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by madhadron
5115 days ago
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Ah, the glorification of your old, dead language. This reads very much like an Oxford don extolling the virtues of Latin or Ancient Greek. Many of his claims are sheer nonsense, such as his digression on the ordering of alphabets. Sanskrit didn't use a fixed alphabet until the 19th century, and there are certainly other writing systems with collation orders just as sensible. Everyone likes to claim that their old sophisticates were scientists before the scientific revolution in Europe. The basic insistence on repeatability, independent of any individual, and trumping any logical system, wasn't there, though. Thus mathematics flourished throughout the world for thousands of years, and philosophy, too, but not science. Vaisheshika had atomic theory? So did Democritus, several centuries earlier. Nyaya was doing logical syllogism? Yeah, Aristotle was doing that, again a couple centuries earlier. We don't think of Aristotle or Democritus as scientists, though, because they wouldn't test their ideas. The whole thing is the ill informed cant of a bigot who wants to ensconce his particular folk tale that glorifies his heritage and denigrates all others. |
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Modern linguistics owes quite a lot to Sanskrit, e.g. Chomsky's famous notation, thematic roles in semantics, controlled grammar, compositional semantics etc.
I suggest the following article in the AI magazine which merely touches the surface of what makes Sanskrit stand out.
http://www.aaai.org/ojs/index.php/aimagazine/article/view/46...