Spoken Sanskrit

[George Hart]

Dear Rasik Joshi Tripathi,

I myself spoke Sanskrit for a year with pandits from the Sanskrit  
Sanskrit college -- I made sure none of them knew English.  I became  
pretty fluent, and was intrigued to discover that my wife, who is  
Tamil and has studied Tamil literature thoroughly, could understand us  
after a time.  Colloquial Tamil contains thousands of Sanskrit words,  
though of course high Tamil uses pure Dravidian equivalents (e.g.  
tuuymai for suddam < suddha).  Sanskrit syntax has been deeply  
influenced by Dravidian -- and this is even more true of spoken  
Sanskrit (bhavaan aagamisyati vaa, where the vaa replicates the  
Dravidian interrogative -aa).  This no doubt made it easier for her to  
understand.  The Sanskrit used by the pandits had, in my estimation,  
very little in common with the language of the person from the  
Sanskrit village.  They used the language sensitively, creatively, and  
with a full knowledge of all its forms.  I remember once being taken  
to task for using too many bhaave constructions, a convenient  
workaround that, of course, enables one to avoid remembering all the  
various verb conjugations.  It is certainly true that there are many  
like yourself who are well-versed in Sanskrit even today.  A Tamil  
gentleman living in the Bay Area recently presented me with a  
composition -- quite well done -- he had written in Sanskrit on the  
Titanic.  He had truly mastered the language.  George Hart

On Aug 11, 2008, at 7:27 AM, Rasik Vihari Joshi Tripathi wrote:

> Dear Hart,
> Do you know that there are fourteen Sanskrit Vidyapeetha in India, and
> six Sanskrit universities in Varanasi,Tirupati, Delhi,Jaipur etc.   
> where
> sanskrit is the media of teaching and all Professors and students  
> speak
> Sanskrit. My mother toung was Sanskrit. My father Pandit Rampratap
> Shastri was Professor and Head of the Departrment of Sanskrit at the
> Nagpur university and I learnt Sanskrit with him as a  child and  
> then at
> Varanasi I studied upto Shastri degree. I took my first Ph.D. in India
> and second at Sorbonne.I have  composed and published 15 Sanskrit  
> Kavyas
> I still speak Sanskrit fluently. My latest Sanskrit Kavya is Satyam
> Universl Truth). I wonder if you have met any Professor or student of
> these institutions? With best regards,
> Rasik Vihari Joshi
>
>
> -----Mensaje original-----
> De: Indology [mailto:INDOLOGY at liverpool.ac.uk] En nombre de George  
> Hart
> Enviado el: Lunes, 11 de Agosto de 2008 09:07 a.m.
> Para: INDOLOGY at liverpool.ac.uk
> Asunto: Re: Spoken Sanskrit
>
>
> I myself once encountered someone from Karnataka who lived in the
> village where "Sanskrit" is spoken.  It was a dumbed-down language not
> much resembling (in my opinion) the eloquent tongue used by Kalidasa
> and Sankara -- or even the epics.  It dispenses with such frills as
> the dual and many verb forms.  I asked him if he had read Sanskrit
> literature -- poetry, darsana, whatever.  He seemed nonplussed by the
> question -- he spoke Sanskrit; why should he read Kalidasa?  I felt he
> was entirely ignorant of the intellectual grandeur and scope of the
> language and spoke it (or his version of it) merely to make a
> statement.  I would remark parenthetically that the use of Sanskrit in
> a Malayalam historical novel I once read -- including 3-line Sanskrit
> compounds -- was far more sophisticated than this "Sanskrit" speaker
> could have managed.  If he had studied the literature of Kannada --
> which I suspect was his real native language -- his Sanskrit would
> certainly have been much better.  George Hart
>
> On Aug 11, 2008, at 12:47 AM, veeranarayana Pandurangi wrote:
>
>> dear friends,
>> welcome to such new studies.
>> but is is difficult for a naiyayika to imagine ritual transformation
>> of
>> household in the context of modern sanskrit revivalism. Since I know
>> personally many sanskrit families here, it is nothing but some kind  
>> of
>> national revivalism.
>> thanks
>> veeranarayana
>>
>> On Fri, Aug 8, 2008 at 10:01 PM, Dominik Wujastyk
>> <ucgadkw at ucl.ac.uk> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> There's an interesting set of reflections on the topic here:
>>>
>>> Journal of Linguistic Anthropology
>>> June 2008, Vol. 18, No. 1, pp. 24-45
>>> Posted online on July 28, 2008.
>>> (doi:10.1111/j.1548-1395.2008.00002.x)
>>>
>>> Licked by the Mother Tongue: Imagining Everyday Sanskrit at Home
>>> and in the
>>> World
>>> by Adi Hastings
>>>
>>> Abstract:
>>> This paper examines the ways in which Sanskrit revivalists in
>>> contemporary
>>> India imagine social contexts for the production and reproduction of
>>> Sanskrit speech. In contrast to the received view of Sanskrit as
>>> being a
>>> ritual language par excellence, opposed at every step to the
>>> domestic sphere
>>> and everyday life, Sanskrit revivalists treat Sanskrit as a "mother
>>> tongue,"
>>> figuring the home as the primary site for the creation of an
>>> "everyday
>>> Sanskrit" world and the mother as the primary agent of this process
>>> of
>>> Sanskritizing the domestic sphere. "Domesticating Sanskrit," the
>>> process of
>>> bringing the elevated ritual language down into everyday life, at
>>> the very
>>> same time "Sanskritizes the domestic," that is, ritually transforms
>>> or
>>> elevates the home into a "Sanskrit home." Moving outward from the
>>> Sanskritized domestic sphere, activists also imagine other contexts
>>> in which
>>> one could use Sanskrit, which nonetheless conforms to a notion of a
>>> Sanskrit
>>> interiority or domesticity.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Dr Dominik Wujastyk
>>> Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow
>>> University College London
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Veeranarayana N.K. Pandurangi
>> Head, Dept of Darshanas,
>> Yoganandacharya Bhavan,
>> Jagadguru Ramanandacharya Rajasthan Samskrita University, Madau, post
>> Bhankrota, Jaipur, 302026.