Remembering our roots

When the tablets of Crete were discovered, they contained symbols, whose pronunciation, let alone the meaning, could not be guessed. Pure logical reasoning and ingenious assumptions helped unravel the mysteries of the language, now called Linear B, used five hundred years even before the Greek civilization was supposed to have begun. Linear B is a script that was used for writing Mycenaean, an early form of Greek and it seems to have died out with the fall of Mycenaean civilization, around 1100 B.C. Hieroglyphics, the ancient language of the Egyptians, also seems to have died around 400 A.D. after the Roman emperor Theodosius I, who ruled Egypt at the time, forced all non-Christian temples to be closed. The list of languages lost in the sands of time is endless and many more are on the verge of extinction. One such language that was developed around 1700 B.C., before civilizations around the world had even started to develop, but is now on the verge of extinction, is Sanskrit. With Sanskrit being offered as a third language to higher secondary students and many students taking it up with interest, one might wonder why it is being referred to as “verge of extinction” but the 1991 Indian census reported just 49,736 fluent speakers of Sanskrit. Although it is a wonder that it has survived so many millennia, which goes on to prove its strength as well as simplicity, it has not come this close to dying in its 3700 years of existence.

In the past three decades, much time and money has been spent on trying to find an unambiguous method of representation of natural languages to make them accessible to computer processing. It is accepted widely that natural languages are unsuitable for the transmission of many ideas that artificial languages can render with great precision and mathematical rigor. But a report produced by the NASA scientist Rick Briggs, on Sanskrit and Artificial Intelligence, states that this dichotomy is a false one. He says that there is in fact a language, Sanskrit, that had been the spoken language for more than 1000 years, whose grammar has all the requisites of an artificial language. To summarize his report, the semantic network of Sanskrit is a context-free one. For e.g. the English sentence “Rama kills Ravana”, can be written in Sanskrit as “Ramah Ravanam Vadathi” or “Ravanam Ramah Vadathi” or “Vadathi Ramah Ravanam” or in any other way the sentence could be formed. This is because a noun’s property of being a subject or object does not depend on its position in the sentence as in most other languages, but in the form of the noun itself. Thus even if the verb appears before the noun, since the subject and object are clear, the sentence has no way of being misinterpreted. This makes instructions in Sanskrit unequivocal. Understandably, this feature gives poets a very high degree of freedom. This is one of the reasons why Sanskrit is sometimes referred to as the most poetic language. The Ramayana consisted of 24,000 verses and the Mahabharata with more than 74,000 verses, long prose passages, and about 1.8 million words in total, is one of the longest epic poems in the world. The poetic freedom given by Sanskrit is what has made epics of such magnitude to be written as poems, instead of direct prose.

The older form of Sanskrit utilized in epic literature—namely the Ramayana and Mahabharata—was slightly less strict in its grammatical codification. The form of Sanskrit which has been used for the last 2500 years is known today as classical Sanskrit. That Sanskrit is a language of the Hindus alone is a misconception for it is also the liturgical language of Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism. Further, it must be considered only as a language, just as English is considered only a language and not the language of Christians. The Sanskrit literature is not only rich in drama, art and poetry but also in scientific, religious and philosophical texts. It is a sad state for the language that these texts are unable to be read now by a majority of the people. Since the 1990s, efforts to revive spoken Sanskrit have been increasing. Organizations like the Samskrta Bharati are conducting Speak Sanskrit workshops to popularize the language. We as Indians must actively try and restore the language, for knowledge which has been our nation’s greatest wealth, found its first words in Sanskrit.