Digest Number 394

[Guest guest]

Dear prabhu,

 

Please accept my humble obeisances.

All glories to Srila Prabhupada!

 

> I don't recall ever hearing Srila Prabhupada discuss any sort of

> "mother Sanskrit theory," but I would take it seriously if he says

> Sanskrit is the mother of all languages. You might be barking up the

> wrong tree. Why not see what the Vedic literatures themselves have to say

> about this? I haven't researched it at all, but what Srila Prabhupada said

> also seems to be implied (at least) in the Bhagavatam (3.12).

 

Thank you very much for your comment, and please forgive me for my lack of

clarity.

 

It is not that I do not take it seriously that Srila Prabhupada says that

Sanskrit is the mother of all languages, and I certainly do not doubt his

words, nor am I overly putting my trust in reason.

 

I was merely interested to see *how* it is true that Sanskrit is indeed the

mother of all languages, and was hoping for some references to some studies

in this area. So surely I would be most happy to see what the Vedic

literatures have to say about this -- that's why I said, "scholars inside or

outside ISKCON", because those inside ISKCON would very likely give Vedic

references, as your good self has done in kindly refering to Bhagavatam

3.12. (Now I realize that I should have said, "inside or outside the Vedic

tradition", for that's really what I meant.)

 

Hare Krishna. Your humble servant,

Rogier.

 

PS: Someone provided me the following quotes:

 

A.

"Gopiparanadhana prabhu: 'According to material history, Sanskrit is not the

origin of all languages on this planet. It is not even the original language

of the Indo-european family. And there are many other families of language

which have no historical connection with the Indo-european group.

 

But from a higher point of view, Skt is the transcendental origin of all

language. It is spoken in the heavenly planets and in Vaikuntha. There is a

history of how all languages derive from Skt, but this history cannot be

seen with material eyes. Just as the Supreme Lord is the oldest, but at

certain times appears on earth as if a recent descendent of some ancient

dynasty, so Skt appears on earth periodically and seems to be youger than

some other "proto-indo-european" language. Our proof of this is the opinion

of Vedic sastra.' "

 

--- In: "Essential Truths" (of Harikesa Swami) p. 414.

 

B.

"I learned the terms "synchronic" and "diachronic" in a university Sanskrit

course. The way we devotees approach Sanskrit--the traditional way--is

synchronic, while academicians employ the diachronic. Tradition says that

Sanskrit is a perfected language spoken by the devatas; the academicians see

its as a mundane historical creation, a language that evolved from more

humble origins. This attitude toward Sanskrit was developed in the

nineteenth century by German scholars who devised the historical science

then called "Indo- European philology." (Today the word "philology" has been

replaced by "linguistics.") In 1786 the English scholar Earnest Jones had

noted affinities among Sanskrit, Persian, Greek and Latin. Inspired by

evolutionary ideas, German scholars applied them to the history of languages

and traced branching paths of evolutionary a vast family of languages that

includes Sanskrit ,Persian, Latin, Italian, ancient and modern Greek, ,

Gaelic, Swedish French, German, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Armenian, and so

on. The result is considered one of the most well-established of scholarly

achievements.

 

Prabhupada has taught us that Sanskrit is the mother of all languages, but

the philologists place Sanskrit as one among a group of ancient languages

which evolved from an original, parent language which they called

Proto-Indo- European, the Indo-European Ursprache. If you look up the

derivation of a modern English word you'll see sometimes that the English

word is traced back-- let us say--to a French word, then a Old French word,

then Latin, then Sanskrit word, and finally a Proto-Indo-European word. That

word will have an asterisk before it. This sign means that the word is

imaginary, or hypothetical. There is no attestation for it, no written

appearance of the word. It has been imaginatively constructed--they would

say reconstructed--as has indeed the entire Proto-Indo-European language.

 

When I took a Sanskrit course at the University of Pennsylvania the graduate

assistant in the class would like to give us the diachronic view of

Sanskrit. I must say its a persuasive account. Panini's classical Sanskrit

grammar as some four of five thousands rules, but there are a number of them

which have only one application. These are the anomalies or exceptions. Why

should they be there. Well our grad assistant would account for the

otherwise inexplicable anomaly by showing how the anomalous form in Sanskrit

was standard in, say, Avestan, and then go on to show how both evolved out

of earlier forms in Proto- Indo-Aryan which in turn which evolved out of

Proto-Indo-European. Granting them their presuppositions, the entire

structure seemed to make sense on its own terms, and to account for things

which on the face of it seems otherwise inexplicable It tidied up a whole

area of thought. Its was enormously clever. Yet I did not for a moment

accept it as true. I recognized it as the product of modern historical

consciousness, and I realized that the graduate assistant and I were simply

inhabitants of two different cognitive universes. My coin of truth--a

citation from sastra--had no value whatsoever in his kingdom."

 

--- Ravindra Svarupa prabhu, "Modern Historical Consciousness -- Its

Cause and Cure", Second European Communications Seminar at the German

Nava-Jiyada-Nrsimha-Ksetra farm in January, 1992.)

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