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Mind-blowing Science of Indian Languages - Why Sanskrit is Amazing & Mother of All? FutureIQ

313,803 views Wait, is this logic right? • Jun 21, 2024
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Slog Reference: Elegance of the Devanagari Script

Description

Devanagari script is proof of why Sanskrit is one of the best languages in the world and inspired great linguists like Noam Chomsky. We've broken down the brilliance of the Devanagari script in this video to help you understand the creativity and brilliance that went through to make it work.

Get familiar with the vowels, consonants, additional words, pronunciations, and the best way to learn to pronounce each letter in the fascinating Devanagari script.

More videos for you:
Why Indian English is weird: https://youtu.be/P4TcPyEt1fg
Ancient India's advanced science: https://youtu.be/O4pL_mmUeVA

Books:
The Ashtadhyayi of Panini: https://tapthe.link/AshthPaniniBook

Hope you enjoyed FutureIQ by Navin Kabra and Shrikant Joshi. Do hit us up on Twitter:
@ngkabra http://twitter.com/ngkabra
@shrikant https://twitter.com/shrikant

Listen it on the podcast provider of your choice: https://tapthe.link/FutureIQRSS
Watch other episodes of The FutureIQ podcast: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAppTB0r5_TaYueZ0adD42Wiw5X-wTE4v

Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
00:28 The problem with pronunciations
01:27 The table
01:43 Rows in Devanagari
02:32 Columns
06:50 Approximant & fricative
11:40 Vowels
15:40 No vowels in T row?
16:13 Sanskrit best for computers?

#futureiq #devnagari #sanskrit #linguistics

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Elegance of the Devanagari Script

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Transcript

how do you pronounce the r in Krishna is it tree or Ru why are there two sh sounds in our languages why are there all these bizarre letters at the end of right it seems like there are some ridiculous things in D nagari script but in reality it is such an elegant system today I want to talk to you about that how it is scientific and beautiful okay one you already pronounced the the r and the and the sounds do you even know how to pronounce the sound at the end of and no because they are they are made up sounds you can pronounce them the way you want I mean this was just taught so
badly in our schools right I'm not kidding my second standard teacher taught this as is the sound of a small baby crying okay okay is the sound of a even smaller newborn baby crying okay not and this is absolutely the wrong way of teaching these things okay sure we don't use these sounds anymore but there is a system to it and that system will also explain the r sound in Krishna the okay I I genuinely don't know what first I'm going to ask you a different question okay okay whenever we are taught the DEA nagari script right it is arranged in this table CH and so on until P right correct did you ever think about why it is always
arranged in this table like this no there is a system okay I want you to do the following okay all right just say kg of oh that's like a wow okay oh in the same oh realize that your mouth and your tongue was in the same position for all the sounds oh yeah it works try with ch ch ch ch ch oh tongue movement is same for all five of those sounds right that explains why t t d d no and T D and P p b right so a r is same tongue movement and same mouth position all the different sounds that you can make all right okay but what about the columns okay
even the columns have a meaning okay wait C what is the meaning of the column so uh first of all just look at the First Column and second column okay the only difference is the aspiration the H part of it right so c c ch ch t t right correct so that's simple enough right and similarly third and fourth column g g j correct what is the difference between columns 1 2 and columns 3 4 and go go the second column is a little fatter it is the little fatter exactly that's a very good articulation the reason it is fatter is because in the third and fourth your vocal cords are actually moving it's called a voiced consonant as opposed to
unvoiced so what I want you to do is the following keep your hand here at the top just a finger okay and do c nothing much happens but if you say G it is vibrating a lot oh yes it is so the first two columns are voiceless which means that vibration here is not being used so most of the sound is created in your mouth whereas the third and fourth are voiced in which means that the voice is getting created here and then coming out which is it is fatter c c g g oh you can actually feel it here and same thing p p BB p p b oh yeah it's it's right here
just above the Adams Apple for the guys and I don't know what to say for the girls they also have an Adam apple it's just smaller okay yeah but I mean okay fine but I'm I'm ready to explain the columns right First Column is voiceless unaspirated which means no sound being created here all sound in the mouth and you are not doing the h correct the pushing of the air out second is voiceless aspirated and all of them the entire third column is voiced unaspirated entire fourth column is voiced aspirated right this is like a matrix of sorts it is absolutely a matrix right I mean you you can even call it a periodic table right most
people who do Periodic Table of this and that are stupid because it's not periodic right but this one is it's definitely periodic and half and the last column is the nasals right so the sound the air you are pushing through the nose not through the mouth right so the tongue position and the mouth position Remains the Same it's just air being sent through the nose nose instead of the mouth g go with the familiar ones yeah right and now using this column and row you are ready to pronounce the and Y properly yeah so you want to push the air out like a n but keep your mouth and tongue position like a c and that's how
you get the c g actually I used to use this trick back in school when they asked me to pronounce it what I used to do was I used I used to look for anusar words like an and Ang and that sound is how I would remember the corresponding sounds in the row I didn't realize that what I was natively doing was this I was actually following the rows and columns wow okay in fact there is no single anusar as such really when you think about it right because the dot that we use really if the following word is a c c g or G then the dot is really a half but if the following sound is a ch
ch or then it's a half and so on right uh and that's why you will see that in mandal it's half not a half correct right whereas and so on right yeah but the next question is what about those stragglers the ones we would just leave out for later here I was just thinking of that y okay okay calm down calm down okay but one one unfortunate thing is that the way we were taught isn't really ideal because if you shift them they fit into the same grid so nicely okay so for example if you take add two more columns yeah after our nasle right there are two new sounds one is called an as
approximate and the other is called a fricative right okay so y r l are approximates and what approximate means is that you keep the same mouth position same sort of tongue movement you do but you don't touch the tongue to the top or the front or wherever it has to remain in the air yeah because with Co CH t t p the tongue progressively comes from back of the mouth to almost your touching your teeth and you're always the tongue is touching somewhere right it is pushed out right something that you need to be really careful while recording on a mic explosives but when you do that same sound except that you don't you leave the air flow open right
okay but only a tiny air flow then you get an approximate yeah right the tongue is pretty close like CH it's like CH but not touching so that's y so it's in the same line as CH okay if you do something similar but for t t d r r it just touches yeah okay same thing if you do with the teeth touching the tongue touching the teeth you end up with a l right so air flow is Contin but yeah and uh similarly the next uh column is fricatives okay it is similar to approximate but you narrow the Gap even more and you actually cause the S sound right okay that sound the hissing sound okay right so those are
the fricatives so sh sh so do the CH but with a hissing sound right CH sh so that's our first sh okay that's the sh but if you do the D sh sh so this is a different sh right sh and Sh the second sh has your tongue rolled inside rolled inside like the so why do we have these two different it depends on what is the sound coming afterwards okay so if the sound coming afterwards is from the ch ch ch family then you use the first sh because your tongue is in the front and you want to continue it in the front as right yeah as as doesn't make sense as makes sense
whereas if the next sound is a from the tur tur family with your tongue rolled back oh yeah so then your tongue you don't basically the idea is that you don't want to flip your tongue from front to back or back to front so you make it easy for yourself for 30 plus years I have wondered the difference between the sh and the SH now you know and it took him less than 30 minutes to explain the difference I am judging my school teachers so hard absolutely because this was known 2,000 years ago they designed it like this this is by Design so I I don't know why they never teach us this right right so
that's Rose and then sh no there are two sh so sh and Sh yes then there is s of course which is the T and well is just forget it right that's not part of the regular let's not forget it it is specific to a specific language but and thr right these are just I mean these are combined letters they really don't have their own existence I don't know why it is taught to us separately there shouldn't be I think I know why it's probably because Publishers wanted to save some space and putting th and R separately was two letters instead they made th and saved space of one no no sometimes it is just you know writing
the letter a combined letter in the regular style would be too complicated right you have to come up with a different way of writing it and then you have to teach kids how to read look I happy it makes my name look nice when written in so I'm very happy about that but then uh the these are the consonants we've been speaking about what about the vels actually the vels also fit into the same grid into this periodic table so what is a wallel and how is it different from a consonant a wowl is a sound in which the air flow is never obstructed it is just Continuous airf Flow uh a e e right no airf flow never stops now if
you try to use the same mouth position as a the c k k g r but keeping the air flow open okay K you end up with an U right and if you do an wider it then you get an ah right so a a is in the same row as the c g interesting okay CH you do CH E E Yeah e right E and E are basically in that row okay same thing if you do with the p row right you will get p p m o m and o o I mean it's roughly the same lips except that without touching you keep the airf flow open right keep the tongue position same p p b b m uh
bit of a stretch but maybe yeah right now we are ready to talk about Krishna right there is that sound again kishna okay imagine what will the vowel sound be for the tur right so your tongue has to be back to huh but because it is a vowel it can't be touching so it has to be in the air because the air flow has to be open right so it is in the air and air flow is continuous so right so when you say kishna kishna kishna kishna so it's a different sound it is not a r in R the tongue is touching to the top it is not a r it is not a Ru it's not a r it's a Krishna
it's a w so it's a rushi and a Krishna correct in Sanskrit H okay in Hindi and marati the r sound does not exist they have replaced it with the re sound in Hindi and r sound in marati uh okay oh a so now when they teach it in the wamala they teach it like R and Ru but not yeah okay basically Sanskrit Hindi marati these are different languages fair so if the word is written Krishna then depending on whether you're reading it in Sanskrit Hindi or marati you will read it in three different ways in Sanskrit it will be Krishna Krishna in marati it will be krushna and in it will be Krishna Krishna oh yeah makes
sense Krishna Krishna and Krishna but I think this R sound has made an appearance in other languages because I remember this I remember hearing this sound in Tamil although I'm not really sure uh if I heard it right Tamil has a whole bunch of new sounds that we will not get into or maybe do a different episode on them right just one thing I wanted to point out is that we skipped the th row while doing our vowels right [Music] okay just it sounds like L but in L you're touching the tongue so if you say l but with the tongue not touching no it's a different sound it is not uh in uh your tongue is in the back
yeah when your tongue is in the front it sounds similar to us because we are not used to hearing the sound but it's a oh it's the halfway between a l and a and that is a different sound which is no longer used we' never ever see it but in Sanskrit in D nagari it is written it looks like a love with a Twisted Tail right you must have seen that I have seen that and for some reason I used to read it as a l but it is not a l it a it's a sound okay this this this episode on screen is going to look really really weird and I'm really sorry I didn't
realize it because I was in the flow of naen explaining things as I usually am but learned a lot of language today and in a lot of different ways okay so uh from what you explained to me so far it looks like Sanskrit has Sanskrit has a very see I'm I'm learning has a very scientific basis for constructing its alphabet constructing its uh uh it its grammar it's the most scientific of all languages man so depends okay uh every once in a while you will get a WhatsApp Uncle saying that Sanskrit is the best language for computers okay and you you would have heard it you would have heard this I did not want to go there but he went there
okay so let's break that down okay what exactly is the meaning of that so first of all the D nagari script is brilliant as we saw as just ahead of the English alphabet okay the grammar of Sanskrit panin grammar is also a work of art it is an elegant grammar it is brilliant Asad the ashad of pan not just the fact that it is so regular but the way in which he has compressed all the rules of grammar and the way he has expressed them in a very small number of rules which can get combined in different ways right by small he still means 3,000 of them 3,300 of them but still there is it's smaller than English or in fact
most other languages so this in fact is so awesome and elegant that modern linguists like Ferdinand Sasser and then later on Nam chsky who's considered the grand old man of linguistics right these people were actually inspired by the rules of part grammar okay so a lot of modern Linguistics uh and the way they analyze uh the rules of grammar owes a debt to panes grammar right okay so yes even in modern computer science with programming languages the rules used there are still reminiscent of Panini's grammar rules okay but this does not mean that Sanskrit is a great Lang anguage either for computer programming nor is it a easy language for computers to understand okay that is a myth and the
reason it started is because in 1985 one guy in NASA got very inspired by Panini's grammar and he said oh Sanskrit will be a great language to use with computers and then he tried to do research in that he tried to write a paper and he didn't get anywhere nobody else paid any attention to him at least not in the research Community but all the WhatsApp uncles of the 1980s in India got so excited about it that for the next 40 years they've been going on and on about how Sanskrit is the most awesome language for computers even though in practice nobody has ever used Sanskrit with computers in that way right okay okay but to end on a positive note
right the D nagari is brilliant it is P grammar is brilliant agreed and it is fascinating the deeper you go into it the more interesting things you learn especially about the pronunciation of the different letters in our language today was basically a crash course in all of that so uh definitely rewind go check it from the beginning again and practice until you get the pronunciations of the sh and so right yes Shri Kant na to thank you