Washington Post article on the revival of Sanskrit

I'm glad I noticed this last night because it's already been reduced to a tiny link on the front page that I probably would have missed today. Here's the article.

I know very little about India so I don't want to make any offhand comments, but I do think that any country with as many official languages (on the regional level) as India should be interested in something like this. As a PIE revival fan as well I like the idea of a revival of Sanskrit.

Here are some interesting parts of the article:

"At first I thought it was impossible. The teachers and attendants spoke to us only in Sanskrit, and I did not understand anything," said Hemant, one of the 150 students gathered inside a Hindu temple on the outskirts of New Delhi. "I knew big, heavy bookish words before, but not the simple ones. But now Sanskrit feels like an everyday language."

Such camps, run by volunteers from Hindu nationalist groups, are designed to promote a language long dismissed as dead, and to instill in Hindus religious and cultural pride. Many Sanskrit speakers, though, believe that the camps are a steppingstone to a higher goal: turning back the clock and making Sanskrit modern India's spoken language.

Their endeavors are viewed with suspicion by many scholars here as part of an increasingly acrimonious debate over the role of Sanskrit in schools and society. The scholars warn against exploiting Indians' reverence for Sanskrit to promote the supremacy of Hindu thought in a country that, while predominantly Hindu, is also home to a large Muslim population and other religious minorities.

and:

Mainstream Indian schools teach the 49-letter language unimaginatively through tedious grammar lessons, and children learn by rote. Many parents see little use in encouraging their children to pursue a language that is not in any official use.

"Some people are constantly saying that Sanskrit is a dead language. It cripples our psyche to hear that, because we are nothing without Sanskrit," said Vijay Singh, 33, a teacher at Sanskrit Samvad Shala. "In the name of so-called secularism, it has become fashionable to attack any attempt to promote Sanskrit."

In January, government funding for a major Sanskrit program in schools was abruptly cut, prompting the program's managers to allege that officials were biased against the language.

The program, which encouraged immersive methods and developed computer-aided teaching tools and games, had been set up in 2003 by a Hindu nationalist government. One of the recommendations of the project included translations of English nursery rhymes such as "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" and "One, Two, Buckle My Shoe" into Sanskrit.

When a new government was sworn in two years later, it ordered a massive review of the program, as well as other initiatives that were seen as being infused with Hindu supremacist rhetoric.

lastly:

Meanwhile, some scholars are developing computer programs for Sanskrit and translating its rich repository of children's stories online. Last month, an alliance of international scholars from the United States, France and Germany was formed for Sanskrit computing.

"Sanskrit is very suitable for computing, because its grammar is complete with 4,000 rules and has a regular structure," said Girish Nath Jha, assistant professor of computational linguistics at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.

Exactly 4,000 rules? I think I'll ask somebody I know who knows more about Sanskrit to comment on that. I'm not sure exactly what constitutes a rule; Esperanto is supposed to have 16 but the 16 alone won't let a person write in the language without seeing it in action and following along.