Category talk:Hindi terms by Sanskrit root

This cat.

@Kutchkutch, is this category really needed? Words of Indo-Aryan languages are already being categorized by their Indo-European (and sometimes Indo-Iranian) roots, so what is the need of categorizing them by some synchronic Sanskrit roots? (And as such, IA languages are really not descended from Sanskrit, instead they are descended from Proto-Indo-Aryan; we assume Sanskrit as a prototype for the sake of convenience, Sanskrit being the only attested Old Indo-Aryan language other than Mitanni-Aryan.) So, this category is unworthwhile, and we should get rid of it. D’you agree with me? Thanks. — inqilābī ^{‹inqilāb·zinda·bād›} 21:16, 24 December 2020 (UTC)

Oppose the deletion of this category. - द्विशकारः^{वार्त्ता•योगदानानि•संरक्षितावलयः•विद्युत्पत्त्रम्} 14:55, 25 December 2020 (UTC)

@Kutchkutch, Bhagadatta, AryamanA, Victar, Benwing2, what are your opinions on this? — inqilābī ^{‹inqilāb·zinda·bād›} 19:42, 28 December 2020 (UTC)

@Inqilābī: Well, our position as of now is not that all IA dialects are descended from Proto-IA independent of Sanskrit; there are a lot of Sanskritic sound laws which operate in inherited MIA and NIA lexicon. So we consider "Sanskrit" to be the entire Old Indo-Aryan continuum, out of which some dialects are attested (there are different dialects of Vedic and there is also the one/few dialect(s) upon which Classical Sanskrit is based). On occasions where the MIA/NIA term does not formally match the attested Sanskrit ancestor, we consider these words to be descended from spoken variants of the attested terms. (Cliff notes; the differences between the different Old Indo-Aryan "languages" were very likely not great enough to classify them as different languages; they were just dialects of the same language).

Now as for this category, it may seem to be just duplicating the category which lists Hindi terms by the PIE root but in theory, this category will also contain Hindi terms derived from Sanskrit roots without an IE etymology. Secondly, there can exist distant doublets in Hindi, with one term inherited and the second one borrowed from an IE language like Persian or English. In such instances, this category will contain only the inherited word and the other one, which lists all the Hindi descendants of an IE root will have the inherited plus the borrowed term. So in theory, these two categories won't be strictly identical; though I'm doubtful of how much of this is true in practice. -- Bhagadatta^(talk) 04:10, 29 December 2020 (UTC)

@Bhagadatta: You explained it so well—I did not consider the OIA terms of non-IE extraction! Thus my concern that this category is merely a duplicate of the one listing terms by their IE root, is now resolved. However, I think that these Sanskrit roots are just synchronic roots that traditional grammarians have derived to analyze Sanskrit words. Have Sanskrit roots really any significance in historical linguistics as reconstructed PIE roots have, or maybe I am wrong because here we take Sanskrit to represent the whole of the OIA “family”/continuum? — inqilābī ^{‹inqilāb·zinda·bād›} 21:03, 29 December 2020 (UTC)

@Inqilābī: It is true that Sanskrit roots are artificial and grammarians constructed them in order to group the different terms making up the paradigm - verbs, verb forms, participles, adjectives and nouns. Many Indo-Europeanists/Iranianists refer to Sanskrit verbs by their roots because when you think of it, there's no real reason to favour the 3rd person singular present over all the other forms as the main lemma form, so they use the one thing that all forms are united by: i.e., the root.

Also, it's convenient for a language to have roots, if it and its descendant(s) preserve the distinction between different verb classes. This is why PIIr. verbs are referred to by the roots, because both OIA and Old Iranian have preserved the difference between verb classes like class 1 (full grade thematic), like bhár-a-ti, class 2 (full grade athematic) like vák-ti, class 3 (reduplicated) like dá-dā-ti etc. If there was a root from which Avestan inherited, say, the class 1 form and Sanskrit inherited the class 3 reduplicated form, we don't have any reason to favour either over the other so we are justified in creating a PIIr. root entry to show the descendants under different derivations.

The same thing applies to Middle Indo-Aryan as MIA languages too, partially, preserved some fossils of verb classes. Thus a situation could potentially arise in a Prakrit where you have two verbs, inherited from Sanskrit verbs of different classes but belonging to the same root. Plus, in Prakrit, you have forms like samara-ï and sara-ï ("he remembers"), from smárati but the perfect passive participle is which is not synchronically derivable from the aforementioned verbs and has to go back to Old Indo-Aryan smṛtá, so a Sanskrit root स्मृ (smṛ) would serve a useful purpose to list these derivations. -- Bhagadatta^(talk) 02:22, 30 December 2020 (UTC)

I concur with Bhagadatta on this. Plus, some roots may be reconstructible to OIA (=our definition of "Sanskrit") but not any further, so a category is nice for those. —Aryaman^{A (मुझसे बात करें • योगदान)} 01:48, 2 January 2021 (UTC)