http://www.livemint.com/2010/04/19202309/Sanskrit-reviving-the-languag.html
Singh speaks about the revival of the ancient language of India where different parts of a newspaper may be written in English, Hindi, and Sanskrit. The Indian constitution lists Sanskrit as the official language of India but most states use Hindi, English, or their respective regional language.
However, recently Sanskrit has been used more often through advertising and public text and Mahavir Agrawal, vice-chairman of the Uttaranchal Sanskrit Academy, is ecstatic about the rising popularity of the ancient language. Not only is it used in text but the idioms and common speech is common in India today.
As we had talked about in class before, many languages are becoming extinct due to the domination of a certain language or languages throughout a country and the world. Hence, in India, the continuation of the use of Sanskrit is important to prevent the language from going extinct. However, there is a significant differentiation between extinct through usage and extinct through history. Sanskrit will be alive through history as long as the holy texts and multitude of other text written in Sanskrit is kept safe. The language may go extinct in usage where no one speaks it again but it still can be seen through text.
A question that came to my mind when I was reading this is that I know Sanskrit is a very important part of Indian history as the ancient language, however, how do we determine which languages are deemed important enough to need to be revived or kept in history? Does a certain dialect that may die out because of overdomination of a language need the same attention? Why not?
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I read the same article and also found it interesting. I believe the question you posed at the end is a very important one as it gets to the core of the discussion of history. I am inclined to say that in an ideal world, all languages and cultures should be documented in history, as in their own ways, all are very significant and can teach future generations unique lessons and provide unique perspectives. Realistically speaking however, I believe only languages that are associated somehow with the dominant, power holding people (whether they are the languages spoken by them, or the languages spoken by those around them or those they interacted with or conquered) will ultimately go down in history. On top of those, perhaps certain languages that hold unique properties linguistically or that somehow contributed to global or community based interaction in a lasting, meaningful way, will also hold a place in history.
ReplyDeleteI have been thinking about this same thing as I have read various articles about languages going extinct. It would be impossible to determine which languages are "important" enough to put efforts into maintaining. At the same time, we can't possibly keep every language alive. And then if we choose to put efforts into one language, who should have the responsibility of directing and supporting its revival? It's interesting to see how different groups of people approach these questions.
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