10 thoughts on “What would you understand out of the following Sanskrit sentences?”

1. 1. The logical analysis of the Vedas and its higher level yoga.
   2. Inquiry into the working area of the analysis of the Vedas and its higher level yoga.
   3. Logic of the working area of the analysis of the the Vedas and its higher level yoga.
   (I think…!)

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   • Many thanks. It is not exactly what I thought—which means I did not express myself clearly enough.

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2. 1. The logic used in the investigation of the Vedas and the impediments therein.
   2. The scope of work and logical philosophy in the investigation of the Vedas and the applications thereof.
   3. The scope of work in connetion with the investigation of the Vedas and its application as well.

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   • Many thanks for taking the time to help. May I ask you what made you think that viniyoga in 1. meant “impediments”? Further, I was using कार्य in the sense of ‘duty’, but I see that readers are understanding it as ‘work’. Any suggestions about how to specify it?

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     • There are multiple meanings to the word viniyog. I looked for the one that made some sense. Actually none of the words seemed to make sense so I chose the one least problematic to me.

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       • 😀 many thanks!

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     • I suspect that the problem lies in that Sanskrit is not a dead language, but one that is still actively used and therefore not really ‘dead’ (even if there are no true mother-tongue speakers, it has a life of its own, just like Latin in western Europe until approximately 150 years ago. One German scholar of medieval Latin aptly called later Latin not anybody’s ‘mother tongue’ but ‘father tongue’).

       This means that Sanskrit never stopped evolving and in the process is strongly influenced by modern Indian languages. One Indian colleague ironically said that there is no such thing as ‘modern Sanskrit’: according to her, there is ‘Andhra Sanskrit’, ‘Bengal Sanskrit’, ‘Karnataka Sanskrit’, etc. etc. In practice this poses hardly any difficulties (just as there are British, Canadian, American, Australian etc. varieties of English, which are mutually intelligible).

       Now, to return to the question of how to translate ‘duty’: one should look for the Sanskritic word which in today’s modern languages has that meaning, and that is कर्तव्य. In my reading and conversing in contemporary Sanskrit (almost entirely in Karnataka, I must admit, but also and especially with persons from elsewhere, with whom I could not speak in Kannada or a European language), कर्तव्य was thus used. Etymologically, कार्य and कर्तव्य mean the same (‘that which is to be done’), but in the course of time a semantic differentiation took place. This is clearly seen e.g. in Bengali, where kārya became kāja and means ‘work’.

       I agree with ks’s remark that विनियोग can mean different things, and therefore it is not quite clear what you intended to convey.

       Perhaps we can do it the other way round: you tell us what you want to say, and we readers propose Sanskrit equivalents?

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       • Many thanks for this reply. I did not start from the English form because I wanted to test my Sanskrit title and check whether it could be misunderstood and how much. The English title is also somewhat scary: “Reasoning Tools for Deontic Logic and Applications to Indian Sacred Texts” and vague (“Indian Sacred Texts” can be safely translated back with वेद:).

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         • I am not so sure whether we can use ‘वेद’ for ‘sacred texts’, since the वेद is a rather limited subset of the broad category of texts which we can call ‘Indian sacred texts’. The common term for ‘canon’ is ‘आगम’, and ‘canonical texts’ would therefore be ‘आगमग्रन्थाः’.

           “कर्तव्यसंबद्धस्तर्क आगमग्रन्थविषयकास्तस्य प्रयोगाश्च”?
           “कर्तव्यसंबन्धी तर्क आगमग्रन्थविषयकास्तस्य प्रयोगाश्च”?

         • Many thanks for this last reply (sorry for the long delay).