I disagree on one thing though. I believe that Sanskrit was learned as a first language for a long time in India. I can’t prove it, but this is what I believe.
In fact there is a village in India to this very day where Sanskrit is spoken as a first language. The entire village consists of Sanskrit native speakers. What’s odd is that it seems to be a low caste village in a rural area. The idea that Sanskrit is some super-language that is too complex to be learned by humans is negated by the fact that these impoverished, possibly malnourished (note effects on brain development) 82 IQ low caste rural learn Sanskrit perfectly well as a first language.
The truth is that there is no natural human language that is too wild, nutty, or complex to be learned by children. If a language was developed naturally by humans, then it can be learned by human children. Any human children. Anywhere. Period. The child’s brain is like a sponge up until age 7-8 and any human language can be picked up quite effortlessly during this age range. There is indeed a Critical Period for language learning that begins to close at age 8 and continues to close until mid-adolescence when it is closed for good. However, I still believe that you will learn a language better if you start learning it at age 15 than at age 40.
Judith on Sanskrit, magic and the quest for the perfect language.
Judith Mirville: I learned Sanskrit (mostly in the intention to demystify the present-day New Age system of magic that claims of ancient Indian lore and just cannot.
For instance chakras as we claim to know them were just unknown to classical expounders of yoga, when you find the word used only once by Patanjali it only means the body’s axis of rotational momentum as both dancers and judokas learn to know to achieve perfect balance, it has nothing to do with any invisible organ made of subtle matter) : it is not so difficult if you realize first it was never meant to be spoken as a natural language, but learned as a second language as a kind of Esperanto that actually worked.
It is an artificial, contrived language that cannot have anything to do with divinity (actually the word deva can mean any spirit like the Greek daimon), though some part of it can be used for magic, which is something very different (and even as a language for magic, classical Arabic or Greek is superior).
It is not true it is too complicated for humans, it is complicated to use it because human bureaucrats (not divine beings) built it like a perfect computer programming language without allowing any divine intervention : it is perfect for the expression of all forms of political correctness first and foremost.
If you are a good computer programmer mastering several coding languages you can pick up Sanskrit much faster, because its rules are formulated in the same way as in a computer language manual (but that doesn’t fetch into very high mathematics, more into mere accounting, hence my analogy with computer languages). Unfortunately there is no divine imprint on Sanskrit, due to its utter lack of simplicity and also to its lack of cleanliness of design.
