The ancient world really did rely heavily on exchange of knowledge. Very few people travelled and fewer still had the ability to effectively pass on knowledge. You can actually very easily correlate the technological and general knowledge level of populations to their proximity to major trade routes. It also shows when populations which were isolated how much their growth and development differed, but it also makes their own discoveries that much more impressive. For example the Polynesian peoples who travelled the pacific may seem primitive even compared to their contemporary civilisations, and especially as time moved on that they didn't progress at the same rate. However when you think about the fact that they lived on small islands with limited resources, and all they developed they did so in isolation, their feats are remarkable, especially in navigation and shipbuilding. They sailed the open ocean, and the Pacific at that which is a very challenging ocean to sail, and managed to find tiny islands in its vast expanse to colonise, something that would have been a challenge to many other great maritime civilisations for centuries to come. To this day most sailing vessels use construction techniques those people originally came up with.

They aren't younger than Sanskrit, I am not sure where you got that idea from. As for the clustering, this is the Linguistic Center of Balance Principle . Essentially the idea is that if people migrated out from a location you're going to find the languages and cultures that came out of these peoples in greater proximity together nearer to the homeland because people will be splitting off along the path of migration. Thus India is unlikely to be the origin point of the Indo-European languages as there's only the Indo-Aryan branch present, representing only the strand of the migrations whilst it's likely to be out near the Black Sea because the closer you get to that area the more frequent and closer together the Indo-European language branches get.

People are more likely to stop at a shorter distance and settle down, and the others from their group just keep going, so the shorter distance is more densely populated with the languages descended from the original group than the other way around.

I don't get that tbh. Shouldn't there be more clusters branching out the further away from origin a thing is? Like tree branches?. Also proto slavs, proto Celts and proto italics being younger than Sanskrit should be proof that argues for this

I think a determined reader could get as far as Middle English with that approach but Beowulf, being in Old English, is probably unreadable without academic study of the language. Let me quote the first few sentences to you:

> Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum,

> þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,

> hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.

> Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum,

> monegum mægþum, meodosetla ofteah,

> egsode eorlas. Syððan ærest wearð

> feasceaft funden, he þæs frofre gebad,

> weox under wolcnum, weorðmyndum þah,

> oðþæt him æghwylc þara ymbsittendra

> ofer hronrade hyran scolde,

> gomban gyldan. þæt wæs god cyning.

I did my undergrad in linguistics and personally the only sentence I can read is the last one, which literally translates to "That was [a] good king."

This is reading like a Monty Python skit

It was later adopted by the Akkadians, whose language was not related to Sumerian.

Can confirm, I'm a native Kannada speaker (aren't we all lol?) and I honestly had an easier time taking Sanskrit classes as a kid than Hindi classes.

Not sure exactly what you mean, but you may be mistaking cultural influence for linear descent. Malay, Thai, Lao, Burmese are members of three different language families: Austronesian (Malay), Tai-Kadai (Thai, Lao) and Sino-Tibetan (Burmese). Sanskrit is a member of an entirely different one (Indo-European). There is a lot of borrowed vocabulary from Sanskrit in Malay, Thai, Lao and Burmese, but their grammars all work extremely differently from Sanskrit.

To add to what others have said: it gets crazy. What is commonly taught as the oldest Dutch sentence (it isn't) is from c. 1100. One theory though is that it is perhaps a certain west Flemmish dialect of English.

Can't tell you the specifics but basically it gets fucky wucky that far back.

To be honest, I have found learning Webdings has been the biggest help in learning Sanskrit.

Just because it is 2500 years old doesn't mean it was being studied for that long. It's more likely that it spent 2450 years not really cared about and only recently did scientists care to study it to try and figure it out.

A slight counterpoint to this, I speak Telugu which is also a South Indian language but has more Sanskrit influence. I've found that Sanskrit words are more commonly used in everyday language in Telugu than in Hindi. Hindi does use Sanskrit words as well, but while commonly speaking, we often resort to Pali/Prakrit or Urdu words.

I've also noticed something similar with Marathi. Of course, I grew up in Mumbai so my Hindi wasn't as "pure" as the one spoken in North India.

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Except that we'd expect multiple branches of the language family closer to the origin point, not less, and we see this with the Proto-Indo-European languages, with a cluster of branching as the Proto-Slavs, Proto-Celts and Proto-Italics splinter off moving west and south away from the Black Sea whilst there's not so much branching going on when you get down into India. This suggests the origin up in the steppe.

Maybe counter point - I speak Kannada (fluent), Hindi (fluent) and Sanskrit (not fluent). From my experience it depends on which flavour of Hindi you speak. For example, Hindi in (purely for the sake of an example), let’s say Hyderabad, is pretty much Urdu. In that case, my Kannada has a higher overlap with Sanskrit. Hindi is not uniform. It has a lot of regional nuances. Perhaps in certain regions Hindi is closer to Sanskrit, but I’m going to say Kannada (other than the written script) is a heck of a lot closer to Sanskrit than many people realise.

He said let's not even talk about it. /s

It’s just crazy to me that the father of liguistics also invented the thing we press sandwiches with

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Now this is a conspiracy I can get behind.

Looking for a starting point into the Kamakura Period.

Just finished reading The World of the Shining Prince by Ivan Morris and multiple Heian Era books such as the Tale of Genji, Diary of Lady Murasaki etc.

For clarity, it was interpreted as the rule that occurs later in the rulebook applies, rather than the rule that occurs later in the word, as is actually the case

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That’s good to know. Thank you for doing the work the article author should have done.

What about cuneiform? 🤔

"Pāṇini’s system—4,000 rules detailed in his greatest work, the Aṣṭādhyāyī which is thought to have been written around 500 BC—is meant to work like a machine. Feed in the base and suffix of a word and it should turn them into grammatically correct words and sentences through a step-by-step process."

I don't know. If you guys are having this reaction to the article, then it must in some sense be confusing, but if I were the author I would find this criticism borderline offensive.