Week 03, 2023

22 Jan 2023 My notes for this week are linked here.

Summary

This week, I did my first translations and got introduced to nominals and the various cases. I also learnt a few simple sentences in Spoken Sanskrit.

Progress

This week, the classes were a lot of grammar and rules. It bugs me a lot that we’re using English to learn Sanskrit because it feels forced. However, unfortunately, English remains the only language I know properly, so I think this is my best bet for now. I’m hoping the Sanskrit grammar will eventually act as the means by which I parse future grammar lessons in other languages.

Turns out that there are very specific rules to form stems from roots based on which class the verb belongs to. To start with, we did the I, IV and VI class verbs. Along with the X Class, these four classes form what are called thematic classes, which have stems ending in a-. Apparently, most of the commonly used verbs belong to these classes. Nevertheless, it’s important to memorize both meanings and the classes to which verbs belong to.

We also learnt about the different systems of stems. Turns out the the stem forms we learnt for the Present Indicative Active verbs is the same system used for Future tense and the Imperfect Past tense. Of course, these terms mean nothing to me now. But, it’s good to know there is more than one stem per verb, and a stem can be used for more than one tense/mood.

The hero of this week was definitely the nominals: nouns, adjectives, pronouns, participles, etc… Just like how there are five categories for verb conjugation, there are three categories for nominals: Case, Number and Gender. Note that the verbs don’t have anything to do with gender, but nouns do. Also remember that the Gender here is grammatical gender, and it may or may not actually be the gender of the entity (just like German).

Even if there are only three categories instead of five, the category called Case is very dense! There are eight possible cases in Sanskrit! That’s a lot! For comparison, apparently Latin has six cases and Greek has five cases. And, I just found from Googling, apparently Chinese has no inflection at all (like English) and has no cases? Since we’re learning Sanskrit through English, which only uses prepositions to denote cases, I find it even more bizarre that we’re doing this kind of translation. According to the original Sanskrit grammar, the cases don’t really have names, but just numbers: I, II, III and so on, but we’re learning names like Nominative, Vocative, Accusative, Instrumental, Dative, Ablative, Genitive and Locative (look at thoughts below). I am divided about this. On one hand, I want to be learning as pure Sanskrit grammar as possible, but on the other hand, I think there’s some merit in knowing names because it’s easier to remember them. Whether I like it or not, I did have to memorize them all. In retrospect, I’m glad I did because it’s becoming natural with time.

Similar to my experience last week, I found it instructive to hear my peers’ perpectives and the attention being given to linguistics aspects. The class is still definitely leaned towards learning to translate and not necessarily get involved in grammar or linguistics for too long. I don’t like the word translation though. I think we only learn a language when we stop translating. But, it’s a start.

I find it interesting to know that the reason the verb root दृश् (‘to see’) has an irregular present system root (पश्य) is that two similar words eventually merged. Apparently the reason the different forms of the English verb ‘to be’ (am? was?) was because of similar reasons, and it was a merger between three similar words.

I have no idea or inherrent understanding of all the names of the cases because I’m not used to them. For example, we learnt that the Genitive case sometimes takes over the roles of Instrumental or Dative cases, and I have no idea what that means. I’m hoping more contextual learning will help in the future.

One more interesting thing to realize is that most Indian languages don’t have articles (like Sanskrit). Maybe that’s why it is/was so hard for so many of my friends to understand where to use a/an or the and when to skip them both entirely. And, not just articles, apparently possessive pronouns aren’t found in Sanskrit (I guess we’ll just use the Genitive to indicate possession?).

Apart from the class, the Sanskrit Interest Group met for the first time this week! We learnt to introduce ourselves and learnt the names of some common household objects for saying things like: “This is a spoon”, “That is a book” and so on. It’s a great way to complement all of the bookish and academic learning that I get through the course!

Thoughts

The two homeworks this week were fun because we used our known forms of the verbs to actually translate a few sentences. I am brought back to my days of learning Hindi translation in school. The funny thing is that many of my friends from North India make fun of or find it interesting that many words end in -am in Tamil. This is particularly obvious when I speak of music: ragam vs raag, swaram vs swar, alankaram vs alankar and so on. Turns out Sanskrit pronounces these ending vowels and also adds -am to many words. So, yeah, Tamil isn’t as discrete as often portrayed. In fact, so many commonly used Tamil words are actually from Sanskrit and they are more popular than the “pure” Tamil equivalents! There was a mildly angry note about this in one of the online resources for Tamil that I recently looked at.

I do have an epiphany to share. When learning Hindi, I remember memorizing this line: कर्ता ने कर्म को करण से, के द्वारा, द्वारा सम्प्रदान को, के लिए अपादान से सम्बंध का, के, की अधिकरण में, पर सम्बोधन हे, अरे. I learnt these were Case Endings and I never actually understood what that meant. UNTIL NOW! A sentence that’s already ingrained in my mind beautifully lists all the eight cases of Sanskrit (with NAMES!!)

Sanskrit still deals with ambiguity even when it’s so organized and effective, and Sanskrit poets supposedly take advantage of the abiguity. I actually really look forward to times when I can appreciate such nuances. I have tasted such thrill with English at times, and I’m hoping it’s only going to be better with Sanskrit (and not frustrating as it sounds to be ambiguous)! We actually dealt with a bit of ambiguity in our quiz this week where we debated on whether the word किम् translates to ‘what?’ or ‘why?’ or if it just indicates a question. Why, we even got a sneak peek into sandhi where we use the anusvāra किं if the following sound is a consonant or just the virāma किम् if the following sound is a vowel. Exciting times ahead! I’m still a little ahead of the class (since I took a look at the declension of Masculine a- stems). But let’s see how long that lasts. I was told everyone hits a Sanskrit wall at one point. I just have to get fit enough to climb it when I get there.

Questions

1. What are participles?

I completely forgot what participles are. This Grammarly guide talks about participles in some detail. Surprisingly, I don’t feel like going over it now.