[fuzztester]

>A similar analysis of "achaara" in Sanskrit would lead to a nonsense meaning of "not-moving".

I think "non-moving" in Sanskrit should be "achara", not "achaara", i.e. a short "a" sound, not a long one, for the second syllable.

Similar to the word ”nishaachara" which means "night-moving”, referring to demons.

I studied Sanskrit for 5 years total in school and college, so although I am somewhat rusty now, I think what I said is right.

[danans]

> I think "non-moving" in Sanskrit should be "achara", not "achaara", i.e. a short "a" sound, not a long one, for the second syllable.

Thanks for the correction. Yes, "achaara" is non moving. "achara" simply doesn't exist AFAICT, so my point stands that it's a Persian borrowing, not a Sanskrit derivative.

[fuzztester]

>Thanks for the correction.

Welcome.

But you switched them around below in your reply, compared to what I said above:

>Yes, "achaara" is non moving. "achara" simply doesn't exist AFAICT, so my point stands that it's a Persian borrowing, not a Sanskrit derivative.

And regarding words that "don't exist": in Sanskrit, anyone can make up words, by combining other existing words, as I think (but am not sure) is the case in German. Both Sanskrit poets and prose writers often do, but literally anyone can, including you and me, as long as the rules for making words up are followed. I don't have a citation for this, but interested people can look it up somewhere.

[danans]

> compared to what I said above

Oops, well your comment will be the decoder then!

> And regarding words that "don't exist": in Sanskrit, anyone can make up words, by combining other existing words, as I think (but am not sure) is the case in German.

You are thinking of compounds.

Compounds are words that are composed (sometimes in realtime) of two or more independent words.

There are several classes of these categorized by their function. English also has such compounds, how it depicts them differently in writing, so we're not used to thinking of them as such.

Nonetheless, the presence of the realtime compounding mechanism does not show that the Hindi word "achaar" was not borrowed from medieval Persian, unless it can somehow be attested at an earlier time in Sanskrit, which it hasn't been. Furthermore, a real-time made-up compound "achaar" wouldn't make any sense by any of the Sanskrit compounding rules.

[fuzztester]

>Compounds are words that are composed (sometimes in realtime) of two or more independent words.

The procedure (i.e., rules) for joining or combining multiple words into one larger word is collectively called sandhi in Sanskrit, IIRC.

There is also another related word and procedure that I forget right now.

I am not a linguist or a philologist or whatever the right term is, but one other way of generating new words is to add a prefix in front.

Like adding the prefix "a" (which implies negation) in front of a word, such as adding it front of "satya" (truth) to get "asatya" (falsehood / not truth).

There are other such prefixes in Sanskrit, such as "sa", "vi" and "pra", which are used, for example, in the words "savikalpa samadhi", "vijnana", and "prasiddha" or "pralaya", to name just a few.

Sanskrit is a very interesting language, to say the least ...