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


Gleb Sharygin via INDOLOGY wrote on 18.08.20 23:19:
Dear learned members of the List,

I wonder if someone might be able to help me find any well-done linguistic or psychological quantitative study of the psychological "dimension" of Sanskrit language/literature. By "Sanskrit" here I mean all classical/ancient Indo-Aryan languages of India, including Prakrits.

It is intuitively obvious to me that Sanskrit is an immensely psychologically rich language, and an extremely psychologically sophisticated tradition of literature. As C. G. Jung and C. A. F. Rhys Davids put it: […]



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Prof. Dr. Robert J. Zydenbos
Institute of Indology and Tibetology
Department of Asian Studies
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (University of Munich – LMU)
Germany