[pianoben]

Sanskrit is an amazing language - it is so BIG! Because of its extensive case system (10 different cases, IIRC), word order is highly flexible. The formalized rules of how spelling changes based on word adjacency (sandhi), and the ambiguity of interpreting long compounds, combined with the free word order, are so rich with poetic possibility that English seems baby-talk in comparison.

It's hard to describe just how cool this language is. Even the alphabet! The way we learned it, it is arranged in a grid with all of the letters in a row corresponding to one sound, and each column based on where in the mouth you make the sound.

I wish I could do it justice, but words fail. IMO it is absolutely, intrinsically, worthwhile to study.

[rraghur]

For anyone here, here is a great example of constrained writing in Sanskrit from 7th or 8th century

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shishupala_Vadha#Linguistic_in...

Just the verbal gymnastics, the wordplay and the ingenuity is mind boggling

[rramadass]

In this context, this former discussion thread is also relevant;

Words for the Heart: A treasury of emotions from classical India (book review) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43249766

Bhartrihari is a notoriously difficult philosopher, and scholars are still puzzling over what exactly his work means. But perhaps radically oversimplified, here are a few things he suggests. First: wholes are always more real than the parts that comprise them. The whole comes first, and parts exist always and only as conceptual divisions within a pre-existing, coherent whole. Second: these divisions are always linguistic. It is language that carves up experience. But importantly, when language carves up experience, it is not, as some Buddhists thought, simply the superimposition of an artificial, conceptual filter onto a non-conceptual reality. Instead, Bhartrihari tells us, ordinary language is a crystallization of something already implicit in reality. Reality itself is fundamentally linguistic, and what we think of as language—ordinary language, with its words and conceptual divisions—is just a devolution or fragmentation of this more primordial linguistic totality. This is precisely why, for Bhartrihari, the ultimate reality is shabdabrahman, a linguistic absolute. So this is a strong form of idealism: things in our experience, and all things in existence, are fundamentally linguistic. We have no access to anything outside of language and therefore no reason to assume that there is, or ever was, anything separate from it.

Note-1: Does the above explain why many people perceive LLMs to be "conscious"?

Note-2: The effectiveness of Mathematics (when considered as a language in itself) to explain the "real world" also seems related here.

See also the book; The Word and the World: India's Contribution to the Study of Language by Bimal Krishna Matilal - https://archive.org/details/wordandtheworldindiascontributio...