LiCTLe of the Month for Februrary: Sanskrit I

What if we could forget everything that we knew?  What if we could look at well-known languages with fresh eyes, new insights gained from radically different foundational assumptions?  What if the science of linguistics had developed not in Europe, but in Australia or Africa or the Indian sub-continent?  What would Cherokee conquistadors have thought about the alien and incomprehensible tongues of Spain or England?

That's the problem with history- like life, you only get the one you're born with.  But, with a little imagination and the scholarship of a lot of people more patient and dedicated than I, we can catch a glimpse of a science that never was. 

European aristocrats were far from the only people interested in questions about language. As it turns out, aristocrats everywhere were.  Members of the Ancient Greek idle classes would have contemplated Plato's Cratylus, which argued that words are most often arbitrary, conventional symbols (something I think we all need to be reminded of every now and again).  In 1054, a prince in Central Asia, Mahmud al-Kashghari, wrote the Diwan al-lughat at-Türk, a three volume work exploring the divergent dialects of the Turkic tribes.  Korean scholars working in the fifteenth century developed hangul, a writing system based on phonological features.

But the most famous group of ancient linguists come from ancient India.  Sanskrit was a scriptural and ceremonial language, and texts concerning its proper usage and pronunciation were taken so seriously that some of its earliest grammarians became semi-mythical demigods.  (Something which, sadly, rarely happens to linguists these days.  Unless you talking about Noam Chomsky to someone from MIT, that is....).  Phonology, the study of the sounds of language, was considered one of the six disciplines essential to a proper understanding of holy scripture, along with syntax, astronomy, etymology, ritual and poetic meter.

These were holy scholars who took their language very seriously.  People who realized that grammar is about more than just words.

Sanskrit is part of the Indo-Iranian language group, which forms the larger part of the Indo-European language family (which may explain the top billing?).   As such, it is a linguistic cousin to such languages as Persian, Kurdish and the Nuristani languages of Pakistan and Afghanistan.  Further-removed cousins include Greek, Spanish and, of course, English.

Sanskrit is often called the “Latin of India” and the comparison is at least superficially accurate.  Like Latin in Europe's Middle Ages, Sanskrit was a learned language of religion, medicine and science.  Both languages, through their colloquial forms Vulgar Latin and Prakrit,  spun off some of today's most widely spoken world languages.  Just as various dialects of Vulgar Latin became Spanish, French and Portuguese, Prakrit can count Hindi, Urdu and Bengali among her daughters.

We'll talk about the grammar of Sanskrit, as well as it's most famous grammarian, Pāṇini, in a later post.  Pāṇini is important in that he defined the rules of Classical Sanskrit in or around the 4th century BCE, but it is important to recognize the achievements of the long tradition of linguistic inquiry that he inherited.
What these ancient linguists realized was that languages aren't composed of  just a random assortment of sounds.  But rather, a system of sounds.  To illustrate this, let's take a look at the Sanskrit oral-stops, by which I mean a consonant in which the air is completely cut off, as opposed to consonants which can be maintained as a continuous sound, such as in an F, S or M.  [disclaimer: I'm simplifying the situation of affricates for the purpose of pedagogy- which sounds dirty]

English has 6 of these oral-stops: B, D, G, K, P and T.

Notice that the traditional alphabetical order of English letters tells us nothing about how any of these letters are pronounced.  But, we could put them into a new order based upon certain similarities.  Both B and P are made with our lips, T and D with the tongue touching behind our teeth, and K and G with the back of our tongues:

P, T, K

B, D, G

Further investigation reveals that, if you put your hand on your throat, you can feel your vocal chords hum when you pronounce the consonants in row two, but not those in row one.  Go ahead, check it out-- I'll wait....

Congratulations, you have just discovered an important feature of the sound system of English oral-stops: the voicing distinction.  This means that two consonants which are produced with the exact same mouth movements can be distinct if one is noisy and the other is quiet.

Now, Sanskrit has 20 oral-stops to English's 6, so we'll have to be creative to write these with less than half the letters that we need.  I've followed the International Alphabet for Sanskrit Transcription, pressing C and J into service and using some dots and H's for the rest:

It is important to remember, however, that any resemblances based on the Latin letters is an unfortunate result of having too few letters to work with.  The sounds of Ḍ and Dh are as distinct to the Sanskrit ear as K and B are to ours.  Also, even though some sounds are written with two letters, all these are still oral-stops; Th is not the TH of “thin,” but actually very similar to the first sounds in “tip” and “top.” 

Now for the fun part- the order of the sounds above are (more or less) in the actual alphabetical order that was developed by Sanskrit teachers well before the 4th century, BCE.  Using this order, provided for us by the ancient grammarians, we can now explore the sound system of Vedic Sanskrit.

You may notice right away that (P, T and K) and (B, D and G) all appear in the same columns.  What does this suggest?  That's right!  Sanskrit also has a voicing distinction, with the left half of the chart belonging to the quiet sounds and the right half to the noisy ones.

 Now, what to do with all of those strange little H's in the second and fourth columns?  I'm afraid we'll need to conduct one more articulatory experiment.  Hold your hand, or a small piece of string or paper right in front of your mouth and pronounce the word “pip.”  If you're a native speaker of English, then most likely you felt (or saw) a quick puff of air with the first P that you didn't with the last.

That puff of air is called aspiration in common linguistic lingo, and it is present on the first (but not the last) quiet oral-stops in the words like “pip,” “kick” and one more I can't remember at the moment (wink, wink, nudge, nudge...).  Unlike with quiet versus noisy, in English we don't distinguish between aspirated and non-aspirated oral-stops.  So the first and last P's in “pip” are the same language-sound, even though they are different acoustic-sounds.

Sanskrit, as I'm sure you've already guessed, does use that little puff of air to distinguish language-sounds:

The last systematic feature of the devanagari is going to be difficult to discover, as it involves some mouth acrobatics that are rarely seen in the Anglophone world (at least outside the bedroom).  Remember that when we organized our 6 English oral-stops, we put the lip sounds and the tongue-behind-the-teeth and back-of-the-mouth sounds together.  The same applies to our devanagari chart:

The back-of-the-mouth sounds (K, Kh, G and Gh) are all on row one, which makes sense.  Row two (C, Ch, J and Jh) are all palatal sounds, produced with the body of the tongue pressing against the hard part of the roof of your mouth.  English doesn't use this mouth position to make oral-stops, but the CH of “church” and the J of “judge” come close.

Row three (Ṭ,Ṭh, Ḍ and Ḍh) are called retroflex oral-stops, which is a fancy name for tongue-rolled-back-pointing-straight-up sounds, which is a mouthful anyway.  We don't have any retroflex sounds in English but they can be heard in the accent of some Indian speakers of English.  We return to familiar territory with the tongue-behind-the-teeth sounds (T, Th, D and Dh) on row four, followed by the lip sounds (P, Ph, B, Bh) on row five.

Notice that this whole time, we've traveled in one direction from the back of the mouth (row one) to the lips (row five).  This is just another ingenious device implicit in the order of the devanagari.  Predating feature phonology by many centuries, we have a chart that lays out the sounds of a language in such a way that all you have to know is the place of a symbol in the order to know what sound it makes.

Well, that takes us to the end of another edition of the LiCTLe of the Month Club.  There's considerably more that can (and will) be said about the subject, but that will have to wait for another month.  As always, if you would like to be notified whenever a new Less Commonly Taught Language of the Month post is published, send an eMail with LiCTLe in the subject line to schendo at schendo (link above).

LiCTLe of the Month for January 2010: Swedish

LiCTLe of the Month for March 2010: Mongolian

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As always, the preceding was an unsolicited and largely unverified research piece by Schendo, who reserves all rights, including the right to change his mind about it later.  And yes, I know that I didn't mention the nasal-stops, but this blog post was getting long enough as it was.  I mean, nobody is actually going to read this far, anyway.  The information in this article came from my own sketchy memory, and the introduction to Michael Coulson's excellent Teach Yourself Sanskrit.  I want to also thank the fine people at It's Yoga Cincinnati, who, many years ago, tolerated the presence of a chain-smoking, binge-drinking twenty year old fast food employee for a weekend-long Sanskrit workshop.