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71 sats \ 4 replies \ @south_korea_ln 19 Aug \ parent \ on: Parent’s Corner: 大人 vs 小人 mostly_harmless
I asked my Indian colleague.
He told me that in a sense, Sanskrit is actually based on a very limited number of roots (around 2,000) and that the innumerable number of words are just coming from a very systematic application of specific grammar rules to apply "inflections" and "derivations".
But he says it appeals to the nationalistic nature of people to claim it contains several millions of words (he doesn't know where the number of 100 billion words comes from)... but in reality, the actual uniqueness of words lies in the roots rather in the inflections or derivations.
This could be a reason for not including it at nr 1 in that Wikipedia page. At the same time, you are free to add it... maybe it's a simple omission.
In the end, I guess both sides are valid. It's just a disagreement on how to count a word as being truly unique. It's a matter of definition.
Very interesting! Thank you for verifying!
It seems immature to me for people to be proud of a 100 billion word language even if the number was true. The pride comes solely from a "big number better than small number" primitive reasoning, while a language can be judged objectively superior if it's able to achieve complexity from a simple basis. Having innumerable words as derivations from a limited root and consistent grammar rules is something Sanskrit can be really proud of. I actually like English because it achieves the same effect.
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You got it all wrong!
I never said that I'm proud of Tamil and Sanskrit for "big number better than small number". No, I also like English much more than these languages mostly because it achieves far better effect with only 120 root words.
If you ask me, I'm proud of Sanskrit for being the mother of all languages, especially Indo-Aryan Group of Languages. This group includes most of European languages and Hindi as well. The spritual tests (the oldest known) Vedas are another reason to be proud of Sanskrit.
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I never said that I'm proud of Tamil and Sanskrit for "big number better than small number"
I never said nor mean to infer you did. I was commenting to, and referring to @south_korea_ln observation from his colleague:
But he says it appeals to the nationalistic nature of people to claim it contains several millions of words
I know well what Sanskrit can boast of, hence my comment on why I consider dumb to fabricate unnecessary and rather childish "merits".
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Okay, so you mean to say that Tamil and Korean have that many unique words? I think they also don't have so many root words.
For Sanskrit having so many similar words of synonyms lies in the fact that it was spoken in numerous dialects. The synonyms gave come from all those dialects.
The reason for not including Sanskrit there on the may also be because Sanskrit isn't spoken anymore. It's very much like Latin!
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