Once I was at the UWA Open Day, answering questions at the Linguistics table. We get a few — what’s the deal with Yiddish? Is the Tower of Babel story plausible? What was the original language? and so forth.
But a gentleman came up to the display, and after seeing the language genealogy chart, said to me, “Are you saying that Sanskrit is not the oldest language?”
“That’s correct,” said I. “Sanskrit itself came from an earlier language, which we call Proto-Indo-European.”
“This is not possible,” he said. “Sanskrit is the earliest language.”
“Well, not really,” I explained. “Proto-Indo-European is the parent language for a lot of other languages, including English, Latin, Greek, and Farsi. And Sanskrit,” I added, as he began to look steamed. “Of course, Proto-Indo-European is so old that we’ve had to reconstruct it. All we know about it has been hypothesised from looking at later languages.”
He thought about that, decided that he had no significant objections, and went away.
“What in the world was that all about?” I asked. Had I met a Sanskrit supremacist? Would there be more?
Well, I have just run across this page full of fun facts about fundamentalist Hinduism.
Indian Civilization has unceasingly existed for 1,972 million years ago as the fully developed Ganges civilization
Yep, nearly 2 billion years old and counting. So Indian civilisation existed in its present form sometime during the early Proterozoic period.
Sanskrit has been in its perfect state since its origin millions of years ago.
So while humans have existed only about 100,000 years, Sanskrit is millions of years older. One wonders who might have spoken it. Perhaps trilobites.
I suppose the Fundamentalist Hindu gentleman decided not to press the question because Proto-Indo-European was hypothesised by scientists, and could therefore be ignored.
Are there fundamentalist Buddhists? Do I need to prepare? Only one thing is for sure. When you see someone making no sense, religious doctrine can’t be far behind.
25 July 2007 at 12:33 am
i think for a person in a particular culture to claim that something was first done or made by their people many hundred or thousands or millions of years ago, and still feel smug about the achievement today is akin to an african claiming that the human race originated in the plains of eastern Africa and then feel more superior than the rest of us for this fact.
Martin