So there are several things in this article that are flat out wrong:<p><pre><code> (1) "No wonder so many languages are derived from it."
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Not sure what he is referring to exactly, but Sanskrit itself is a descendent of proto Indo-European, from which many other Western languages were derived. So it is a near cousin to the original language of the Indo-European people, but not the direct ancestor of Western languages (this was a misconception of the 19th century linguists that "discovered" Sanskrit).<p><pre><code> (2) "It is more expressive"
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I assume by this he means you can do more with less. To a certain extent this is true.<p><pre><code> (3) Very systematic
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This is only true to a certain degree. Classical Sanskrit is itself not the original language, and probably the largest single pain point is the "sandhi" rules, in which words are combined together. Although someone eventually wrote down a large number of rules that shows how these changed together, they are more the product of slurring of speech over time, rather than "design" per se.<p><pre><code> (4) "Excellent grammar"
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Is a lot of grammar "excellent grammar" ? In Sanskrit, it does allow certain structures that are not available elsewhere (like the existence of a dual case), which presumably facilitate density, and, consequently, presumably also facilitates efficiency. If so, one could argue that the grammar of Attic Greek is more "excellent" than that of English. However, to me "excellence" is something that depends more on the specific use case -- a language that someone can speak and use is better than one that one cannot.
> Here is what I came up with during our discussion...<p>You are looking for reasons where there is none.<p>* Why Brazil speaks Portuguese?
* Why do we speak English now?
* Why do people in Ukraine speak Russian instead of
Ukrainian?<p>Not because Russian is more expressive. But because they were killed for doing otherwise.
It's not about language features, it's about politics, wars, colonization, economics.
Sanskrit is a festidious language that agglutinates huge numbers of tenses and forms in to a festival complexity that is a classical feature of the Indo-European language family. It might be great if you <i>feel like being really damn specific</i>, but it might also <i>suck</i>. It depends what you want to do with it.<p>I would posit that Sanskrit is more like <i>assembly language</i> (for its unique combination of specificity, table-thumping traditionalism, and verbosity). On the other hand, classical Chinese, which presents a roughly similar vintage literature, is a more fluid and combinatory system for type-indistinct component thoughts ... sort of like an extreme version of <i>perl</i>.
One could take the analogy further - for the same reason people choose C versus LISP. :-) Sometimes structure isn't the best (or quickest) solution for the problem at hand.
Here's the Google Cache <a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:XaBQEvNdzwEJ:ifacethoughts.net/2011/03/15/sanskrit-and-lisp/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=in&client=ubuntu" rel="nofollow">http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:XaBQEvN...</a>
It's quite likely that natural Sanskrit did not have those properties, and all that has survived is the well documented formalizations of its grammar.<p>EDIT: By natural, I meant Vedic. Speaking as a linguist, I doubt that all of Sanskrit was accounted for when it was formalized.
Sanskrit is considered a "refined" language, implying serious effort to systematize phonemes, grammar, declension and even verb classification distinguishing recipient of actions (1-10 ganas, PP/AP padas, etc.). Refinement can give subtlety, accuracy, concision etc. but does not automatically and objectively mean "universal", "perfect" or "excellent", even though proponents conflate those aspects.<p>IMO, Sanskrit persisted as the language of metaphysical and scientific treatises for a long time because of practical advantages. A large library of concepts, allowed easy reuse and concision [1]. Being trained in Vedanga (phonetics, metre, grammar, etymology, etc.) allowed practitioners to compose new sutras easily, much like PhD students using mathematical notations and proofs in papers.<p>It was used conversationally, at least in courts and debates. Its decline into a quasi-venerated read-only language over the last 1000 years would be an interesting (and contentious) topic for dissertation.<p>[1] Patanjali Yoga Sutras <a href="http://www.arlingtoncenter.org/Sanskrit-English.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.arlingtoncenter.org/Sanskrit-English.pdf</a>
Very apt comparison considering I have the same problem with Lisp (and Erlang) as Sanskrit<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5452038" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5452038</a>
Expressive, systematic, powerful - it looks atractive but none of that counts. What counts is ease of being copied and easy assimilation of unprecise copies. That's why PHP rules the web and DNA rules the life and english rules the world despite their messines.