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To learn Sanskrit with Latin, advice pls?

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Heinrich S.
Groupie
Germany
Joined 6745 days ago

63 posts - 85 votes 
Studies: French

 
 Message 1 of 5
09 May 2011 at 10:57pm | IP Logged 
First thanks for your reading & helping (and now some information: my French and German are basically nonexistent.)

I want to learn Sanskrit and Latin: (shared or not shared Indo-European) vocabulary only and pretty much do not care about speaking. It will be hard(?), but I do have one thing going for me, I am passionate. I would love advice, any resources, and anyone's stories of experience.

Cheers,
Heinrich
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zyz
Newbie
United States
Joined 5145 days ago

19 posts - 28 votes
Speaks: English*
Studies: Latin, Ancient Greek, Sanskrit

 
 Message 2 of 5
10 May 2011 at 12:57am | IP Logged 
Hello,

Am I correct in understanding that you want to learn Sanskrit and Latin in a historical-comparative sense rather than for reading fluency?

There are several books which teach Latin vocabulary. I've heard good things about Greek & Latin Roots: Keys to Building Vocabulary by Rasinski, Padak, Newton & Newton, though I've never read it. I'm having trouble finding anything that isn't just a bare lexicon for Sanskrit.

For comparative PIE vocab. (not exclusive to Latin and Sanskrit), Mallory and Adams' Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture is a pretty fascinating read.

Best of luck.
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Cabaire
Senior Member
Germany
Joined 5408 days ago

725 posts - 1352 votes 

 
 Message 3 of 5
10 May 2011 at 8:26am | IP Logged 
I would find it extremly boring to learn words of a language without actual texts or Grammar but suum cuique, as one would say in Latin.

Do you want to learn the Sanskrit words written in Devanagari or in a transcription using the latin alphabet and diacritics?

There are two very useful books in German to learn that language:

1) Einführung in das klassische Sanskrit: Lehrbuch mit Übungen, written by Eberhard Guhe.
E. Guhe was a teacher of mine and is a veritable pandit, what grammar concerns. The sanskrit in his book is written entirely written in Devanagari and he is very grammarorientated (you have to be that, if you want to learn to read, as this language has a extremly sophisticated system of morphology (but a dissapointing use of it to convery meaning).

2) Sanskrit-Kompendium, written by Ulrich Stiehl
He teaches you 2240 sentences. A fabulous useful book, if you have the guts to stand such an amount of independent sentences.

You could use the "Stiehl" ignoring the grammar and looking only at the words of each sentence. (Every sentence is analysed and each word is given) So you could also get a feeling what the nuances of each lexical item are.

One problem: What is a word in Sanskrit? If you learn verbs, you learn roots, which are non-existing entities in reality, but useful to form actual (nearly a thousand) verb forms.

You may learn grah to mean "fassen, greifen"; but you may prefer to learn for example gṛhṇāti, which means "er faßt"; the latter is a real verb form, but only one among many, many.

What are you going to do with a mere collection of words? You only get acquainted with them really, if you see them in action.

Edited by Cabaire on 10 May 2011 at 8:31am

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Cabaire
Senior Member
Germany
Joined 5408 days ago

725 posts - 1352 votes 

 
 Message 4 of 5
10 May 2011 at 8:43am | IP Logged 
For comparative PIE vocab, Mallory and Adams' Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture is a pretty fascinating read.

For that use, I like "The american heritage dictionary of Indo-European roots", written by C. Watkins.

You look up a reconstructed indo-european root and it gives you its raw meaning and derived words in many languages, including English, German, Latin and Sanskrit with some explanations. But the focus is English, so only words are given, which you may know as an educated reader of English (loan words, proper nouns etc.)
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jimbo
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Canada
Joined 6103 days ago

469 posts - 642 votes 
Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French
Studies: Japanese, Latin

 
 Message 5 of 5
11 May 2011 at 5:40am | IP Logged 
You may want to have a look at A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages.

Buy a magnifying glass if you plan to use this book.


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