[Mugwort]

I've wanted to study Sanskrit for a while now but nobody around where I live can teach it. So I've been nibbling at at occasionally. Some points of pronunication are a bit vague such as there being two kinds of T's and D's which sound almost identical to me. I've read the Gita and the Uphanishad s in English (Eaknath Easwaran's translation). Here's my impression. It's definitely worth reading through a translation. You can read it not as philosophy or religion but simply to read it. That's why I read it. To climb the mountain of life a little bit higher to see more. To see a tiny bit of what men like Oppenheimer, Ghandi, Thoreau and 1.3 billion others have been inspired. I can now read most Devanagari characters, enough to recognize simple words when they appear to me in stores like "Dharma", "Karma" or "Tantra" etc. That said, I identify more closely with Judaism than anything else. You need a place to call home. Still, the Sanskrit language is fascinating and the Hindu scriptures have made a deep impression on me.

[nemo]

If you know German, Latin, or Greek it helps for understanding inflection in Sanskrit. Otherwise learning the eight cases of Sanskrit nouns is going to be really hard. I studied Sanskrit for a while many years ago in a Classic dept where I'd been studying Greek and Latin (alas, I can barely read Devanagari now), and it was mostly straightforward to understand the structures for the nouns and verbs - learning all the forms takes time and work and you need that to parse the syntax. But it's Sandhi that makes the language unusually hellish. If you've got a critical text or something with the works broken out, it's so not hard to read and get basics of syntax. But the originals of the classics the words are all compressed into long unbroken lines with subtle and difficult rules for joining words.

[monktastic1]

Hindi has basically the same phonemes as Sanskrit. Any Hindi speaker should be able to pronounce the two d's and t's for you. And if you can find one who also speaks unaccented English, they can help you compare them with the English d and t. That said, by far the harder part of Sanskrit will be grammar and vocab.

[lappet]

I was trying to teach Hindi to a colleague of mine a few years back and the Ts and Ds really threw him off - I was so used to different Ts and Ds that I couldn't help him understand the difference. I think even English has the different sounds but it is not obvious.

[gourabmi]

I have studied Sanskrit for a few years, not because I wanted to but my school had it in mandatory coursework. I agree that the 8 cases and 3 numbers (singular, dual and plural) are a bit of a mouthful. But the grammar is very precise.

[canjobear]

Check put Winthrop Sargent’s translation. It comes with a transcription and word-by-word gloss of the Sanskrit, so you don’t have to learn Devanagari.

[richard23132]

Hinduism can not be compared with Judaism. Hinduism is fundamentally build to protect the Brahmin supremacy and caste system is used to deny access to education to the majority of people and to control the society by the priestly class. All the scriptures are there to divert the attention from the main subject when questioned. This essay "Annihilation of caste" by Ambedkar http://www.ambedkar.org/ambcd/02.Annihilation%20of%20Caste.h... gives a factual reasoning behind the construction of Hinduism. Its short but full of verifiable facts. Especially for a non-indian this is a must read if you want to understand the Hindu society.

[dang]

Please don't take HN threads further into religious flamewar. We don't want that here; it leads nowhere good.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[denton-scratch]

"two kinds of T's and D's which sound almost identical to me"

Sanskrit is a dead language. Nobody has used it as a spoken language for nearly a thousand years; and even those Sanskrit speakers a millennium ago were using the language only for specialist discourse, not as a mother-tongue. I'm saying it was already a dead language a thousand years ago.

We don't really know how English was pronounced in London, England as recently as 400 years ago. Shakespearean English might have sounded a bit like the accents of some relatively-isolated East-coast US communities (Amish?). We can only guess.

We have clerical Latin pronunciation, and legal Latin; the Latin pronunciation that I acquired was "school" Latin, which I think is the same as the pronunciation used by lawyers in anglo-saxon countries. but we don't know how Latin was pronounced in 50 BC (say). For ancient Etruscan, we can't really even guess.

There is no correct pronunciation for Sanskrit.

[svat]

The Sanskrit tradition is uniquely centered around language itself, starting with its origins in the preservation of the Veda. There is an ancient tradition of Śikṣā (≈phonetics) for the correct pronunciation thereof, and there are further detailed descriptions of sounds given by Pāṇini and Patañjali. Most importantly, there is still a robust oral tradition of reciting the Śruti (Veda), which has often been compared to a tape-recorder from at least 2500 years ago.

All of this is to say, we know very well (except for some much-debated rare words) what the correct pronunciation of Sanskrit is: it is what the Śikṣā śāstra says, what the grammarians elaborated, what is still heard at every Veda-pāṭhaśāla, and what is still spoken by at least tens of thousands of paṇḍits whenever they want to debate anything technical, or even just as a link language to make chit-chat across (other-)language barriers.

Sanskrit is as alive as it has ever been. It is “dead” only in a very restricted sense of the word — e.g. if you only consider usage as a mother tongue rather than as a language for poetry, technical topics, debate, etc — a sense that is irrelevant in the context of Sanskrit, because by this definition (classical, as opposed to the older Vedic) Sanskrit has been “dead” since the moment of its birth (its codification by Pāṇini, which was so exhaustive that it has become, for millenia, a de facto definition of correct Sanskrit), and you'd have to say that everything of value written in it was written after this moment of death/birth (including, according to scholars, most of the Bhagavad Gita itself). Oh and also, I personally know at least a few dozen people who can and do speak in Sanskrit routinely, and at least three families where Sanskrit is the children's mother tongue, and the primary language spoken at home. So the claim of “Nobody has used it as a spoken language for nearly a thousand years” is hard to take seriously.

In any case, the two kinds of Ts and Ds (retroflex and dental) are contrasting phonemes in Sanskrit, meaning that if you mix them up you'll get different words with unintended meanings — it would be hard to consider the outcome “correct”.