[Advaita-l] to be and to have in Sanskrit

Vidyasankar Sundaresan svidyasankar at hotmail.com
Sat Mar 31 18:31:44 CDT 2007


>Sri Guy's question clearly involves a grammatical question.  The grammer of
>one language cannot be interspersed into another language.  Sanskrit should
>not be judged from the point of view of another language.  A person
>conversant with Sanskrit would have no problem conveying his ideas in that
>language.
>

On the other hand, the deep grammar of a language reveals something 
intrinsic about thought processes of those who speak that language and 
therefore has implications for the philosophical systems that they create 
and subscribe to.

For example, the English language prefers direct constructions, "I am 
hungry", "I am thirsty", "I own a house" etc. The "I" is not only the 
doer/enjoyer (kartA/bhoktA), but also grammatically the subject of the 
sentence. In any Indian language that I can think of, the expressions 
involve the "I" in a more indirect way, e.g. mujhe bhUk lagI hai, mera ek 
ghar hai, enakku paSikkaradu, enakku/ennuDaiya oru vIDu irukku, and so on. 
The grammatical subject of the sentence is no longer the "I".

Regards,
Vidyasankar

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