Classical Greek vs. Sanskrit

Greek Learning Greek
1

I was thinking of taking Sanskrit as my next language after Greek – although due to the difficulty of mastering both Greek & Latin is enough for me, perhaps for years. Still, I wouldn’t mind learning Sanskrit as a ‘secondary’ language, learning the alphabet, pronunciation, rough grammar overview, so I can have some appreciation without being overloaded on languages.

How difficult is Sanskrit compared to Attic Greek? I know asking how difficult a language is, is a sign you aren’t ready to study it, but let me break those rules and ask anyway.

In particular, does knowing Attic give us a significant advantage on Sanskrit? How much?

2

I’ve done very little with Sanskrit, but what I’ve read and heard is that Sanskrit is more difficult in terms of inflection but that its syntax in general is easier than Greek. Also, I personally find the Devanagari script difficult to learn for some reason and the orthography of the language causes me trouble, since words are written together and the orthography reflects all sorts of sandhi changes to the end of words that can obscure what the words are.

But I found Greek was a lot of help, both in that the two languages are structurally very similar but even in the details of the inflections I was surprised by how many things were very similar. I’d say that in terms of the inflection, Greek and Sanskrit are closer than Greek is to Latin.

3

Very interesting. There isn’t anything like a comparative Sanskrit/Greek(/Latin) grammar, is there? I’m sure there are some overview of Indo-European out there, but I have in mind something more specific.

Edit: Ah, I’ve found one, which is of course written in 1869 (when they were excited about this kind of thing).
A comparative grammar of Sanskrit, Greek and Latin: in two volumes, by William Hugh Ferrar. It doesn’t look like he ever published the second volume… and the first is mostly concerned with “alphabets” and nouns.

“I have been delayed in the publication of this book for more than a year through a severe attack of illness. The second volume of this work will, I hope, be ready for publication in January, 1872.” (Died 1871–looks like the illness came back!)

4

I don’t think Sanskrit is actually as hard as people say, once you have Greek under your belt. You can get comparative grammars though they are old school and tend to include other languages.

5

The major obstacle in my opinion is the script and its conjunct letters, or ligatures. You might also find the phonology hard, but it is manageable.

6

Sihler’s book on Greek and Latin makes a lot of references to Sanskrit, which is natural as he traces everything back to PIE, but yeah, I don’t know of anything that directly compares the two languages, although the older book you linked to is interesting.

7

Some of the relative ease or difficulty may depend on your motivation. If the main reason you want to learn Sanskrit is so you can see comparisons with Greek, it will be very exciting at first when you glance over paradigms and see, “Wow, that’s really similar!” But when it comes to the hard business of actually memorizing everything and learning to read texts, you’ll see how many things are NOT related to Greek or PIE. At this point, you may decide that your curiosity is satisfied, and you can learn more about Greek by actually reading Greek. If, on the other hand, you are interested in Sanskrit literature in its own right, and want to know about Indian culture through the ages, including the influence of Sanskrit on modern Indian languages, the development of vernacular literary traditions, the role of Sanskrit in current Hindu religious practices – well, all of these things are extremely fascinating, and very worth studying!

8

You’ll find fuller paradigms when studying Sanskrit, but I think it’s comparable to Greek in difficulty. Knowing Greek however won’t help you all too much, except that you’ll have a good idea how a highly inflected language works. Like modus irrealis said, the Devanagari script slowed me down quite a bit, but it was a lot of fun in its own right. You could certainly choose to study Sanskrit without learning the Devanagari script and it would speed things up. Many English introductions don’t even use it anymore, and there are full texts available in the Roman alphabet, like the Clay Sanskrit library, which is the equivalent of the Loeb Library for Sanskrit. Plus Whitney’s grammar provides everything in Roman letters as well as Devanagari.

But even if you study it in the Roman script you’ll have to deal with the sandhi changes. In certain contexts, a series of sounds will change and that will be represented in spelling. This is one of the more difficult aspects in my opinion. For instance, you’ll have to know the important sandhi changes to recognize inflectional endings.

9

Sanskrit is extremely easy. Although at first it appears alien it is in fact such an ancient language your ancestors already know it. Many people found their way into sanskrit by practicing yoga or reading about meditation. Once you have a context the for a word you discover it used over and over and over again in multiple contexts. Unlike other languages where you keep having to learn a new word or learn a different word for the same thing sanskrit will use a concept and that word acts like a key to many other compound words or phrases.The more you discover the same word the more meaning the context gives to it and the more profound your understanding becomes of the subject matter. The sanskrit word is an unlocking of your understanding and your understanding of the subject matter correspondingly profound. Sanskrit unlocks ideas rather than paints over them the way the latin language does. Easy. Easy. Easy. Easiest language of them all.

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Avitus scrambledeggs optimo suo S·P·D

Out of my more than a dozen languages, Sanscrit is undoubtedly the hardest ever. Unless you have a direct line with nirvana, you need to brace yourself for a tremendous experience, although it is blooming worth every bit of it. In that respect, I really subscribe Damœtas’ reflections.

Personally, I had always laughed (and still do) at people who indicate that the greatest problem with Greek or Arabic is that they have a different alphabet. Yet, the devanagari was the cause for my catastrophic failure the first time I tried with Sanscrit, more in particular because the method I used (Coulson’s Teach Yourself) considered it advantageous to expose the learner to the full complexity of sandhi from chapter 2. Madness!

Stubborn as I am, and adopting some lateral thinking, I decided to try with Hindi. As I had experienced with Greek, learning the contemporary tongue helped me tremendously to feel much more at ease with the ancient version. It was only through Hindi (with much shorter words and no sandhi) that I finally got the devanagari confidently under my belt. I used the Teach Yourself method also for this. It is hard and dense, but does the job if you have the strength of character.

With a basic level of Hindi and complete familiarity with the devanagari, I went back to Sanscrit. By now I had found what must surely be the jewel in the crown of Sanscrit methods, namely Madhav M. Deshpande A Sanskrit Primer (Michigan, Centers for South and Southest Asian Studies, 2007), which comes with glorious recordings and introduces the subject matter in a much more progressive and humane way. I’d really recommend to follow this.

Still, Sanscrit is difficult, but you won’t regret learning it.

Cura ut valeas optime!

11

Interesting I too speak modern Greek and Hindi.

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Naturally all their derivative languages are incomprehensible across language families, but I’m wondering what the difficulty may have been for a speaker of one to learn the others… Naturally, I’d assume Greek and Latin would be easier with similar pronouns, declensions, etc. but I know nothing about Sanskrit. Thanks.best education|what the best

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As someone said earlier, the grammar is more difficult than Greek in almost all aspects, but the syntax does not really make full use of the grammar, and as a result you may find it easier than Greek (I say “may” because the syntax is much different from Greek/Latin and you may actually find it more difficult). Devanagari seems like a life’s work for some people but I learned it very quickly, so it all depends on you really. However, the Sanskrit’s vocabulary is enormous for such an ancient language, comparable even to modern English, except you will only need parts of it for each work. Of course, Greek and Latin will help you along the way.

Now, it all depends on what you want from a language. Sanskrit is instructive because it preserves some older Indo-European features (ablaut and weak/strong roots) and reveals deeper and more analyzable structure, as opposed to Greek/Latin where some forms have become solidified and have to memorized. And you can also wonder how one Indo-European language can function so differently from all others that you are used to. But, if you are only interested in finding the similarities with Greek, you may grow bored after a while.

Finally, the best thing about Sanskrit is that the most well-known works written in it are also the easiest to read, that is, the epics and dramas of Kalidasa. The Vedas and Gita Govinda (although fascinating) should be left for more advanced levels.

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Well if you want the Vedas surely just get a dedicated text book/grammar for them? Amazing poetry though.

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You have a nice intro to Sanskrit at Uni. of Texas website. It’s for the Vedic era, which is the closest to Greek in syntax and grammar. Still, I think RgVedic is more advanced and less helpful than later language.

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Thanks for the tip on approaching Sanskrit through modern Hindi.

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Learning Greek really helps in learning Sanskrit, though the Sanskrit grammar is much harder. But Sanskrit and Greek are very similar it is now theorized that Greek and all indo european languages are all defended from Sanskrit.

In terms of difficulty it depends, what languages you can speak , speaking Greek or Hindi would make learning Sanskrit much easer. Furthermore you would have to decide which form of Sanskrit you want to learn : rig Vedic, Vedic/classical or post Vedic. Each is extremely different from the others for example rig Vedic’s grammar is harder and lexis more archaic, while as time progresses verbs are used less in terms of tenses and nouns are used more frequently.

Hope this helps

18

It should be interesting to reply here, as I am on the other side, being a Sanskritist with interests in Greek and Latin. First I would say Alexander, having arrived in Northwest India, upto the Sindu river, which he called, of course, the Hindu river, and so named the people there also the Hindus, most remarkably was able to converse with the local people, who would have spoken a form of late Vedic. In Vedic there is a most wonderfully descriptive word for an uncouth barbarian, ‘mḷeccha’, with the ‘l’ sounding like a trilled vowel. Well, it was duly noted by the ‘Sindus’ that the Greeks, or ´Yauvanas´, were, indeed, not ‘mḷeccha’, and that communciation was clearly possible. Thus ensued a most interesting, and peaceful, cultural exchange with a Greek city named ´Takṣaśilā´, established in possibly what is now Kashmir or nearby, becoming the great center of arts and theater, science etc… not unlike the Paris of our last few centuries. Buddhist statues reflect this influence. Indian, or we say vedic, astrology was forever altered by Greek ideas. One can write vastly about this subject, but let me get back to Sanskrit.

The problems most people on this post are expressing are related to the script, which is called ‘Brahmi’. This script presupposed some ‘shortcuts’: one being the non writing of the most common vowel, which is ‘a’, to shorten written text, presumably to save space on stone tablets and palm leaves. Mahabharata would be written thus, ´Mhbhrt´. Secondly, from that idea, consonants require a marker to stop the implied vowel, which allows consonants to cluster, making a horrible mess actually, and sheer madness for a computer. Well, our european predecessors, who were mostly Greek and Latin scholars, got rid of that problem rather quickly by moving over to ´Roman´ script.

The accents are simple. Sanskrit flows from guttarals to labials, so we have a guttaral ṅ, then a palatal ñ, followed by an aluvial ṇ, the dental is just ´n´, but the labial would be ´ṃ´, the ´s´ is three forms of palatal ´ś´, an aluvial ´ṣ´, and dental ´s´, h can be aspirated as ´ḥ´, finally the aluvial consonants are ´ṭ´ and ´ḍ´. Long vowels are importent: ´ā´,´ ī ´and ´ū´ being marked, ´e´ and ´o´ as also ´ai´ and ´au´ presumed to be long. Often ´r´ functions as a vowel and thus ´ṛ´, and a counterpart, but rare, ´l´ has an ´ḷ´ vowel form. That’s it! ´mahābharata´, śiva, viṣṇu, rajaḥ, ..

Āstām, tāva danyat, salilena, abhibhūyate rajas amātram, api na avaśiṣṭam, iti arthas .
If we apply sandhi rules:
Āstāṃ tāvadanyat salilena abhibhūyate rajomātramapi na avaśiṣṭamityarthaḥ

Finally, I would say that Sanskrit is most directly founded on the ´roots´ or ´dhatus´ of the language, which should be a lot of interest for most of you: ´sṛp´ > ´sarpa´, serpent; ´und´ > ´unda´, undulate; ´ud´ > ´udaka´ (u>va) ´vad´> ´vada´ (v>w d>t wat + er)

Please forgive my poor English grammar, as I am rusty, and there is no spellchecker here.

Namaste,
Taracandra, Kathmandhu

19

Just some historical points.

Actually Alexander wouldn’t have referred to the Sindh as the Sindhus but as the Indos, as it is referred to in Greek. The natives certainly didn’t refer to themselves as Hindus in this period.

Vedic wouldn’t have been spoken any more (or rather, we use differing linguistic labels) but the common speech would have been somewhere between Panini’s Sanskrit and the Prakrits.

Sometimes Yavanas are mleccha, barbaras etc sometimes not. This had nothing to do with communication so much as for dharmic reasons. Communication seems to have been via Aramaic actually judging by the trilingual Ashokan pillars. Trying to find consistency in ancient Indian ethnography is maddening.

Takṣaśilā was in the ancient Punjab (now in Pakistan) and predates the Greeks as a centre of learning I believe.

Welcome aboard btw, its always good to have more learners and anyone with Sanskrit should be able to pick up Greek relatively quickly.

20

I have not studied Sanskrit, but given my interest in Buddhism it’ll be on the radar at some point. Is the Sanskrit of Indian Buddhist texts (aka “Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit”) much different from the Sanskrit of the Vedas or other ancient Hindu texts? Easier or harder?