Dear Dagmar,
As to Latin and Greek literature, I believe that choosing a good periodization is difficult, if you want to do it for comparative purposes.
Would you consider Byzantine Greek literature or not? If yes, then why not consider Latin literature from late antiquity, medieval times and Renaissance too? Would it be on linguistic grounds? I think that then you would be forced to compare the periodization
let’s say of South Asian or Central Asian history and the history of each language with that of Latin and Greek. Assuming we are talking also of scientific and technical literature, you would also face the issue of assessing the impact of the late diffusion
of printing technology in South Asia and on the other hand how this phenomenon might have affected a possible increase in the composition of works in cultures were printing technology was employed early on, such as China and Japan, due to economic reasons.
After all, printers and publishing houses wanted to sell more and more books, and in order to do it they had to publish something.
In one of my articles I briefly touched upon the numbers of Latin, Greek, and vernacular languages manuscripts from the 6th to the
15th century as compared to various estimates of the number of South Asian manuscripts, but again, these numbers again are simply telling us—in an unreliable way—how many books have survived, not how many works were composed.
I apologize for the long and unstructured reply, but lately I’ve been fascinated by questions like the one you asked, only to be baffled
by the fact that it seems very difficult to get reliable quantitative data to start with.
Best wishes,
Camillo
Dr Camillo A. Formigatti
John Clay Sanskrit Librarian
Bodleian Libraries
The Weston Library
Broad Street
Oxford
OX1 3BG
Email:
camillo.formigatti@bodleian.ox.ac.uk
Tel. (office): 01865 (2)77208
www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk
From: Dagmar Wujastyk [mailto:d.wujastyk@gmail.com]
Sent: 19 April 2017 17:32
To: Camillo Formigatti <camillo.formigatti@bodleian.ox.ac.uk>
Cc: indology <INDOLOGY@list.indology.info>
Subject: Re: [INDOLOGY] Sanskrit literature in numbers
Dear Camillo,
I must admit I am a bit uncertain where to draw the line. Trying to quantify Latin literature, I think I would want total numbers that could then be split up in classical and then everything later? I am not sure what the cut off date would
be.
Best, Dagmar
On 19 April 2017 at 10:19, Camillo Formigatti <camillo.formigatti@bodleian.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
Dear Dagmar,
This is a very interesting question indeed. May I add two other questions to it? Would you like to know the numbers of extant works only or the number of works in general, even if lost? Also, when you write Latin language, for instance, do you mean only classical Latin (whatever this might mean) or every work that has been written in Latin until today (and I’m not thinking of today’s Latin used in the Vatican, I was rather thinking of authors like the Italian poet Giovanni Pascoli (1855 –1912), who wrote poems in Latin too)?
Best wishes,
Camillo
Dr Camillo A. Formigatti
John Clay Sanskrit Librarian
Bodleian Libraries
The Weston Library
Broad Street
Oxford
OX1 3BG
Email: camillo.formigatti@bodleian.ox.ac.uk
Tel. (office): 01865 (2)77208
www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk
From: Dagmar Wujastyk [mailto:d.wujastyk@gmail.com]
Sent: 19 April 2017 16:53
To: indology <INDOLOGY@list.indology.info>
Subject: [INDOLOGY] Sanskrit literature in numbers
Dear colleagues,
Might anyone be able to point me to a publication/data on the relative quantities of Sanskrit works and other pre-modern works in languages such as Latin, Chinese, Tamil, Arabic or Persian?
We all know that there is a very large body of Sanskrit literature, but how does the number of Sanskrit works compare to works written in other languages? My sense has always been that Sanskrit literature is particularly large, but perhaps this is not substantiated by data?
Best wishes,
Dagmar Wujastyk