite unenlightening name "conjugation prefixes." No one has really settled what some of these do or how the significance of one differs from another.

The phonology invites wild theorizing. We know Sumerian phonetics only by way of Akkadian, which had only four vowels. If you look at a Sumerian vocab list, it looks like there are a lot of words that sounded the same (always written differently, though). This leads some people to assume that somehow the word du really meant to the Sumerian brain all of "to build, to gore, to open, to look at, to play." These theories depend on excluding the possibility that Sumerian had either more distinctions in their consonants (voicing, aspiration, etc), or that the vowel system was either more complex or perhaps tonal.
i recently found an Akkadian learning site, but it didn't work. :cry:
...
anyone knows a site that works?
I've only ever seen one, and it hasn't been updated in years, and acts so badly I assume it's the one you visited.
William S. Annis — http://www.aoidoi.org/http://www.scholiastae.org/
τίς πατέρ' αἰνήσει εἰ μὴ κακοδαίμονες υἱοί;

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Post by tdominus »

annis,
is sumerian currently considered to have any link with indo-european languages?

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Post by bingley »

Sumerian's generally considered to be a language isolate, i.e., it has no known relatives. There have been attempts to link it with other languages, but none have been very successful.

Gwendolyn Leick's Mesopotamia: The Invention of the City says, page 66

Linguistically, Sumerian is not related to any of the known groups of languages and attempts to relate it to Ural-Altaic languages, because of a shared characteristic of adding syntactic elements to the main word -- agglutinating them -- have proved fruitless.

The question of the origins of the Sumerians remains intractable and all we can state is that, at the beginning of the early Dynastic period, this language was chosen to be rendered in writing.

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Post by annis »

tdominus wrote:is sumerian currently considered to have any link with indo-european languages?
Nope. It really does seem to stand alone. It surely had close relatives once, but no sign of them remains, although people have spent a lot of effort trying to link it other languages.

Even a brief look at the grammar (split-ergativity by aspect, verbal cross-referencing of case relationships, the mysterious conjunction prefixes) is quite different from anything in even the remotest i-e language.
William S. Annis — http://www.aoidoi.org/http://www.scholiastae.org/
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Post by 1%homeless »

Hmm... I thought it did have a link to the semitic languages. Oh well...

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Post by Kalailan »

http://rhea.sron.nl/~jheise/akkadian/]Here is the akkadian site i found. it seems to work better on the machine i am using now.

Akkadian is Semitic. many of the words i saw there resemble hebrew words.

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Post by mingshey »

bingley wrote:Linguistically, Sumerian is not related to any of the known groups of languages and attempts to relate it to Ural-Altaic languages, because of a shared characteristic of adding syntactic elements to the main word -- agglutinating them -- have proved fruitless.


That agglumerite characteristics attracted many of the Korean amateur historians and some of them, like the Atlantis nuts, conjecture that the Korean ancestry goes up to Sumer. They refer to an unauthorized document about the mythical Korean history that mentions an ancient kingdom of "Shu-mir-i" to support it. Well, I don't buy it. :P But the language of one of the oldest cultures is attractive in itself.

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Post by annis »

Kalailan wrote:Akkadian is Semitic. many of the words i saw there resemble hebrew words.
Oh, yes. I have two Akkadian books, and one for its late descendant Assyrian. The vocabulary at the end of the Assyrian book is given in Hebrew aleph beth order, and most of the root headwords are given in the margin in Hebrew letters.
William S. Annis — http://www.aoidoi.org/http://www.scholiastae.org/
τίς πατέρ' αἰνήσει εἰ μὴ κακοδαίμονες υἱοί;

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Post by Sanskrit »

A sasnkrit section would be nice.

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Post by Chris Weimer »

tdominus wrote:annis,
is sumerian currently considered to have any link with indo-european languages?
No, nor with Semitic. It's a language isolate.

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