Artful Lounger learns Sanskrit (among other things!)

Wow at making quiche from scratch (even if it did go a bit wrong in the process) and double WOW WOW at you doing an essay for Greek myth that you don't have to do. You keen bean

Oh gosh, I'm not too sure I'd realised you have an oral exam for Sanskrit! That's both cool and somewhat terrifying

9am classes should not be a thing, imho

Can I have tag plz
This looks so cool and I'd be interested in maaaaybe doing some more Classics at some point so interesting to see what it looks like

Of course

It looks like lots of grammar tables a lot of the time! But you get to use these to do translations which are pretty rewarding (not sure I would go so far as to call them "fun" in general I spent about half an hour last night trying to puzzle out one sentence and then realised that it had been translated for us in the footnotes )

'Sanskrit' drew me in! Fantastic.

I spent an hour obsessing over an unusual conjunct consonant the other week only to eventually realise it was what I had first thought it was!

Oh yeah, I've had that experience even at the introductory level we're working at even...especially the way devanagari gets printed in different fonts, sometimes things look so different! At one point last term I was very confused by what I thought was a strange consonant conjunct only to realise it was just "gra" in a different font than we were used to which had also been printed not all that well and then scanned

That'll happen a lot, don't beat yourself up!

I hadn't read any nāgari for a couple of years so in my case it is ring rust, I think. Use it or lose it and all that

I can believe it! I didn't look at any just for a few weeks over the winter break and already found a couple of the (maybe less common?) signs I couldn't remember, for just the basic consonant syllables D:

Evidently it definitely pays dividends to keep on top of it...I'll need to make sure to do a bit of reading every week over the summer so I don't forget everything before next year!

It is worth it, I reckon. I have learnt through experience: my Skt is nowhere near as good now as it was in 2016 just because I spend less time with it!

Yeah, I think it will be worth it for sure! Plus hopefully by the end of this term we might have the very basic background needed to explore some simpler texts (if such things even exist!) directly, rather than purely adapted texts. That may be overly optimistic though

Either way I think I will look for some kind of "reader" to try working on over the summer (although I'm sure our lecturer will have some suggestions and advice for not going rusty over the summer!). Unfortunately the one the lecturer has been using some of the exercise passages from so far in class is pretty expensive so...not that one :x

Haha is it the Walter Maurer one? I love that but yeah, not cheap!

Of course

It looks like lots of grammar tables a lot of the time! But you get to use these to do translations which are pretty rewarding (not sure I would go so far as to call them "fun" in general I spent about half an hour last night trying to puzzle out one sentence and then realised that it had been translated for us in the footnotes )

Hahahaha tell me about it - was going through my old Latin stuff over Christmas to decide what to chuck and all these sheets of paper where I'd revised by copying out full verb tables from memory fell out

Translation is absolutely the best bit though and that's what I really miss - I did some French last term as an optional module but dropped it because it really just wasn't giving me that sense of satisfaction. I also really enjoyed doing translation into Latin but that was very extra

Yeah the composition/translation from English into *target language* is pretty tough but rewarding, it definitely leads you to understand the grammar and constructions on a deeper level I think, and helps you make sense of translations into English more easily. Also maybe once you get to a more advanced level you can start trying to be creative and involving metre and rhyme and suchlike! We're definitely not at that point yet

We actually spent the better part of the second half of our Sanskrit class this morning practicing composition to better understand the grammar we covered on Monday It was definitely helpful because the way the constructions would literally translate (in the Sanskrit word order) is very weird, but practicing composition into Sanskrit using some of the principles of Sanskrit word order we had covered last term (which is not really that fixed, I gather, like Latin and Greek? But in prose it does seem that things tend to go into a relatively structured format).

Helps you see that what might seem incomprehensible at first is pretty straightforward if you start at the verb (usually at the end of the sentence) and then just move from the end to the start of the sentence (which is usually the subject)...so you would have "he goes" - where does he go? "to the city" which city? "the city in the vicinity of the mountains" and so on and so forth. Whereas my usual approach to translation is just write all the grammar above the line and the definitions/individual translations of each word underneath the line, and then on a separate page try and make sense of all the words so doing the composition reminds me at least that I can try and think more in terms of starting from the verb at the end and making my way to the subject, to move away from just translating as a separate activity and into more like...reading the language directly, in a way?

Sanskrit is written how Yoda speaks. That's how I deal with it

Yes I think it really gives you insight into how a language just...does things. Latin is very verb-heavy and for me that only hit home when I was translating into Latin and realising I had to swap noun phrases for verbs! I got to the point where I was doing stuff that I felt was fancy (basically copying Cicero as much as possible) - I'm sure my teacher would disagree though

That totally makes sense about moving to follow the sentence structure of the language and knowing what to look for After a while it's automatic and you get the "omg I am fluently reading [LANGUAGE]" It sounds "yoda-y", like Latin or German? (Greek, from what I understand, is a bit weirder and more fluid)

I know next to nothing about Sanskrit - do you study any literature at this level? Are there any texts you want to be able to read?

Yeah with Sanskrit you get sentences where the word order if taken directly into English would be something like: "once upon a time, a certain lion, of the cave, in the mountain, he lived" which would mean in more idiomatic English "once upon a time a [certain] lion lived in a mountain cave", or something.

Also it tends to not have more than one finite verb per sentence so fills in the need for other verbs using non-finite verbal forms, so if you very literally translated a sentence you might have something like "The prince, having awoken, having gotten out of bed, having gone to the balcony, saw the bird". The "having x-ed" was the convention we were introduced for understanding the past passive participle (PPP) which is pretty ubiquitous apparently (and has been very common in the extracts we've looked at!), although we were advised that less formally it might be typical to translate them as a past tense verb (e.g. instead of "having gone to the balcony, saw the bird", have "he went to the balcony and saw the bird").

We've not used any texts directly, and only some short adapted passages from a reader developed for teaching Sanskrit. The reader passages are adapted from actual Sanskrit texts though, I gather, although sometimes it's not all that clear exactly what it's from! The texts modules start from second year, alongside the Sanskrit Language 2 (the second year language module). They aren't purely about studying the texts though and also serve as a form of language instruction in of themselves, is I think the design of the Sanskrit curriculum at SOAS.

Although because of the restructuring of degree programmes and the South Asian Studies department, I'm not sure if all of them will be offered again...I expect they might only offer the yoga texts option now, since that corresponds to material taught on the yoga studies MA from which many students on the Sanskrit language modules are drawn. I'm hoping the epic texts module gets offered since that was the one that I was most keen on out of the ones on offer. There is/was epic texts, yoga texts, Hindu texts (although I think these overlap with the epic texts somewhat), court literature and another on poetry (although I think these last two overlap and the particular format depends on whether you're UG or PG; also I think these last two require Sanskrit 2 as a prerequisite, because I guess dealing with poetry and metrical systems and maybe more elaborate (?) court literature is a bit harder and requires more background.

From what I've done of Greek, the word order is usually pretty free. The verb often goes at the end, but not always, and there are some enclitics which can't go first in the sentence, and certain constructions which go in a particular order, but otherwise things aren't that rigid I guess, in theory anyway! However Athenaze (the textbook we were using) which was all passages specifically constructed for language learning, tended to mostly have things in a relatively easy to understand order.

In principle this is also the case with Latin I guess, and Sanskrit, but in practice Sanskrit prose it seems tends towards some structure (but because it's heavily inflected like Greek and Latin you can theoretically just put the words mostly anywhere and usually figure out what the meaning is, so in Sanskrit poetry apparently word order is mainly determined by whatever fits the metre being used).