Participles in Sanskrit and other IE languages

Stephen Hughes
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Participles in Sanskrit and other IE languages

Post by Stephen Hughes »

Sanskrit is a language that holds many similarities with Greek.

We have often read allusions to the similarities between the earliest forms of Greek and other Indo-European languages, and some reference grammars use tables to make comparisons between languages. The scholars like A.T. Robertson, who came before us, thought that it was of great benefit for our understanding of Greek to consider not only texts within our own religious tradition and confined to the Greek language, but also to consider texts written in other related languages within other religious traditions. They concentrated their efforts on accidence. I am wondering if there is any benefit to be had in looking at (even basic) syntax in Sanskrit to see if that would be beneficial to our present discussion on participles.

Is anyone interested in engaging in that discussion?
Γελᾷ δ' ὁ μωρός, κἄν τι μὴ γέλοιον ᾖ
(Menander, Γνῶμαι μονόστιχοι 108)
RandallButh
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Re: Participles in Sanskrit and other IE languages

Post by RandallButh »

I am wondering if there is any benefit to be had in looking at (even basic) syntax in Sanskrit to see if that would be beneficial to our present discussion on participles.

Is anyone interested in engaging in that discussion?
First, you might want to ask if your interest is Greek itself, or the development of IndoEuropean?

Then there are potential problems of cirularity. Unless one is very well versed in the language, they may just be carrying over distilled rules but without the broader limitations and contextual applications. For example, someone once claimed that Greek could be reasonably viewed as having no time in the verb 'because languages like Hebrew have no time in the verb.' That would be both circular and wrong. Contrary to the claimed parallel, Hebrew, too, cannot say מחר αὔριον with either qatal or vayyiqtol verbs. It, too, has a time-dimension within its verb that shows up in certain restrictions. A better grasp of Hebrew could have helped steer away from a false trail. Or in other words, a little Sanskrit may do more harm than good. Always make sure that the Greek works on its own and can be justified on its own grounds, then tracing the parallels with Sanskrit can be fun.

As for participles, I feel that alot of participial usage has dropped between 19th century English and 21st century English. If true, what are we going to do about it? Yes, it would be worth discussion, and yes it would have payoff in understanding the forces involved in human communication, which in turn would sensitize one to watching how the same forces molded the development of Greek (albeit not in the same way).
Stephen Hughes
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Re: Participles in Sanskrit and other IE languages

Post by Stephen Hughes »

RandallButh wrote:you might want to ask if your interest is Greek itself, or the development of IndoEuropean
Well, because IE was spoken of highly in A.T. Robertson, I have spent some time pursuing an interest in it. Now, I think there is an opportunity to bring some of that learning to bear on an issue. Greek is broadly speaking a part of IE.
RandallButh wrote: I feel that a lot of participial usage has dropped between 19th century English and 21st century English.
That is quite a different topic. Doesn't that have to do with the decline of classical education and subsequent freedom to express English in more idiomatic (uneducated) terms?
RandallButh wrote:Always make sure that the Greek works on its own and can be justified on its own grounds
Are there currently ready answers for even basic things to orientate a discussion on syntax - things such as "Did the use of participles increase, decline or change role in the formation of the Koine?" "What genre of classical Greek does participle usage most replicate stem from?" There are a few oblique comments here and there about differences, but it seems to me that the generation of those who saw clearly the differences between the one and the other passed in the early 20th century.

In the case of Greek itself, even at a most basic level, it would be interesting to see whether the usage of participles actually increased or deceased over the life of Greek. My initial impression is that the participle is used more in Koine than in Classical. In a page of Homer, there may be 4 or 5 participles (just from looking at a few pages). In a page of one of the Gospels, there are certainly more.

That raises the question as to whether the distinction is between prose and verse for the use of participles. Or whether it is a diachronic development within Greek. Since Homer is the first in a preserved series, it would be interesting to see what was potentially before that series.

If we accept that the Baltic languages are the linguistically best "preserved" of the IE family, and Sanskrit is both the next best preserved linguistically, and that it has a wide range of literature across a number of genres then there could be some benefit to looking into them.

Well, while I find IE interesting, I would like to apply that I acquired while pursuing that interest now to Greek.
RandallButh wrote:Then there are potential problems of cirularity.
I admit that the investigation into them could produce circular results. If we assume that both the Greek Epic poetry and the Rigveda are verse, and the discussion sections in the Upanishads (philosophical discussions) are examples of polished prose, then perhaps seeing a parallel in both languages in the similar genres would naively lead one to believe that participles were a mark of thought out scholarly style (as if memory serves me they are in Baltic languages).
RandallButh wrote:a little Sanskrit may do more harm than good.
Yes, that is true. I did read through a number of Sanskrit grammars when I was studying the language, and it is clear that the system of the language is formidable. I think that we can assume that simply listing the finding of others would be of secondary benefit and without an overall understanding to contextualise certain points, they could easily be misplaced (like flipping through the index and just making oneself sound good by making highfalutin statements).

My proposition is to put up some (tagged) texts from different genres and work through the syntax with especial reference to participles.
Γελᾷ δ' ὁ μωρός, κἄν τι μὴ γέλοιον ᾖ
(Menander, Γνῶμαι μονόστιχοι 108)
Stephen Carlson
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Re: Participles in Sanskrit and other IE languages

Post by Stephen Carlson »

Stephen Hughes wrote:Sanskrit is a language that holds many similarities with Greek.
...
Is anyone interested in engaging in that discussion?
This is not really a comment about participles per se, but about Sanskrit and Greek. For a while, it has been thought that Sanskrit and Greek best preserved the original PIE verbal system, but I think that the trende now is to see a somewhat simpler ancestral system that Greek and Sankrit grammaticalized into something more paradigmatic. It's not clear to me how the commonalities of Greek and Sanskrit against the rest of the language are best explained. Perhaps it is due to the timing of the break up of Indo-European, perhaps there is some areal influence, perhaps there simply is parallel, independent development. It's all rather complicated. I think the field has become less sanguine than before about the helpfulness of Sanskrit for understanding Greek.

I'm not the one to tell anyone not to study a language, but it is not clear to me that learning Sanskrit is the best bang for the buck for understanding the Greek of the New Testament. But if you want to learn another language, I won't stand in your way.
Stephen C. Carlson, Ph.D.
Melbourne, Australia
Stephen Hughes
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Re: Participles in Sanskrit and other IE languages

Post by Stephen Hughes »

Stephen Carlson wrote:I'm not the one to tell anyone not to study a language
I wasn't thinking of starting a let's learn the Sanskrit discussion. I was wondering if anyone already knew it well enough to be able to discuss it (at any level) or to work through a few texts.
Γελᾷ δ' ὁ μωρός, κἄν τι μὴ γέλοιον ᾖ
(Menander, Γνῶμαι μονόστιχοι 108)
RandallButh
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Re: Participles in Sanskrit and other IE languages

Post by RandallButh »

Having forgotten the alphabet over 40 years ago, I wouldn't use my own non-use as a recommendation in either direction.

However, back to some of the problems: there were debates that don't need to be revived on this list over a decade ago about whether Greek has a five-case system or an eight-case system (a la Robertson). The 'eight-case' system was a blatant etymological re-reading of Greek, based on Sanskrit. Synchroniclly and descriptively Koine and Attic Greek have five morphological noun categories mapped on to as many meanings and contexts as analysts care to define.

The relevance? This would apply to participles. The 'genitive absolute' is roughly comparable to the Sanskrit Locative absolute, which are roughly comparable to the Latin ablative absolute. The puzzle for me, that I don't have time or interest to follow up on, is why Locative? How did a Locative strucutre end up sharing conceptual space with a Genitive structure? Probably, looking backwards, because Ablative and Dative are close forms in Latin and both closer to a vestigial Locative than a Genitive. Locative and Ablative make for a reasonable merging for the structure, meanwhile, Greek merged the ablative and genitive, producing the genitive absolute. That's pretty imprecise and sloppy, but is sufficient for my practical interest and memory.
The point: in any case, it doesn't change the way we read and use Greek.
RandallButh
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Re: Participles in Sanskrit and other IE languages

Post by RandallButh »

PS: The unspoken twist in the previous post is that in Greek the Locative and the Dative merged. If so, a simple development from and in parallel with a Sanskrit Locative absolute would have produced a Dative Absolute in Greek. So obviously there are complications in details and in the timings of the various developmental stages of all three languages, which go beyond my current interests and time. I'm not saying it isn't interesting, it is.
Stephen Hughes
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Re: Participles in Sanskrit and other IE languages

Post by Stephen Hughes »

RandallButh wrote:Having forgotten the alphabet over 40 years ago
Yes, it is a bit difficult, but at least there is a basic 1:1 correspondance of grapheme to phoneme. In hypercontradistinction to that, the cunieform script used by Hittite is something that requires more than just remembering - it needs active engagement with the alphabet, as well as the other mouldable / (slightly) variable systems within the language.
RandallButh wrote:The 'eight-case' system was a blatant etymological re-reading of Greek, based on Sanskrit.
I remember that it was perhaps in the semester after I took Greek dialects that I started Sanskrit. I had initially assumed that I would be able to handle it as a sort of slightly off-into-unmapped-territory "dialect" of Greek. Scripts are as scripts go, and having gotten over that hurdle, I found that there was a lot more to it than that. Greek helped, but as you are suggesting, it was a functioning whole of a language.
Stephen Carlson wrote:It's not clear to me how the commonalities of Greek and Sanskrit against the rest of the language are best explained.
That is really thinking big. Perhaps to do that one would need to have a very high level of competence in both languages.
Stephen Carlson wrote:
Stephen Hughes wrote:Sanskrit is a language that holds many similarities with Greek.
This is not really a comment about participles per se, but about Sanskrit and Greek.
I realise that, so I put it in the "Other" topic, rather than up in one of the front row seat topics in this section of the forum.

The basic point I want to discuss and test is whether participles in Sanskrit (and Lithuanian) are used more in composed thought out literature or as a part of everyday speech. There are, however, always more things that come up in discussion than could have been envisaged before the discussion began.
Γελᾷ δ' ὁ μωρός, κἄν τι μὴ γέλοιον ᾖ
(Menander, Γνῶμαι μονόστιχοι 108)
Stephen Carlson
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Re: Participles in Sanskrit and other IE languages

Post by Stephen Carlson »

Stephen Hughes wrote:
Stephen Carlson wrote:I'm not the one to tell anyone not to study a language
I wasn't thinking of starting a let's learn the Sanskrit discussion. I was wondering if anyone already knew it well enough to be able to discuss it (at any level) or to work through a few texts.
Oh, OK. I can't really discuss Sanskrit, knowing only so much as I indirectly get from my PIE reading. Latin has participles too and they use them quite a bit, sometimes in imitation of Greek style. The only problem with Latin is that only two participles are in common use, while Greek has so many more.
Stephen C. Carlson, Ph.D.
Melbourne, Australia
Stephen Hughes
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Re: Participles in Sanskrit and other IE languages

Post by Stephen Hughes »

Stephen Carlson wrote:I can't really discuss Sanskrit, knowing only so much as I indirectly get from my PIE reading.
Well, I'm sure that even indirect knowledge would allow a lot of discussion. Sanskrit and PIE are sort of one of those things that appeared on the radar of Greek studies for a while, so to get the feel of where we have been over the past 150 years, it is beneficial to retrace the steps of others, even if it is in only a cursory manner.
Γελᾷ δ' ὁ μωρός, κἄν τι μὴ γέλοιον ᾖ
(Menander, Γνῶμαι μονόστιχοι 108)
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