sanskrit
epitome of incomprehensibility Summer course. A challenge, and it's the first day.

I'm learning the letters, and by "letters" I mean the Devanagari script. The hard part? Not only are the symbols different than the Roman ones, but they change with different sound combinations, like a strange (to me) agglutinative cursive. So it seems like there are hundreds of different letters, even though I know intellectually it's not really like that.

I don't know why I thought "Oh, we're just learning grammar and structure, so we'll probably do the sounds in IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet)." Wrong.

But I can do it. I just have to look at it and practice it long enough. Humility. Grit. Sans-grit.

...Which makes me think, Frenchifly, "without grit," but I need it with. One Sanskrit, with grit. 		210511
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e_o_i Third-last day. Last exercise, and take-home final. Translating sentences, small stories, verses.

Fascinating, but I wish I had more time.

Well, I shouldn't artificially limit it by blathering. All right, back to the hermit who wants to arrange a marriage between his adopted daughter who used to be a mouse and the sun god. 		210627
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e_o_i The adopted daughter, to be clear, is the one he transformed from a mouse into a human. The sun god is the sun god but also just the sun. There's something about a cloud later on. 210627
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e_o_i The full story! Or rather a paraphrase. It's from a text called the Kathasaritsagara.

So. A hermit finds a young mouse that escaped an eagle's clutches and turns it into a human. It's female, so it becomes a girl.

When the girl grows up, the hermit decides she should marry someone strong. So he goes to the (personified) sun and tells him he wants the young woman to marry someone strong.

The sun's answer? "The cloud is stronger than me - he can cover me in an instant."

So the hermit goes to the cloud, explaining his plan again. The cloud says, "The wind is stronger than me - he can scatter me in all directions.

So the hermit goes to the wind. The wind says, "Actually, the mountain is stronger than me - I can't move him at all."

So the hermit goes to the mountain. And the mountain says, "You know who's stronger than me? Mice. They keep making holes in me and it's annoying."

So finally, the hermit finds a forest mouse. The mouse, looking at the hermit's adopted daughter, says, "Hmm, I'll marry her...if she can fit in my house. Not so sure about that part, to be honest."

"Oh," says the hermit. "True." So he turns her back into a mouse, and the two mice get married and, presumably, live happy mouse lives together.

...


I kind of anticipated mice being the strongest ones, once the pattern got started, but I didn't predict the exact ending. It's cute and narratively pretty clever! And it felt rewarding translating sentence by sentence, unfolding the story. 		210629
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e_o_i Of course, I'm being casual: a more literal translation doesn't sound like that.

This was my prof's version of the last verse (it's written as a poem):

"Let her be a mouse indeed as before, rather" (is) saying then this hermit. Having made her (into) a mouse, he gave her (in marriage) to this mouse. 		210629
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e_o_i Holy shit, I got an A+!

But this is thanks to the prof who gave everyone an extra day for the exam. 		210704
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e_o_i I don't think the professor needs to do this, but for me translating Sanskrit happens in three steps:

prathamám: transliterate the letters

dvitīyām: translate individual words and phrases (a lot of the time the difficulty is telling where one words starts and another one ends, because Devanagari strings things together, though there are SOME pauses)

tr̥tīyām: actually figure out what the words mean!

The last doesn't actually take the longest time, but it's hard work, and sometimes I could only guess at it, aided by context cues. That's how I found one of the world's many tree_parables. 		220507
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e_o_i tree_parables has now sprung out of the fertile burgundy ground of blather.

But boo on me for showing off how I can write the adverb versions of first, second, and third: the first has an accent marking, but not the other two. It's inconsistent, and it bothers me. It's because I didn't even know the word for "first" - I had to look it up.

I couldn't even remember the word for "one." I thought it was "enam" but that's one of the words for "him." That's "evam" - I think.

...Nope, "ekām," where the ā means a long "a": āāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāā. 		220507
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