The Tale of a Car

The Tale of a Car

Why We Should Keep the Sanctity of Sanskrit Language

Yes, Sanskrit is the most ancient language. It is artistically beautiful, malleable as one desires, for everyone including our seers, poets, writers, researchers and experts in each and every field we can imagine, and importantly for common man. At the same time, Sanskrit is very scientifically structured as a language, almost giving the impression that it is an "engineered" or "designed" language. After all "Sanskrit" itself means "processed". This aspect also makes it the favorite subject for grammarians, etymologists and linguistic experts.

The origin of the language is unknown, or anybody's guess. The most ancient scripts in Sanskrit, the Vedas, have a very wide range of guesstimate on their age - 1700 BC, 1300 BC, 1500 BC, 2000 BC, 7000 BC, 75000 BC... And some say they are eternal. In any case, these guesses are for the age of Vedas, not the language. The Vedas themselves are in completely mature linguistic form with poetic meters and usages. That means the age or origin of Sanskrit language is even harder to guess.

Over the period, the usage of Sanskrit declined and the mankind lost an unimaginable number of invaluable literary works forever. But for a long time, probably until the British arrived in India, Sanskrit remained as the link-language between various geographies in that country. It is likely that during this time, Sanskrit was started to be associated with certain communities in the contemporary social structure and being seen just as a vehicle to study the scriptures and the Vedas. With all that decline and negligence, even the amount of currently available literary works in Sanskrit is very huge.

Given this, one would start wondering how relevant Sanskrit is in today's world. Though it has a rich history, can it be revived as a language in the modern times? Is it capable of being used as an everyday-language? Every populace in the world naturally will support and promote its own language. Some of the scholars around the world may be interested to study Sanskrit for academic and research purposes. But in its home country, where most of the regional languages are based on Sanskrit, not a single population in India owns the language and nurtures it. Whose language is it anyway today? Can we imagine it to be the link-language again, at least among the Indians? And why should we care?

Here lies the strength of Sanskrit as a language - its ability to survive and thrive in these times, and forever in future - because of its sound scientific structure. The language is based on a unique concept called dhatus (धातु). Dhatus are not words. They are properties of objects, entities or things, but not objects themselves. Dhatus are abstraction of objects. And the words are derived from dhatus. Dhatus cannot be used directly in the language, but only the words derived from dhatus can be used. Anyone in the computer world today would understand and appreciate this concept. Dhatus are like classes and the words derived from dhatus are like objects (in the computer OOPS parlance). This arrangement makes the language very flexible, making it possible to generate infinite number of words - for everything that was imagined before and everything in the world that might be conceived in future.

For example: One of the words for bird is खगः which is derived from ख (sky) and ग (going) (खे गच्छति). Now, this खगः can be literally (and has been) used to represent not only a bird, but any object that goes in the sky - it could be an airplane, sun, a planet, a satellite etc. The actual meaning can be known only by the context.

This approach makes the language self-sustaining forever. As new objects are invented, other languages have to make up a word or borrow it from other languages, and add it to their dictionary. And as the objects go out of fashion, they need to be removed from their dictionaries. But not in Sanskrit. Based on the usage or purpose of an object, a new word can be synthesized mainly with the help of dhatus and combining multiple words into one. In recent times, using the same logic, there have been considerable and appreciable efforts to coin new words to represent the objects that did not exist before.

(Reference: The above idea/class/object is explained in the article here nicely.)

For example: पत्रभारः (paperweight), मृदुमुद्रा (rubber stamp), अङ्कनी (pencil), बाष्पस्थाली (steam cooker), शीतकम् (fridge), मिश्रकम् (mixer) etc.

However, in some cases, the foreign words sneak in. Case in point: Many books show a bicycle as द्विचक्रिका (two wheeler), a bus as लोकयानम् (people carrier). But a train goes as रेल्-यानम् and a car remains as कार्-यानम्. In many gatherings, these words have been questioned and challenged by the audience. But mostly they go unanswered or get a reply like "this kind of usage is there among people". Really? While it makes sense to use the proper and people nouns like Google, Facebook etc. "as is", for vehicle types and like there should not be dearth of संस्कृत words. While we are ready to use बाष्पस्थाली, why not use लोहपथयानम् or लोहपथी or लोहपथगा for a train? And शकटः, शकटी, शकटिका, यन्त्रयानम् for a car? There is no need to dilute this language for the sake of convenience. Sanskrit deserves the respect and demands from us to keep its sanctity.