Sanskrit and Hindi

When you hang out with books about Hinduism, you begin to pick up some Sanskrit words... ahimsa (non-violence), sadhana (the spiritual journey), deva/devi (god/goddess).  So when I went to Divinity School, I signed right up for Sanskrit.

Oh.  Oh my.

So here's the thing about trying to learn Sanskrit.

First, it's written in Devanagari (Devanagari means "Writing of the Gods"), so you have to get past that.  Devanagari is easy to identify, by the bar across the top of the letters.... looks like this:

ॐ भूर्भुवः॒ स्वः॒
तत्स॑वितुर्वरे॑ण्यम्
भ॒र्गो॑ दे॒वस्य॑ धीमहि।
धियो॒ यो नः॑ प्रचो॒दया॑त्॥

Second, Sanskrit has interesting rules, called sandhi.  The first two lines of Sanskrit just above looks like four words, right?  Um, not so fast.  It's actually the first two lines of the Gayatri mantra, including eight words, from the Yajur Veda  Transliterated, it looks like this:

Oṃ bhūr bhuvaḥ svaḥ

tát savitúr váreṇ(i)yaṃ

bhárgo devásya dhīmahi

dhíyo yó naḥ pracodáyāt

The sandhi rules cause the words to run together....   so, in effect, in that second line,  tat savitur varenyam becomes tatsaviturvarenyam.   (I am absolutely not going to try to explain why specific sandhi rules caused them to run together.  There are many, many sandhi rules.  Dauntingly many.  Staggeringly many.)

Sandhi makes it hard to even identify which words you are trying to translate.  The example above, transliterated ....  has become one long string of characters, tatsaviturvarenyam.  So your first task is to figure out the separate words in that long string of characters.

Third, like Latin, Sanskrit is fully inflected.  This means that every word includes all of the grammatical information about that word in that context.  In English, if we take three words...   Boy throws ball.... and toss them in the air, we have difficulty reconstructing the sentence.  Could be Ball throws boy.  Not a problem with Sanskrit, where Boy would clearly be in nominative case, the subject of the sentence.  Each noun is identified by gender, case, and number (singular, dual, and plural) for each of the eight cases.  This means that there are 24 forms of EVERY noun.  (Mercifully, dual is not used very often... )   Verbs are fun also.

Fourth, Sanskrit is an astonishingly rich language.  One can say the same thing (in English) a dozen different ways in Sanskrit, and one can translate any given Sanskrit into a dozen different English meanings.  I think because of that richness, Sanskrit poetry is unbelievably gorgeous.  In Divinity School, we had a scholar come and read Sansrit poetry for us, and then translate the poems.  That was one of the *best* classes.

But when I left Divinity school after two years of Sanskrit, I gave up.  It was just too challenging.  (One of my friends in Div School had studied Chinese, and said that Sanskrit was *much* more difficult.)

The good news about any of that? I did learn how to read Devanagari, which is also used in Hindi.Sanskrit's relationship to Hindi, is something like the relationship of Latin to Italian.  (Any linguists reading this blog?  Ah, that would be the people yelping in horror about that sentence.)

I have studied Hindi on and off for years... each time I have stopped because it's just too challenging.  The Devanagari is hard.  The sentence structure is nothing like English.... if you are studying a romance language like French, you need to learn many words - but the sentence structures of French and English are very similar.  Native Hindi speakers talk a mile a minute.  (They same the same about English speakers!)

So a couple of things happened when I was in India.  First, I was looking at the Sanskrit for the homa, the fire ceremony.  And one thing led to another, and I found myself talking to a French Sanskritist who put her files on a thumb drive for me.  When I got home and looked at those files - I was fascinated by her work. (And a tiny bit challenged by the fact that the explanatory text was all provided in French, not English.)  Talking with Naniji made me very wistful for Sanskrit.

The other things that happened - I was trying to order a couple of things in a shop, and the shopwala and I were pretty much failing to communicate.  (That ending -walla, or -vala -- means "the person who does this, the person who knows about this.  Can be used with English or Hindi words.  For example, one buys books from the bookwala, or one buys books from the kitaabwala.  One buys chai from the chaiwala, etc.) So after a couple of tries, in some desperation, I decided to try saying it in my clumsy Hindi... and his face lit up, and he got my things for me.   And I got a kick out of being able to read signs written in Devanagari....  including finding many instances where an English word was written in Devanagari rather than being translated at all. 

So I came home all fired up to try - again - with Hindi. Even a little bit... a few words... helps!