संस्कृता वाक् - Sanskrit!

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Re: संस्कृता वाक् - Sanskrit!

Postby Meera » 2013-04-10, 17:07

hindupridemn wrote:Is it trueness that Sanskrit has four genders?


I believe it only has three.
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Re: संस्कृता वाक् - Sanskrit!

Postby księżycowy » 2013-04-10, 18:23

Yes, Sanskrit only has three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter. As the link that Mike already shared states clearly.

Sanskrit is a typical Indo-European language. I'm not sure where this idea of a fourth gender came from.

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Re: संस्कृता वाक् - Sanskrit!

Postby Meera » 2013-04-12, 14:42

Are there any languages with four genders?
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Re: संस्कृता वाक् - Sanskrit!

Postby księżycowy » 2013-04-12, 14:44

None that I can think of, but then again I'm far from an expert. :P

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Re: संस्कृता वाक् - Sanskrit!

Postby hindupridemn » 2013-04-19, 3:58

There are languages with over a dozen "genders" or "noun classes".

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Re: संस्कृता वाक् - Sanskrit!

Postby mōdgethanc » 2013-04-19, 4:05

Genders are a type of noun class, but not all noun classes are genders.

Anyway, to answer Meera's question:

Some Slavic languages, including Russian, Czech, and Slovak, make grammatical distinctions between animate and inanimate nouns (in Czech only in the masculine gender; in Russian only in masculine singular, but in the plural in all genders). Another example is Polish, which can be said to distinguish five genders: personal masculine (referring to male humans), animate non-personal masculine, inanimate masculine, feminine, and neuter.

You can get more genders when you add features like animacy (whether something is living or not).
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Re: संस्कृता वाक् - Sanskrit!

Postby księżycowy » 2013-04-19, 12:35

I hadn't thought of it like that. Thanks for the info.

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Re: संस्कृता वाक् - Sanskrit!

Postby הענט » 2013-04-19, 12:52

To distinguish animate and inanimate objects is actually pretty handy for the noun declension. :)

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Re: संस्कृता वाक् - Sanskrit!

Postby Babelfish » 2013-04-19, 17:40

नमस्ते
(no ! or ? on Devanagari keyboard?)
I'm not actively studying Sanskrit just yet, only gathering bits and pieces out of curiosity... I've been practising yoga for the last couple of years, so I got familiar with some Sanskrit words and terms. I'm not sure how long I could stand the temptation to delve into an ancient language with a complex grammar, Latin & Greek cognates, various words I encounter in yoga and elsewhere, and generally written with an awesome script :mrgreen: The script I'm already studying - speaking of which, I found the conjuncts table in Wikipedia more intimidating than useful, so I copied it and colored the conjuncts according to the rules they're based on. Please have a look!

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/67621112/Devanagari%20Biconsonantal%20Conjuncts.html

I'd love it if you tell me whether you think it's useful, needs improvements, or has errors. I might make one for the Ethiopic script too :)
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Re: संस्कृता वाक् - Sanskrit!

Postby eien » 2013-04-20, 0:36

Very cool.
Heads up that the WP Devanagari table will probably render using specifically modern forms, unless you have a really odd font configuration. Older texts in Devanagari, and some modern printed editions of Sanskrit texts, will vary here and there. But you probably shouldn't get too comfortable with expecting specific forms anyway, it's a script that allows a lot of variety diachronically and diaspatially.

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Re: संस्कृता वाक् - Sanskrit!

Postby Babelfish » 2013-04-20, 15:15

Yes, after finishing the table coloring I also had a feeling that the virama is used in conjuncts much more often that I'd expected, and that maybe there are conjuncts not supported by the font my browser uses (they even mentioned such a possibility on Wikipedia)... Which brings to mind the question, does anyone know of a webpage describing those conjuncts more extensively? I searched but didn't find anything specific, just some remarks that there are some ligatures of 3 or even 5 consonants, without examples.

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Re: संस्कृता वाक् - Sanskrit!

Postby eien » 2013-04-20, 21:37

Didn't have much luck with Googling. I think most Sanskrit grammars will cover it a bit. Here's a few pages from Whitney.

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Re: संस्कृता वाक् - Sanskrit!

Postby Meera » 2013-04-21, 20:52

Babelfish wrote:नमस्ते
(no ! or ? on Devanagari keyboard?)
I'm not actively studying Sanskrit just yet, only gathering bits and pieces out of curiosity... I've been practising yoga for the last couple of years, so I got familiar with some Sanskrit words and terms. I'm not sure how long I could stand the temptation to delve into an ancient language with a complex grammar, Latin & Greek cognates, various words I encounter in yoga and elsewhere, and generally written with an awesome script :mrgreen: The script I'm already studying - speaking of which, I found the conjuncts table in Wikipedia more intimidating than useful, so I copied it and colored the conjuncts according to the rules they're based on. Please have a look!

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/67621112/Devanagari%20Biconsonantal%20Conjuncts.html



I'd love it if you tell me whether you think it's useful, needs improvements, or has errors. I might make one for the Ethiopic script too :)



Wow awesome job!
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Re: संस्कृता वाक् - Sanskrit!

Postby Meera » 2013-04-21, 20:59

mōdgethanc wrote:Genders are a type of noun class, but not all noun classes are genders.

Anyway, to answer Meera's question:

Some Slavic languages, including Russian, Czech, and Slovak, make grammatical distinctions between animate and inanimate nouns (in Czech only in the masculine gender; in Russian only in masculine singular, but in the plural in all genders). Another example is Polish, which can be said to distinguish five genders: personal masculine (referring to male humans), animate non-personal masculine, inanimate masculine, feminine, and neuter.

You can get more genders when you add features like animacy (whether something is living or not).


Oh! I think Swahili and some other African langauges like Xhosa, does this also. I'm not sure if Sanskrit does this or not, but it does have eight cases I think.
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Re: संस्कृता वाक् - Sanskrit!

Postby Babelfish » 2013-04-26, 12:47

Thanks! 8-) I'll go on and post it on the Hindi and Scripts forums. It'll need a bit more work, as indeed as eien has warned, I've found that on my iPhone some conjuncts do have specific forms not supported by the font on my Windows PC...

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Re: संस्कृता वाक् - Sanskrit!

Postby mōdgethanc » 2013-04-26, 14:31

Meera wrote:Oh! I think Swahili and some other African langauges like Xhosa, does this also. I'm not sure if Sanskrit does this or not, but it does have eight cases I think.
Yes, Bantu languages have complex systems of noun classes, which are like gender but more complex. Swahili has sixteen of them including ones for people, nature, objects and animals. Xhosa has fifteen. They work kind of like measure wordsin Chinese and Indonesian. If you look up Swahili you can see what some of the prefixes are. For example ki- is the noun class that includes languages, which is why the language is called Kiswahili, and its speakers are called Waswahili. In Xhosa the language is isiXhosa and the people are amaXhosa. I guess they're kind of like cases, but the difference is that cases show the grammatical function of words while noun classes cover their meaning.
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Re: संस्कृता वाक् - Sanskrit!

Postby Babelfish » 2013-05-15, 16:48

(Naturally, I couldn't resist starting a set of basic Sanskrit lessons :roll: I don't know to what level I'll get, currently I hardly have the knowledge to confidently write अहं संस्कृतं पठामि...)

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Re: संस्कृता वाक् - Sanskrit!

Postby modus.irrealis » 2013-05-15, 18:59

You know, your devanagari table got me wanting to get back to Sanskrit....

What book are you using? Of the times I tried, I made it the furthest using Coulson's book, which I found nice based on my knowledge of Ancient Greek and Latin.

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Re: संस्कृता वाक् - Sanskrit!

Postby Babelfish » 2013-05-18, 14:54

Wow, glad to hear I'm doing something useful! :mrgreen: I should probably find a better place for it than Dropbox, though, as it's not really intended for hosting webpages and in particular they don't get indexed by search engines.

I'm not using any books, just online resources as usual... :roll: Too many languages I meddle with to buy books for all, when there's so much free stuff on the Internet.



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