/lit/ - Literature

ताडनम्।

>>22945803
Worry not anons, I will begin Sanskrit shortly after I get to read Plato in the original Greek. Screenshot this and I'll see you in 2.5 years

>>22945931
I'm not sure how worried I was, but I'm always glad to hear that someone else is thinking of going down this long but immensely rewarding path, of course.

I myself came to Sanskrit directly after learning to read Plato in the original. If you're looking for a "bridge" between introductory textbooks and actually read Plato, you might check out Louise Pratt's Eros at the Banquet. It's basically a grammar review based on the Symposium, which we used for my first semester of intermediate Greek. It's pretty good, but you may be a little frustrated to find that some of the early passages are presented in a somewhat simplified version (in fact the differences are small enough that one wonders why she didn't just hold students' hands a little more through the tricky bits rather than eliding them).

And in case you'd like a first-year Sanskrit textbook recommendation for future reference, I think the Goldmans' Devavāṇīpraveśikā is appropriate for people who already have experience studying classical languages. It has some of the basic traditional vocabulary for describing grammar, which is immensely useful, and there's a nice passage of the Rāmāyaṇa at the end.

>>22946502
*actually reading

>>22945803
I have very little Sanskrit Knowledge - how do I learn?

>>22946502
Haha it's great so see someone that did the same I'll do. There seems to be a clear pipeline going from Latin > Plato in Greek > Sanskrit. Once you enter the rabbithole, it is not so much that you can't leave; more so, you don't want to. Thanks for the recommendations, anon.

One question: how long did it take you, and with what pace, to get to Plato?

How long does it take to learn the script? I want to study the grammar purely out of autistic interest but learning the script first seems like a huge hurdle.

>>22947253
Several months of pretty concerted study. You'll get the basic CV shapes quite easily, but for CCCV stuff and the like, you'll really need to focus long and hard. It's somewhere between learning a Greek-based or Cyrillic-based script and Chinese/Hanja/Kanji.

>>22947278
Not that anon but to get past the initial stage what would you say is more helpful, flashcard-style memorization or trying to figure out words with a graph of the alphabet next to you?

>>22947490
Why not both? I personally started with just learning the most basic shapes in a traditional phonetically-arranged graph, sort of like this, then I would read a line in some Sanskrit text like the Mahabharata or Srimad Bhagavatam, then look at the transliteration and Sanskrit verse carefully, and try to work out which character and vowel stroke is representing what sound(s).

>>22946959
Well, I think there's nothing stopping you from picking up a first-year university textbook and giving it a go. That's how I did it. I think one of the more beginner-friendly resources in English is Madhav Deshpande's Sa.msk.rta-subodhinī (period before a letter represents a dot underneath it). The author is one of the greatest living authorities on Sanskrit grammar, or vyākara.na. There's also a nice textbook called Michael Coulson called Teach Yourself Sanskrit, but from what I understand it's not actually that good for self-teaching.

Once you've got the basics, participating in a reading group is invaluable. If you're in a major metropolitan area, you may very well be able to find academics who would be willing to read with you, even if you work outside of academia. There may also be online groups. This assumes you're living outside India—if you're in India, you should of course seek out a pandit to study with.

>>22947100
Well, I went through Greek: An Intensive Course over a summer when I was in high school, and then the following semester sat in on a university course where they used that book by Pratt. Of course, I was a kid with few responsibilities, so if you have other obligations, then it will take longer. It was not just Plato for me, btw; I did a year-long intensive reading course a few years later where we read all kinds of things. Plato remained a favorite though

>>22947253
Not long, I think the other anon made it out to be more difficult than it is. Devanāgarī (the script of almost all printed editions) is fully phonetic, so it's much more like just learning a new alphabet than mastering the characters of Chinese. It's true that the consonant conjuncts are tricky at first, and you'll find that there's some discrepancy between typefaces in how they display them. I guess it took me maybe a year to really be comfortable with the writing system, but I think I had learned it within a month: As a bonus, all other Indic scripts become easy to learn once you know one, since they all operate on the same principles. FWIW, you might be able to learn something about the grammar without ever having to learn the script, since many books for academics are published using transliteration, though I wouldn't recommend it. At this point I actually find reading Devanāgarī easier; the way it represents the syllable quantities is somehow more intuitive, and to read Sanskrit properly you must distinguish at all times between long and short syllables.
>>22947490
It really depends on your learning style I guess. I've hardly ever used flashcards personally, so I would have gone with the basic chart. Deshpande's textbook, which I mentioned in reply to another anon, has some nice pages where it teaches the script though. But you'll need to find other resources online to really make sure you get your mouth around the sounds, and your hand around writing the characters.

>>22945803
People should look at Rajput painting more often, amazing stuff. For readers of Kalidasa, then I strongly recommend Meghdut as well, because it's one of his most entertaining works and generally serene to read. Can't say how the Sanskrit is since I read it in Bengali so sorry about that.

>>22947830
Very nice. I would really like to learn Bengali someday since I'm interested in the Bengali renaissance period, but I'm afraid I need to master Tamil first. Do you have any favorite Bangla authors?

And yes, Meghadūta (or Meghdut) is of course very beautiful; it was one of the first kavya I read. In case you haven't read it before, I'd highly recommend Bhavabhuti's Uttar-Ram-carit, which I'm sure is available in Bengali translation. As far as kavya goes, though, it is anything but serene!

good thread
have a bump
also, how tf do I learn Sanskrit? I know Marathi and Hindi
so it might be pretty easy for me but how to get started?

>>22945803
Does learning Sanskrit make any sense if you are not Hindu and do not have much interest in Hinduism, beyond, let's say, the interest one might have in Greek mythology? Like, I may enjoy an epic poem but I'm not looking to read a treatise on the nature of Zeus' divinity.
The only reason I'm really considering it is because I already know Pāli, and the languages are so close to one another that they can basically be considered different registers of the same thing, so it seems like I could get a decent amount of content out of it without having to put in a lot of effort. On the other hand, this would also make it annoying to have to go through a Sanskrit textbook, seeing as I'll know like 80% of it already. Though I'd still need to know where to throw in all those extra consonants Pāli did away with in every word. Wondering whether you have any advice about this situation.

>>22948711
how long did it take to learn pali?

bump

>>22948391
You'd certainly have an advantage as an (I assume) native Marathi speaker. If you want an English-language textbook, you could check out संस्कृतसुबोधिनी by Madhav Deshpande, which I mentioned earlier in the thread. Deshpande is a Marathi Brahmin (as I'm sure you can tell by his name), and one of the great living masters of व्याकरण.

There are actually some advantages to learning Sanskrit through a language that isn't so closely related to it, I think, since you really have to think about how to translate everything rather than just relying on vocabulary that is cognate. But if you live in India and you're serious about learning, you should of course see if there's a local pathshala or pandit who would take you on as a student.

>>22948711
Unfortunately I don't know of any "Sanskirt for Pāli students" resources. I will say that Sanskrit is a whole other beast, as you may already know: grammatical complexity was often a sought-after aesthetic feature in the language, and the extremities of both śāstric and poetic Sanskrit are a far cry from the generally folksy manner of expression in the Pāli canon. That said, my biased feeling is that it's a shame if someone learns enough to be able to read some South Asian classics, but doesn't bother to go all the way and tackle "the real stuff"...

Also, if you know Pāli, then I assume you have a well-devdeloped interest in Buddhism. There is, of course, an immense body of Buddhist literature in Sanskrit. Maybe you could skim through a first-year textbook (and after all, reviewing the parts of grammar you already know never hurts) and then go for Aśvaghoṣa's Buddhacarita, certainly a landmark in Sanskrit literary history as the first extant mahākāvya.

I myself wasn't interested in Hinduism as such when I first started learning Sanskrit. I was also coming at it from a literary angle. But of course the religion permeates the aesthetics and vice versa, and that's part of what makes it such a fascinating world to study, for me.

>>22947757
Thanks for the recommendation! Since I'll be starting anew with Greek, I thought I would mend the mistakes I committed with Latin and actually put in some good effort on grammar, memorization and writing this time around. For that matter, what do you think of the following setup?
> Greek: An Intensive Course
> Anki decks for remembering the words
> LOGOS: Lingua Graeca Per Se Illustrata as a supplementary reading
> Athenaze as a supplementary reading
> And some other supplements like Alexandros if I manage to get through Athenaze and LOGOS

Anything else you'd add? Or take away?

>>22949320

Yes absolutely, with classical languages especially, since you don't get much practice speaking them, I think that writing out the exercises physically and getting the muscle memory that way is immensely important. Also, be warned that Greek was in some ways the most frustrating language I've studied. It's well known that, especially when it comes to conjugation, "exceptions are the rule." It takes a while to build the intuition for all the irregularities, but you get there eventually. (Conversely, if you stop reading Greek for a little bit, it goes away quickly in my experience)

I'm honestly not sure if the intensive course book is the very best option for self-study; it worked for me, but I remember finding some of the early readings especially hard going. It's definitely comprehensive though.

I assume Anki is some kind of flashcard software. That should be especially useful for learning the principal parts of verbs (which should be a focus of your first year). But as I already implied, I'm also an advocate for writing out (and, if possible, reading aloud) the principal parts.

II didn't realize Lingua Graeca per se illustrata existed, but that sounds like a great idea. I love the original book, of course.

So yeah, sounds good

>>22949133
I went through Warder in about a month and a half, at which time I could read well enough given the PTS dictionary. I wouldn't say Pāli is very hard, especially because of the fact that the prose of the suttas is very simple and, being an oral tradition, is full of repetition of various kinds. There is a decent gap between prose and verse, and I still wouldn't get very far in the Sutta Nipāta without a translation side by side, although I wouldn't particularly care to. You can read the prose of the four Nikāyas until you drop and you'll still not be prepared for that. The verse parts of those are a lot less of a jump than the SN, though.

>>22949152
>Unfortunately I don't know of any "Sanskirt for Pāli students" resources.
Yeah, those usually go the other way.

>I will say that Sanskrit is a whole other beast, as you may already know: grammatical complexity
I actually leafed through a Sanskrit book once to find the grammar I was "missing", seeing as I like linguistics and such and you tend to hear a lot about things like āha being a petrified remnant of the perfect, and so on, and anyway I ended up finding that the difference in meaning between the perfect, imperfect and aorist had already disappeared by the time of Classical Sanskrit, which means that their not being in Middle Indo-Aryan is hardly a loss of grammatical complexity. Besides those tenses, what does Pāli lack that Sanskrit doesn't?
The fact that the style is massively different is certainly a valid point, though, as I commented on above; the suttas are pre-literate and therefore certainly don't have extremely complex constructions in their prose. I don't know how verse stacks up, though. I remember an anecdote that the leading Sanskrit/Prakrit expert in Europe, I think in either the late 19th century or the early 20th, was invited to translate some part of the Sutta Nipāta, maybe the Ațțhikavagga and Pārāyanavagga, and replied that he couldn't because it was too complex. I certainly couldn't comment on that, though, not knowing Sanskrit.
I did eventually end up learning Ancient Greek, however, of which it's said that it retained the full Indo-European verb system. How do the complexities of Sanskrit grammar compare to that? I think you said you knew it above.

>>22949320
>LOGOS: Lingua Graeca Per Se Illustrata as a supplementary reading
What, they made one of these for Greek? Is it new? How could I have missed this? (I did Mastronarde)

>>22950292
Well, grammar includes morphology, and in fact the biggest difference between Sanskrit and (so-called) middle Indo-Aryan might be the morphology. So although imperfect, perfect and aorist (or to use their respective traditional names, LaṄ, LiṬ and LuṄ) are semantically interchangeable in classical Sanskrit, you still need to be able to form and recognize their formation in order to read actual texts. Similarly, the Prākṛts (and I assume Pāli too, though I sadly haven't made a study of it yet) have almost entirely done away with the Sanskrit athematic verb classes by thematizing them; in order to read Sanskrit, you need to reckon with some rather complex and sometimes unpredictable consonant sandhi in their conjugation that I think is mostly irrelevant to Pāli.

One area of semantic import is that the Prākṛts (and again, I assume that this includes Pāli) tend to collapse the different case markers, and in fact we can see them moving towards the split-ergativity of modern Indo-Aryan dialects. The caturthā vibhakti/dative is almost entirely absent from Prākṛt, for instance.

Of course, that isn't to say that Pāli doesn't present its own difficulties. For one thing, there are many Pāli forms with more than one possible Sanskrit equivalent, and besides that some important terms whose etymology/derivation are entirely unclear. This can be a point of confusion especially for someone coming from the study of Sanskrit.

There are also syntactic peculiarities of the different registers of Sanskrit, such as so-called "abstract predication" so common in śāstric prose—though, for all I know, this may be reflected in the Pāli of the Visuddhimagga, for instance

>>22950435
Oh and another important thing (though I'm sure examples could go on and on) is that ātmanepada/middle voice is, so far as I know, marginal to MIA, whereas in Sanskrit you can occasionally find nuances between ātmanepada and parasmaipada/active forms of the same verb, as you would be familiar with from ancient Greek

OP, I had assumed there were no Sanskritists on this board. I've been using this website as a sort of LSPSI (Lingua Sanskritensis Per Se Illustrata, if you will), but only very passively between my close reading of the Greek Anthology, which is my main focus. What do you think of it? Does it suit that purpose? I'm not terribly far in yet but it apparently takes you up to adaptations of the Diamond Sutra, and then real extracts
https://en.amarahasa.com/library/

>>22950471
I have to say that what I see here doesn't seem as inspired as LLPSI, but if you're enjoying it I don't see anything wrong with it. I would forge ahead to the part where you get to read some actual Pañcatantra. Unfortunately I don't know of many better resources that go the route of maximal accesibility (not that Sanskrit was ever meant to be accessible, really). I myself have been doing some spoken Sanskrit with materials meant for children, but I forget the name of the organization that puts it out and can't find it again atm.

You could also check out other spoken Sanskrit resources for beginners, but be warned that many of them will be in a form of Sanskrit that's highly infleunced by Hindi grammar and vocabulary. Still, better than nothing.

There is also an interesting text from 17th century Benares called the Gīrvāṇapadamañjarī, which was geared at teaching relatively unlearned Brahmins to speak Sanskrit, so the grammar is kept very simple. It makes extensive reference to the particularities of the life of Brahmins in 17th century Benares, though, so probably not suitable for a beginner with no prior knowledge of the culture

>>22950532
Thanks, anon. No, it's not very inspired, but I don't know where I'd find comprehensible sanskrit practice otherwise.

>>22950292
Yep it is new. As of 2023. Santiago Carbonell i think is the author

>>22950701
Well, I've already shilled a book called Devavāṇīpraveśikā a couple times in this thread. No pictures and the grammatical discussions are certainly quite technical, but it has adaptations from the Rāmāyaṇa throughout which is rather nice. Actually I don't remember seeing another textbook with readings that stick to a theme throughout the book like that. But yeah, it might be hard to use a traditional textbook if you just want to do it for a few minutes a day

>>22950750
No, I don't want to do it for just a few minutes a day; I want to go all-in. However I am looking for hundreds instead of dozens of pages of reading practice.

>>22950758
Aha, well in that case you could go super old-school and give Lanman's Sanskrit Reader a shot: https://archive.org/details/LanmansSanskritReader/mode/2up

In principle, you could start using this as soon as you've learned Devanāgarī, and the notes are excellent for any beginning student. Be warned, though, that Lanman is totally opposed to modern principles of pedagogy, so you're likely to be overwhelmed if you try to learn Sanskrit using just the reader.

I would also urge you to learn the grammar systematically and as a subject separate from other reading materials in Sanskrit. Unfortunately there is still, to my knowledge, no English-language that tries to present Sanskrit grammar in fully Pāṇinian terms, but if you want to be able to read the highly sophisticated courtly poetry of the "classical" and medieval periods, for example, you'll quickly run up against a bunch of Pāṇinian terminology in even the most rudimentary commentaries (and commentaries are really indispensable for everything that isn't simple narrative literature). Bear in mind also that Brahmin students were traditionally supposed to do 8 (sometimes 12) years of just grammatical study before they were allowed to move on to any other subject. Again, maybe not absolutely necessary to focus on the grammar if you just want to read the Pañcatantra or the epics, but always helpful.

>>22951012
Thanks. As my Greek is excellent, what are some ways the grammar differs?

>>22951031
Well, it's hard for me to summarize how two langauges differ from each other in a 4chan post, but in some ways I feel that the process of learning the rudiments of Sanskrit is actually easier than learning Greek, simply because it is much more regular (you have Pāṇini to thank for that).

But really, the reason why grammar (in Sanskrit, vyākaraṇa) is so important is that it heavily informed practically all the other areas of knowledge in classical Sanskrit. Almost all of the authors you are likely to read in Sanskrit had memorized the Aṣṭādhyāyī as children, and to varying degrees were familiar with the often highly philosophical arguments in the many commentaries that developed around it. This has much to do with the fact that Sanskrit probably ceased to be a fully "living" language by the late Vedic period, so everyone who wrote in it had to learn it formally, somewhat as we do now (albeit much more thoroughly).

If you're really serious about Sanskrit, then after going through the reader and a couple other texts of your choice (if you want to read some kāvya/courtly poetry, the editions of M. R. Kale are always nice for intermediate students), you might consider trying to read the Siddhāntakaumudī or one of its abridgements, which has served as the basic grammar textbook in traditional Brahmanical education for the last 400 years.

I should say that I haven't yet made the formal study of vyākaraṇa that I would very much like to do, although I have read a few chapters of the Siddhāntakaumudī, and it is a constant frustration to come up against theoretical discussions of grammar that I don't fully understand.

>>22950749
That's so unfair. I picked a book based on a couple of google searches and I kept finding people lamenting the fact that there was no LLPSI for Greek and that Italian Athenaze was, well, in Italian.
Enjoy your superior method, anon.

>>22950435
>Similarly, the Prākṛts (and I assume Pāli too, though I sadly haven't made a study of it yet) have almost entirely done away with the Sanskrit athematic verb classes by thematizing them
Like with most of these categories, there are a few "survivals" such as the root aorist for bhavati, deviant forms for labhati, and middle voice endings popping up occasionally, but these things can basically all be assimilated passively as you meet them, especially as generally only one or two persons are used.

>some rather complex and sometimes unpredictable consonant sandhi in their conjugation that I think is mostly irrelevant to Pāli.
Sandhi affecting conjugations is, indeed, not something I remember. Reminds me of Attic, though.
It's generally limited to being between words except in verse in Pāli, with, again, the SN making a sort of sport out of being as obscure as possible.

>The caturthā vibhakti/dative is almost entirely absent from Prākṛt, for instance.
Pāli has, indeed, conjoined the genitive and the dative, except in the case of the dative of purpose, for which it preserves -āya

>so-called "abstract predication" so common in śāstric prose—though, for all I know, this may be reflected in the Pāli of the Visuddhimagga, for instance
I have heard before that the Pāli of the commentaries and Visuddhimagga is a nightmare, although I've never read them myself. The compounds are said to be especially egregious, and used far too liberally. Later/non-sutta Pāli is generally accused of being influenced by the Sanskrit that was current in those ages (as I understand it, the grammatical style in which Sanskrit was written tended to change over time), and I've heard that Sanskrit similarly partook of an extremely liberal use of compounds and participles, to the point of basically neglecting to use any finite verb at all. I must admit that that does sound syntactically interesting to me, even though I've only ever heard it spoken of as a degenerate feature.

>>22950448
Ah, yes. In Pāli, middle voice "alternative endings" are basically just that: poetically charged alternative endings. Present participle in -māna is fairly common, but again not any different in meaning.
Thank you for writing this out. I had been wondering about it for a while.

so how do people know how to translate words in pali which is a dead language?
All the first translators would use the same sources and thus could very well be completely wrong on the translations.

>>22952901
You're making several assumptions here that don't work out.
Pāli was created when the substrate language was still alive (middle indo-aryan), and after that it has been continuously used for about 2000 years. The vocabulary it uses is mostly also present in Sanskrit, which brings most of it back another 1500 years of being recorded, and Sanskrit has also been continuously used for 2000 years after Pāli was created. In other words, it's not a "lost" language or anything like that. There were no "first translators", it's not first dynasty ancient Egyptian, anon.
Think of it in terms of Latin; Latin never "died", the substrate language ("vulgar Latin") simply drifted further and further away from it, but Latin as a formalized literary/auxiliary language was continually in use from the classical period until like 200 years ago. I wouldn't be surprised if you could find Latin dictionaries/dictionary entries from like 1400 years ago, at which time the Vulgar Latin/Romance languages were more like dialectically distanced from Latin. At that point, it would hardly have drifted farther than Shakespeare, at most Chaucer, from your English.
By the way, even for a truly dead language like Sumerian, the meaning of the words is not figured out by copying the translations of writers in other languages, but by puzzling out sentences from what little you understand until they're intelligible, i.e. from the context. If you're completely wrong on your translations, the text will not internally make sense. All that's left to get wrong after that is that you might think "wooly haired ram" is a sheep because you're not familiar with the local fauna, etc.

>>22952804
I'm not sure who has called it a "degenerate feature," but what I have found is that intellectual traditions in Sanskrit tend to become only more sophisticated and refined through at least the middle ages, not less. Without going into too much detail, a big interest of mine is tantra, but I am only interested in the early scriptures (written in a bizarre form of broken Sanskrit, close to so-called Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit) because they are the source for the later exegesis of Abhinavagupta and his lineage, where the real concern is the nature of consciousness. And I think you can find that happening several times in the intellectual history of pre-modern South Asia: first the ritual/visionary base of a given form of religion develops, and only afterwards do inquiring minds reflect upon what it all means. To me, that's not degeneration, but innovation. But then, my interest in this stuff remains a broadly humanistic one, not that I wouldn't be interested in taking up some form of practice under the right circumstances.

Anyways, Sanskrit usage does indeed change over time, but of course nobody post-Pāṇini would be willing to admit that, and indeed it takes careful scrutiny to tell a mīmāṃsaka writing in the 6th century apart from one writing in the 16th, for instance. Long compounds with complex internal syntactic relations are there from pretty early on, though. I believe that they are already common in the Brāhmaṇas (though the Brāhmaṇas and other early post-Vedic literature remain a gap in my knowledge, unfortunately). You can certainly find them in the earliest layers of śāstric writing. To me, Sanskrit would lose much of what makes it distinctive and enjoyable to read if it lost the richness and the ambiguity that comes with its long compounds.

Also, finite verbs are indeed minimized in some śāstric writers, but by no means all. And participles can easily stand in for finite verbs even in the Vedas, I believe.