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Sanskrit: Closest Indian Language? | ||
Tags: Sanskrit | Linguistic relationships | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Lykeio Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4038 days ago 120 posts - 357 votes  | Message 17 of 21 01 March 2014 at 11:40am | IP Logged | ||
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Thank you Serpent. Indeed, this is a topic well traversed by many many teachers and even
students at various levels. More importantly, something also covered by several exhaustive studies by philologists from the 1880's onwards. The biggest mystery is why our new poster felt the need to revive an old thread with a post that literally adds nothing to the discussion. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| horshod Pentaglot Groupie India Joined 5564 days ago 74 posts - 107 votes Speaks: Hindi, Marathi*, Bengali, Gujarati, English Studies: German, Spanish, Turkish | Message 18 of 21 01 March 2014 at 3:31pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think Marathi pronunciation is the closest to
Sanskrit. I guess there is no way to exactly determine what Sanskrit used to sound like, but Marathi seems to reproduce the written words more faithfully than any other Indian language. As for the vocabulary Bengali probably wins hands down. When I started watching Bengali TV (that is what this observation is mostly based on. I have never been to West Bengal) I was astonished to see the number of purely Sanskrit words used in everyday conversations. Marathi vocabulary has been significantly influenced by Dravidian languages. But I don't understand how one could determine if the grammar was influenced by Dravidian languages. I have studied most of the major Indian languages and I couldn't see any major differences in the grammars of Dravidian and Indo-Aryan languages (which was, in fact, quite surprising). Or maybe I am missing something. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4462 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 19 of 21 01 March 2014 at 8:13pm | IP Logged | ||
Not really. Marathi is one of the few Indo-Aryan languages which didn't conserve the nasal vowels of Sanskrit. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| horshod Pentaglot Groupie India Joined 5564 days ago 74 posts - 107 votes Speaks: Hindi, Marathi*, Bengali, Gujarati, English Studies: German, Spanish, Turkish | Message 20 of 21 01 March 2014 at 8:43pm | IP Logged | ||
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What do you mean when you say nasal "vowels"? I
can't think of any nasal vowels in Sanskrit like the Portuguese ã, õ etc. Do you mean to refer to the nasal consonants ङ and ञ? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Lykeio Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4038 days ago 120 posts - 357 votes | Message 21 of 21 01 March 2014 at 10:14pm | IP Logged | ||
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Sanskrit can have m, n, r and rarely l as what ought to be called resonants as a class,
the first two specifically being nasals. That is, these sounds can function as vowels. A common, important, class of sounds still testified in several Indo-Aryan languages but excluded from Marathi. For vowels Sanskrit tends to mark them with anusvara, but as I said there are other examples if you look beyond "nasal" and look at class function. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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