[INDOLOGY] "Psychological complexity" of Sanskrit language/literature

[Gleb Sharygin]

Dear Professor Zydenbos,

Thank you very much for your constructive reply!

I rejoiced in reading that C. G. Jung also was the reason for you to take
up Sanskrit. I took up Sanskrit, Indology and Buddhology as well in part
because of Jung's and other psychoanalysts interest in Indian and Eastern
psychology and meditation, as well as because it was evident that early
Buddhist and other Indian spiritual traditions offered an unparalleled
deep, rich and rational analysis of the human psyche, and understanding of
how to change and develop it. I personally fully agree that a great deal of
Indian philosophy is some form of psychology or "psychology".

I mentioned "quantitative" mostly because of the classical Kantian "maxim"
"in jeder besonderen Naturlehre nur so viel eigentliche Wissenschaft
angetroffen werden könne, als darin Mathematik anzutreffen ist." What I
meant was that some form of statistical analysis and corpus-related
procedures are desirable, some modern linguistics, unless we want to find
us in the old debate "I understand it differently". Renowned Russian
linguist Vyacheslav V. Ivanov wrote in his seminal work "Even and Odd"
(which is a treatise on the nature of language and human mind, that
Alexander von Humboldt would have written, had he lived in the second part
of the 20th century) and would tell us in his classes that "people seem to
understand and discuss things very well between each other, until one of
them asks "what do you mean by this and that (word or concept)"". I think
at least some statistical overview of psychological features of Sanskrit is
possible, if we compare how many words in Sanskrit correspond to the
similar words in other languages (see my earlier post about love on the
list, and we can compare other psychological phenomena, such as friendship,
trust, betrayal, rage etc.). Of course, so to say, Sanskrit *verba
cogitandi*, that you mention, would need a special analysis. I can imagine
that would bring us a tentative (but scientific) answer, whether some
languages are psychologically more nuanced than others, and to what
extent/degree... The next question would be -- what shall we do, having
ascertained that...

The study of such cognitive and psychological terms and concepts, related
to inner human life, that you mention, would be very interesting. I imagine
that some of the procedures and tools of modern cognitive linguistics,
semantics and pragmatics could be used in such enterprise (cp., for
instance, Anna Wierzbicka's work).

Kind regards,
Gleb Sharygin

ср, 19 авг. 2020 г. в 17:37, Robert Zydenbos <zydenbos at uni-muenchen.de>:

> The development of this thread suggests that ‘psychological complexity of
> a language’ does not refer to morphological or syntactic complexity and the
> unnecessary burdens which these impose on the human psyche (and which were
> happily reduced when Indo-Aryan developed from Sanskrit to Prakrit), but to
> the semantics of those items in the lexicon that refer to psychological
> phenomena.
>
> Initially I myself was drawn to the study of Sanskrit precisely because of
> what C.G. Jung wrote about the subtlety of psychological thought in India,
> and indeed a huge part of what is discussed in Indian philosophy is
> psychology. Given this interest, along with the age-old interest in
> techniques of mind analysis (the entire complex that comprises what in
> English would be called contemplation, meditation, etc.), it is only
> natural that in Sanskrit, the main lingua franca of the Indian
> intelligentsia, a very refined and differentiated terminology was
> developed. English has only ‘consciousness’ and ‘mind’ to cover areas where
> Sanskrit has various terms.
>
> A quantitative study (which to my knowledge does not yet exist) in itself
> seems not so useful. Lexically one could simply look at the items that are
> derived from verb roots like man, cit, cint, jñā, kḷp etc. and compile a
> list. Finished. Then you do the same with a few other languages and compare
> the numbers. That says very little.  A statistical search for the use of
> all these terms in actual texts? Which texts would you select for that?
> There is hardly any basis for a comparison, and so I think any such attempt
> would tell us nothing.
>
> Far more interesting would be a semantic study of such sets of
> terminology, bringing out the distinctions.
>
> The Zentrum historische Sprachwissenschaften at our LMU
> (Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich),
> https://www.sprachwiss.uni-muenchen.de/index.html, of which I happen to
> be one of the governing members, for years has been playing with the idea
> of organizing a symposium on terminologies in various languages for the
> inner human being: ‘self’, ‘soul’, psyche’, ‘mind’ and related phenomena.
> The idea was unfortunately never supported by a majority of the members of
> the Zentrum, because the topic was considered too philosophical and
> psychological, and not sufficiently ‘scientific’…
>
> Robert Zydenbos
>
> --
> Prof. Dr. Robert J. Zydenbos
> Institute of Indology and Tibetology
> Department of Asian Studies
> Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (University of Munich – LMU)
> Germany
>
>


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