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Knowing and speaking are two very different things.

'Dead' is a legitimate categorical term, not a subjective judgement by BarAgent.

.... I dont see the point of calling a language dead but also saying there are several speakers of that language. That's like opposite of dead. Sorry, but studying languages that are actually dying due to nobody speaking them any more, your description somehow doesn't fit right.

Ah thanks! Sounds like you're right.

Found this searching "nazi" in that link.

During the times of the Third Reich, the national socialist leadership chose to forbid academic fencing. (It hints it was driven underground) but then states:

Following the war, most of the formerly suspended fraternities were reactivated and resumed the traditions of Mensur fencing if they had not continued throughout the time of Nazi occupation.

It’s a minor thing, but some of the later iconography of Surya appears to have been influenced by depictions of Helios: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surya?wprov=sfti1

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Basically, the student figured out that scholars have been misinterpreting one of the rules, leading to incorrect results. The students new interpretation produces correct ones.

The article should have made this more clear. To state that people speak Sanskrit today makes everything else odd.

This is correct. Herakles and Boreas were massively popular in the Greek army, and so the lands that were conquered/settled by the Greek brought worship of these gods with them. Since Buddhism traveled from India through Bactrian Afghanistan on its way to China, Korea, and Japan, it picked up a lot of artistic and religious pieces from those cultures along the way.

In addition to the wind bag carried by Fūjin (descended from Boreas' cloak) the lion skins and weapons carried by Niō in their depictions are thought to be inspired by Greco-Bactrian depictions of Herakles, who wore lion skins and carried a big club.

Sanskrit speakers. It’s a dead language, but there are plenty of people who know it. And there are plenty of texts. There’s enough for a person to validate whether the rules work.

But what defines what is perfect Sanskrit?

I was going to recommend this book as well. Tldr: there was a pretty substantial amount of cross pollination, both from Hinduism into Greece, and from Greece into India.

Modern and old English are far apart enough to be quite difficult to translate fully, I imagine a language with deeper roots even more so

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Considering that we still don't know how old Sanskrit is, it is wrong to claim fully that the text predates Sanskrit. Again, ancient Indians never kept record. The oldest Sanskrit text that was found is a massive religious collection of hymns. That same trial for all we know could be backwards.

As academic fencing was done only in Burschenschaften which were instrumental in the (failed) democratic revolution of Germany in the 19th century it would be odd for it to be liked by the Nazis. Also I'm pretty sure it's not exclusive to elite universities as most of them have or had such Burschenschaften.

Maybe Wikipedia can give you more accurate information about it here.

If there are 25,000 contemporary speakers, why would they not be able to make sense of the underlying algorithm? Are modern Sanskrit and ancient Sanskrit that much different?

Now she needs a matching tattoo of Boreas

I'm not sure the link the author makes between the mensur and Nazis is justified; The mensur was practiced at least as early as the 18th century and was fashionable long before the 1930's - I'd even say it was more of a WWI thing than a WWII thing; when the officers were almost exclusively from the upper class. Skorzeny seems a special case and I'm sure both his face and actions were the inspirations for several villains (I'm pretty sure Blofeld is partly based on him) - however I never saw or heard that mensur was very widespread in nazi circles.

Imperial Rome was a thing and the rule of the Emperor was was imperial rule. The Mongols had an Empire as did the Caliphate. I have never heard that it was restricted you Euro imperialism during the early and mid modern era.

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That the text predates the oldest sanskrit we've found by a couple of centuries implies to me that the spkit between the two cultures was prior to the migration into India. The trail of material evidence, not just inscriptions, does point to an origin of the ancestral peoples of the Indo-European culturo-linguistic familoty being from around the Black Sea area. More than likely an immigration of a people descended from that ultimate ancestral group mixed with the descendants of the Harrapan civilisation.

Paanini created a list of 3950 rules, each of which is a sutra, nonsense phrase to be memorized.

Consider the word glass. We create the plural by adding an s, but the rule is that we insert an e before the s. For the word cat, we don't insert an e, the s is simply added to the word. For the word dog, we add an s but pronounce it like a z. That is the kind of thing the rules deal with.

Here are the rules:

http://gretil.sub.uni-goettingen.de/gretil/1_sanskr/6_sastra/1_gram/paniniiu.htm

The rules use lists of sounds. Instead of listing letters in some traditional random ways, like the alphabet, he grouped similar sounds and gave each group a name. He call this table the Shiva sutras, shown here:

https://www.learnsanskrit.org/panini/shivasutras/

The name comes at the end of the list, so the semivowels l and r are referred to as k.

Here's some idea of how the rules work:

He groups these lists sometimes by naming the first letter of the first list and the name of the last list, so aten means a, i, u, l, r, e and o. (at mean short a).

On of the rules is at-eṅ guṇaḥ which defines the word guṇaḥ as a, i, u, l, r, e and o, the short vowels. (l and r are sometimes vowels in Sankrit) If you search the word guṇaḥ, it's used 10 times. As far as I know it's a nonsense word he invented for his rulebook.