The flexibility of Sanskrit

• The Sanskrit Series
• 1. Features of Sanskrit that make it an extra-ordinary language
• 2. Mechanism of generating new words in Sanskrit
• 3. Similarities between Sanskrit and Programming Languages
• 4. Verbless sentences in Sanskrit
• 5. The building blocks of Sanskrit language
• 6. No punctuation in Sanskrit !!
• 7. The flexibility of Sanskrit
• 8. Efficiency of Sanskrit: Less words more meaning!
• 9. Temporal order of words in Sanskrit

Just as you change your worn-out clothes, so do you change your worn-out body. Afterall, the body is just a set of non-living chemicals and you are beyond them. This conjecture forms the foundations of Indian Philosophy. And above all, this belief is not unscientific. In fact, though unprovable, it is consistent with Observation/Science. 

Did you know, Sanskrit is a highly word-order free language ? What does this mean ? It means that you can take a Sanskrit sentence, jumble its words the way you wish and there is good probability that the resulting sentence would still mean the same as the original one. Don’t believe ? Here is an illustration. All the sentences given below mean exactly the same.

वासांसि जीर्णानि विहाय नवानि गृह्णाति नरः अपराणि ॥
विहाय जीर्णानि वासांसि नवानि गृह्णाति नरः अपराणि ॥
नरः विहाय वासांसि जीर्णानि गृह्णाति अपराणि नवानि ॥
विहाय वासांसि जीर्णानि नरः नवानि अपराणि गृह्णाति ॥
गृह्णाति नवानि अपराणि नरः विहाय वासांसि जीर्णानि ॥
जीर्णानि विहाय वासांसि गृह्णाति अपराणि नरः नवानि ॥
and so on…till thousands of permutations are exhausted!

The above sentence(s) mean(s) “A man abandons worn-out clothes to wear other new ones.“

Try to change the position of even a single word in the English version and you will see the sentence become meaningless. What feature of Sanskrit makes such tremendous word-jumbling possible ? I bet you know the answer. It is our same old vibhakti!

Let’s understand how such cruel word-jumbling becomes possible through a conversation  between you and me 😛

You
So can you shed some light on this jumbling thing and explain how it works ?

Me
Sure. But before I give you the light, I need to explain a very basic concept of linguistics. That concept is Inflection.

You
Ok. Go ahead.

Me
English is a weakly inflected language. This means that given a word in English, it will not have many different forms. Take the word Dog, for example. There are only two forms of it. (1)Dog (2)Dogs. The word Dog has no other forms. Form(1) gives the information that there is one dog, while Form(2) gives the information that there are more than one dog.

S.no	Form	Information provided
1	dog	one dog
2	dogs	more than one dog

Similarly, consider the word Happy. It has the following forms.

S.no	Form	Information provided
1	happy	someone is happy
2	happier	someone is less happy than the happier person
3	happiest	everyone is less happy than the happiest person
4	unhappy	someone is not happy
5	happiness	the feeling of being happy
6	unhappiness	the feeling of not being happy

For the word Write, we have

S.no	Form	Information provided
1	writes	present tense
2	written	something is already written
3	wrote	past tense
4	writable	possible to write
5	writer	someone who writes

The words dog and dogs are called inflections of Dog. The words happy, happier, happiest, unhappy, happiness and unhappiness are inflections of Happy. The words writes, wrote, written, writer and writable are inflections of Write.

An inflection of a word is a different form of that word and is used for enhancing the meaning of the original word.

When we say that English is a weakly inflected language, we mean that, on an average, the words in English have few inflections. That means, English rarely uses different forms of a word, to convey enhanced meanings of that word. Instead, it uses totally new unrelated words to convey the enhanced meanings. For example, to convey “the meat was eaten by a dog“, we are using a totally new unrelated word ‘by’, instead of using a different form of the word ‘Dog’. Similarly, to convey “If I were Newton, I would have discovered the laws of motion“, we are using 2 new unrelated words ‘would’ and ‘have’, instead of using a different form of the word ‘Discover’. This is what makes English a weakly inflected language. Similarly, Hindi and Mandarin are also weakly inflected. Mandarin is even more weakly inflected than English.

In contrast, we have what are called highly inflected languages, such as Arabic or Greek. Highly inflected languages are those which depend heavily on inflections to convey the enhanced meanings of a word. For example, the sentence “the meat was eaten by a dog” written in Sanskrit, would be
मांसं          खादितं         कुक्कुरेण ॥
The meat was eaten by a dog .

In English, to convey the information that dog is the agent by whom the action(of eating) is being performed, we are using a totally new unrelated word by. But in Sanskrit, we are using a different form(inflection) of the word कुक्कुर . Here, कुक्कुरेण is an inflection of the original word कुक्कुर, which conveys the extra information that कुक्कुर is the agent by whom the action is being performed. Similarly, while English used the word was to convey that the meat is already eaten, Sanskrit uses खादितं  – a different form of the word खादन – to convey that the action(खादन) is already performed. The word  खादितं is an inflection of the original word खादन . Even vibhakti is a type of inflection.
Now, having known this, I think you are able to figure out why such intense word jumbling is possible in Sanskrit and not in English. In fact,  मांसं खादितं कुक्कुरेण ॥ can be correctly written as  खादितं कुक्कुरेण मांसं॥ or as कुक्कुरेण मांसं खादितं॥  This can’t be done in English!

You
Intuitively, I am getting a feel of this word-jumbling thing. But can you clear the haze ?

Me
No problems. Let’s try to see what happens when we jumble the words in the English sentence. Consider the word was in the sentence The meat was eaten by a dog. The word was performs 2 functions here.
1) By appearing after the word meat, the word was conveys that it is meat on which the action(of eating) is performed.
2) By appearing before the word eaten, the word was conveys that the action(of eating) has already been performed.
Jumbling the words in English would nullify these functions

In Sanskrit, these 2 functions are performed by the vibhakti (inflections) and not by word-order.
1) Because मांसं & खादितं have the same vibhakti, we know that they apply to the same object. Hence, खादितं applies to मांसं and not कुक्कुरेण, whatever be the order of words in the sentence! So we know that, it is मांसं on which the action is performed.
2) To show that the action(of eating) viz. खादन has already been performed, Sanskrit uses an inflection of खादन viz. खादित. The information that खादन has been performed is ingrained in the inflection खादित, irrespective of the position of खादित in the sentence!

Because each word in a Sanskrit sentence is an inflection of an original word, it represents not only the original word but also some enhanced meanings of it. These enhanced meanings are not conveyed by other unrelated words (as in English), but are embedded in the inflection itself, hence the enhanced meanings remain unchanged irrespective of the word-order!

You
Ok. I get it. Interesting. But what will one get by jumbling the words ? Don’t you think it’s useless.

Me
I don’t think so. Let me show you some benefits of the flexible word-order. From a literary point of view, flexible word-order makes creating poetry, slokas and other forms of literary art easier. No wonder, a large part of Sanskrit literature is thrown in the form of poetry. In fact, mahAbhArata which is the world’s longest poem (1,00,000 slokas!) is actually a story! Writing a long story like mahAbhArata in the form of a poem would have been more difficult in English. Even Aryabhatta has written his mathematical and astronomical theorems in the form of slokas and not prose. maharSi baudhAyana explains what the Europeans call as Pythagoras’s theorem in the form slokas(poetic couplets). Slokas are not only sweet to the ears but also make memorizing their content easier, so that theorems can be recalled and applied without errors!
And above all, this flexible word-order makes Sanskrit easier to be understood by a computer because when a sentence is fed to the computer it need not analyse the order of words while processing the sentence!

You
I think I should donate some time to learning Sanskrit properly, apart from learning some foreign languages. Sanskrit seems to be much more advanced than the impression I got about it from the school course.

Me
You are right. Not only Sanskrit, but most Indian languages, I feel are linguistically and grammatically more advanced than English, contrary to the impression that our British-designed education system gives us. Our education system gives us a biased one-sided view of India (and its languages), resulting in confused and apologetic Indians.

Finally, to end the article, take home what you learnt today. Sanskrit is one of the most highly inflected languages in the world. Possibly, more than any other. The concept of vibhakti (which is a type of inflection) is the single main feature responsible for all the sophistication that Sanskrit possesses. In fact, any language that makes extensive use of vibhaktis is bound to be more robust than the one that does not use it (meaning of robust is given in the next para). Languages like German, Latin, Greek, Arabic (that make comprehensive use of vibhaktis) are more sophisticated than, say, English, Hindi or Mandarin (that don’t).

Baba Ramdev is actually not a baba as the media tries to malign him. He is what I call a maharSi of the modern yuga. Very few know that Baba Ramdev started doing research in Yoga only at a later date. His original field of study is Sanskrit! He is a scholar of the Paninian Grammar which is still not fully understood by modern Linguists.

Vibhakti is, perhaps, the most groundbreaking linguistic discovery ever made. It makes a language short and computer friendly, reduces the need for punctuation, also reduces the need of using unnecessary verbs and, above all, provides the support base for creating new words. It also makes a language word-order free as we have seen in this article. In the view that English is weakly inflected, I reckon the rise in popularity of English in the last 2 centuries (mainly due to British invasions and not because English is inherently advanced) has been a regressive phenomenon for humanity, atleast from a linguistic perspective.

Coming back to the topic, Sanskrit makes use of vibhaktis much more  extravagantly than do Greek, Arabic and others. No wonder, it is highly sophisticated. Below I quote the words of Sir William Jones, a European linguist, about Sanskrit.

The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either.

In the upcoming articles, apart from other aspects, we will also look at the revival opportunities for Sanskrit. The future of Sanskrit seems great, if my (political) calculations carry substance.