<rant>
I don't know how many people we have on the board who have studied Latin or (Ancient) Greek, and I suspect I'm probably the only person who's a Classics major (I think RedKing's done archaeology IIRC, though).
I'm proficient in reading Latin, have done some Greek in the past, and am now learning Sanskrit (I'm just now getting to the hard part...). Those are the three major classical Indo-European languages; they're all relatively conservative and have a large literary heritage to their name.
Here's something I didn't know until tonight, though: while Greek and especially Latin have large literary corpuses, Sanskrit's corpus is massive. It's a thousand times bigger than Greek's, at a conservative estimate. And Greek's is pretty large: it would take a very long and bored lifetime to read what Greek's got (I've seen it estimated at 91 million words. For comparison, Marcel Proust's A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu is 1.5 million words). And now imagine a corpus of almost 100 billion words. You couldn't even begin to get into that. Heck, just the Mahabharata is 200,000 verses and would take you almost a decade and a half if you tried to read forty of those a day (which in Sanskrit is harder than it sounds). And then there's everything else: the Vedas, the Upanishads, the plays of Kalidasa, the Ramayana (a quarter of the length of the Mahabharata, and still as long as twice the length of the Iliad and the Odyssey put together, just to give everyone a sense of scale), the Pañcatantra, even the Kāmasutra for the salacious...And that's just the major stuff! There's philosophy, there's mathematics, there's poetry...you could probably be the most well-read (if not widely-read) person in the world without ever leaving what's been written in Sanskrit.
But here's the problem...outside of India (and even in India the scholarship tends to be religious and quite biased), almost nobody reads this stuff. The Mahabharata is the primal, cultural epic poem for as many people on this planet as the Odyssey is. There's been one translation into English made, and nobody is publishing it on dead leaves. Almost nobody wants to study Sanskrit in the first place, and half the people that do are New Agey bobos trying to get in touch with the Wisdom of the Mystic Orient. Heck, the guy who wrote the textbook I use- this is one used at Ivy Leagues!- is an associate professor at the "Maharishi School of Management" in Fairfield, Iowa. There's been one attempt to publish a line of facing-page translations of Sanskrit literature, the Clay Sanskrit Library (similar to the Loeb Library if that rings a bell). They published half the Mahabharata and a few plays before having to fold from bankruptcy. And it's nigh-impossible to get even original Sanskrit editions sans translation in the West.
I kind of wonder if part of it is the fact that nobody does this for fun anymore. I mean, the British did a lot of damage when they took over India, lots and lots of atrocities...but they also preserved and analyzed a lot of the cultural heritage. If you were an Englishman of a certain station in the Victorian era, you knew Greek and Latin, you knew your Plato and your Virgil and your Cicero. That was just a given. You might be given to study and translate Sanskrit in your spare time, especially if you were stationed in India. I mean, I'm not saying that all of them did that or even many of them, but philology and autodidacticism were highly respected. And there just isn't anything like that anymore. If you're moneyed and ambitious and intelligent you go work on Wall Street, and leave Sanskrit to a few impoverished professors and their overworked grad students. I mean, sure, Sanskrit literature isn't the most useful thing in the world, but doesn't that make it more beautiful even so?
It's also, I think, a searing indictment of the idea that academia, especially the humanities, has run out of things to talk about and is now just a bunch of stuffed shirts engaging in mental masturbation. It has work to do and lots of work to do. But it's stuck producing its twentieth English major looking at Hamlet through the postmodernist lens du jour.
</rant>
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Topic: Things that made you sad today thread. (Read 9793239 times)