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Comment by rusticpenn | Hacker News Reader

At least with Hindi and Tamil, you can be sure because they come from different language families.

True. This may sound obvious to you, but I am not so sure about its obviousness in general in the West.

A lot of western-educated people have asked me “So Hindi is the main language, and there are a lot of different dialects throughout the country, right?” – and I have no idea where to begin explaining that it's nothing like that, so I go with the time-tested “Well, it's slightly different...”

> and I have no idea where to begin explaining that it's nothing like that

(I have studied Sanskrit and Hindi in school for multiple years, and can understand a good amount of Marathi and Tamil.)

You can say this - I think it is true, not quite verified (partly heard from older relatives, partly deduction based on observing similarities in the mentioned languages' vocabularies):

Sanskrit came first - thousands of years ago. It is the language of the Vedas, 4 of India's most ancient scriptures. Many northern (including east and west) Indian languages are similar to Sanskrit and likely are descendants of it. Hindi, Gujarati, Marwari, Punjabi, Bengali, Oriya (not sure, but it sounds some like Bengali), Marathi, are some of these.

Languages of Indian states further east than Bengal, called the North Eastern states, like Assam, Nagaland, Manipur, etc. may not show a lot of Sanskrit influence because they may have Oriental influence instead, such as from SE Asia, China, etc. Except Assamese may have some Sanskrit influence, also not sure of Manipuri.

And of the southern states in the peninsula, Tamil has the least Sanskrit influence and is also said to be very ancient. The other three, Malayalam, Kannada and Telugu, have some Sanskrit influence.

Caveat: I am not a language expert.

Bengali is very much a descendent of Sanskrit. Assamese (and Oriya) is essentially a somewhat distant dialect of Bengali. Most languages of Asia that aren't part of the Chinese world (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and modern Vietnamese) have tons of Sanskrit or Pali (or both) in them. Tamil has lots of sanskrit in it (good examples are naka meaning finger nail, singa meaning lion, ampala from ambara meaning sky) it just has less than other dravidian languages, presumbaly because of its much older literary tradition. Literaly Malayalam looks literary Tamil, with all the words converted to Sanskrit. It's kind of funny!

And Tamil have long tradition of resisting Sanskirt influence. With elaborate grammar rules dictating if you must use loan words when, where and how to use them. It is more true for literary setting and never true for day-today speaking. Also, Tamil words also made into Sanskrit, don't know what it means. Languages are basically for interchanging ideas. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I mean... Tamilians sort of dominated of dominated Sanskrit literature in 7th-10th centuries. Dandin, Kumarila, Shankara, Dharmakirti, Ramanujan and Madhva. Not to mention the Bhagavatapurana, which very quickly became probably the most important religious text in India! I wouldn't say Tamilians rejected sanskrit... they just kept the two seperate. There aren't very many tamilian words itself in sanskrit (mina meaning fish is the only one I can think of), but there are proto-dravidian loan words in Sanskrit.

Most of the people in that list were likely not Tamilian - Shankara was likely Malayali, Kumarila & Dharmakirti are just as likely to have been from Assam, and Madhva was Tuluva.

What about the Bhagavatapurana is Tamil?

It literally quotes the Azhvars... you're right about Malva, that was a mistake. I don't agree with a possible assamese origin of either Kumarila or Dharmakirti, and see no reason to doubt Taranatha, and in the 9th century, the distinction between Malayali and Tamil is academic.

Assamese is NOT a dialect of Bengali. It is older than Bengali and infact the first non-Sanskrit language to which Ramayana was translated to. The Assamese script itself is in a continuous development since 5th century.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umachal_rock_inscription

The earliest extent translation of the Ramayana is the Tamil Kampan Ramayana from the late 12th century. The might have been a Khmer translation earlier. The Assamese Kotha Ramayana is about two hundred years later. The Jain Ardhamagghadi Ramayana is very old, perhaps older than the Valmikiramayana!

I stand corrected about Assamese's relationship with Bengali.

No worries. I meant in the Indic language family, not Dravidian. The Tamil version definitely preceded that.

> Bengali is very much a descendent of Sanskrit

Yes, that is nearly same as what I said above, except I said "likely", because I was not sure, not being a language expert. And that "likely" applied to the other languages I mentioned too, in that sentence.

Edit: Actually, I am (still anecdotally) pretty sure of it for at least Hindi and Marathi, because both of them have too many words which are the same as, or derived from Sanskrit, for it to be a mistake.

"The situation is a lot more nuanced than that."

"it's slightly different" confuses the issue.

It seems easy to say, "actually, no, India has multiple unrelated language groups as different from each other as English is from Hindi, and I don't just mean in isolated villages"

I usually explain it as being similar to the differences in languages across Europe. If you take portuguese at one end and russian at the other and start tracing across countries, you'll notice certain similarities and patterns but also encounter a lot of unique character especially in some areas. Spanish and portuguese people might be able to understand a little of each other like tamil and malayalam speakers and so on.

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