--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB <no_re...@...> wrote: <snip> > As for the website Bhairitu pointed to, all that > you have to do to see its True Believer nature > is to do a mental "search and replace" on the > text in it and replace every mention of "Sanskrit" > with "Hebrew." Then you'll see what the site is > really about. > > It's attempting to present a case for learning > Sanskrit based on its supposedly spiritual nature, > and its supposed status as the "mother of all > languages."
But if you read the Briggs article at the URL I posted in response to Bhairitu, you won't see any of that; it's purely technical. Although the site itself is pro-Sanskrit, they've reproduced the original piece without commentary: http://www.gosai.com/science/sanskrit-nasa.html > The only relevant > piece of information in this context is whether > it is an *unambiguous* language. Given a sentence > in Sanskrit, can that sentence be parsed one and > only one way? > > Everything I've ever heard is that the answer to > that question is a definitive "No." And that > unambiguous answer rules out Sanskrit as the > basis of an experiment in machine translation > that is based on the notion of that base lang- > uage being unambiguous. I've now looked at the article a little more closely, and while I don't have the chops to understand it, it does seem clear that the issue of ambiguity has several different elements, depending on what aspect of a language you're looking at. What I can't tell is whether the kind of ambiguity Barry believes characterizes Sanskrit is the same kind of ambiguity Briggs claims is avoided in Sanskrit. It does seem clear that to rule out Sanskrit on the basis of ambiguity, such that it cannot serve as an artificial language in the manner Briggs proposes, one would have to *read the article* and understand the nature of the case he's making, and then refute it on the same level. I strongly suspect that what Barry's saying has nothing to do with the case Briggs makes. A big part of the reason for apparent ambiguity of a Sanskrit sentence may have to do with insufficient expertise in Sanskrit grammar. A non-native speaker of English without much knowledge of English grammar might be completely flummoxed as to how to interpret "Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana," the sentence Barry cited. And Sanskrit is *vastly* more complex grammatically than English. There may be clues, in other words, encoded in a Sanskrit sentence that someone not steeped in the grammatical details would miss, and thus think the sentence could be parsed more than one way, when in fact the clues point to one and only one way. It's also possible, it seems to me, that the content of Sanskrit sentences makes a difference--that a sentence describing the nature of Purusha, for example, may have ambiguities and/or multiple levels of meaning that a sentence describing an everyday situation may not.
