# Sanskrit-Hindi: mutual intelligibility



## ulyssez

I've read that many Indo-Iranian languages have a high degree of mutual intelligibility. But to what extent is classical Sanskrit intelligibile with modern Hindi? Is the situation comparable to Latin and modern Romance languages? How much Sanskrit can a "typical" Hindi speaker (let's say with secondary education) read and understand?

I've been looking forward to learn both, but I wonder which may be a better place to start.

Also, are the devanagari used for Hindi and Sanskrit significantly different?


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## Not.A.Linguist

I would restrict myself talking about Hindi, Urdu, and English. I may also go back a little in time and touch upon related ones. Pardon me you may find some of the transliteration outside the guidelines on this site.



ulyssez said:


> I've read that many Indo-Iranian languages have a high degree of mutual intelligibility. But to what extent is classical Sanskrit intelligibile with modern Hindi?



A great deal. Most Hindi words are direct simplification (Upbhramsha) of corresponding Sanskrit words. See some samples:
______________________________________________________________________________________________

Sanskrit   -->   Hindi
Matree   -> Maataa, Maa, Maa (sometimes with a faint ending N sound)
Pitree   -> Pita
Ekam     -> Ek
Dwi      -> Do
Tri      -> Teen
Chatur   -> Chaar     (Ending R is a half sound)
Agni     -> Aag


Some have come to distort much and sound very different in 'Simlified Hindi'.
______________________________________________________________________________________________
Sanskrit   -->   Hindi      -> Simlified Hindi
______________________________________________________________________________________________
Griham     -> Grih     -> Ghar   -- 'am' with a half ending M sound is characteristic Sanskrit treat
Sakhaa     -> Mitra    -> Dost   -- Dost probably is Urdu (any Urdu speaker here may kindly confirm or reject)
Janna      -> Janna    -> Vyaktee
Aham       -> Main


But many do not seem taken directly from Sanskrit. It would be interesting to find out their origin.
______________________________________________________________________________________________
Jal      -> Paanee
Vaayuu   -> Hawwa
Kreeda   -> Khel      (D is a big R sound)







ulyssez said:


> Is the situation comparable to Latin and modern Romance languages?


I think so. Yes. Though I do not know as much about the Latin's relation to modern Romance languages as much I do Sanskrit with Modern North Indian Languages.





ulyssez said:


> How much Sanskrit can a "typical" Hindi speaker (let's say with secondary education) read and understand?


Reading 100%. A typical example: I can perfectly read all Sanskrit even today. Pronounce it with 95% accuracy. Understand 70%. Rest 30% will be vocabulary issue and nothing else.





ulyssez said:


> I've been looking forward to learn both, but I wonder which may be a better place to start.


Depends on the purpose. If you intend to use it with Indians for conversation, Hindi is the way to go. A quick googling will tell you Hindi is understood by 40% of Indian population. Not to mention millions of Non-resident Indians and migrants in Greater India and worldwide. My first hand experience is that even 2nd generation NRIs are very happy to talk (have a limited conversation) in Hindi. They love doing so just because it gives them a feeling of being related to their roots deep inside.

One more reason is - because of various reasons, you will find that more South Indians (Native Dravidian language speakers) can understand a speak a bit of Hindi than North Indians can understand or speak South Indian languages.

If you learn Hindi, you can find someone to use your Hindi and buy literature, newspaper in a much wider area (Greater India - Modern India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Fiji, Mauritious etc).

Sanskrit is more pure. Has not been affected much by other languages if at all. I do not know if Sanskrit has 'imports' of any sorts whatsoever. Still remains the language for all Hindu Religious Rituals. Grammar is more tight, better defined and more consistent across the board. If you do not know any of these languages, it should be equally easy/difficult for you to master these languages. But with Sanskrit you may have trouble finding a qualified teacher. Specifically if you are in anywhere but in South India.

In southern India, many villages still have people for whom Sanskrit is still first/second language and they speak Sanskrit fluently. So the best place to learn Sanskrit without spending loads of money is probably move to a South India village and find a guru. Another option is to learn it from a Purohit in Benaras - but this may not be as economical as modern day Benaras is a highly commercialized area.






ulyssez said:


> Also, are the devanagari used for Hindi and Sanskrit significantly different?


No, Devnaagari is exactly the same for Sanskrit and Hindi. Hindi uses a subset of Devnaagari symbols. Notable ommissions in Hindi are 'Rri'. A compound sound which *I feel* is extraneous anyway. Reduced usage of the third 'Sh' sound which is pronounced by curling the tounge back to upper mouth.


HTH.


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## Not.A.Linguist

ulyssez said:


> I've read that many Indo-Iranian languages have a high degree of mutual intelligibility.


Hindi and Urdu is a strong case in point. Hindi and Urdu have so much in common that their native speakers may not even be able to realize when they use words from the other language.

The key is to understand the 'Hindustani' language, which is an informal language most widely spoken in Indian subcontinent and consists of elements from Hindi, Urdu, English, Sanskrit, Pharsee/Farsi/Persian.

Personally, I can understand 50-70% of all modern north Indian languages when spoken clearly by a native speaker. I can also read parts of Banglaa, Maraathee, Gujraatee without any formal training in them at all (just by guessing). Though I cannot write them as most of them have their own Scripts. Though it is entirely possible to write them all using Devnaagari with 70-90% accuracy, because phonetics bear a very high degree of similarity.

[Off topic] Too bad the Government of the Republic of India did not enforce a single standard Script as Official Script as did some other governments (Japan, China), which was really a *significant* step towards keeping these diverse countries unified.


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## ulyssez

Many thanks for your very thorough answer.

My goal for learning Sanskrit is to further my studies in Buddhism and Hinduism.  To the same end, I'd also like to continue my studies in India, where I suppose Hindi may come in very handy.

I am a native English speaker and I speak French fluently.  I have a decent base of Latin, and I've been able to pick up Spanish and Italian relatively easily.  Unfortunately, since I've been learning Spanish and Italian at about the same pace, I have a terrible tendancy of confusing the two languages when speaking.  I was afraid that learning Sanskrit and Hindi may cause the same problem.

From your description, though, I get the feeling that Sankrit is a lot closer to modern Hindi than Latin vs modern romance languages.  To a typical modern romance language speaker, I'd say that spoken Latin is nearly totally incomprehensible, while written Latin is only vaguely understood at best.  The key reason being that, while modern romance languages share a great deal of vocabulary roots with Latin, the grammar is very different.  Most importantly, declension is completely foreign to most modern romance languages.

So, grammatically speaking, are Sanskrit and Hindi very similar as well?


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## Not.A.Linguist

ulyssez said:


> So, grammatically speaking, are Sanskrit and Hindi very similar as well?


They share the same grammatic semantics. The 'Tense', the 'Gender', 'Sentence structure ' etc remain absolutely the same. You'll find the differences in word forms. Sanskrit has more forms of same word than Hindi. Sanskrit Grammar is more refined than Hindi.
Indian 
There is a joke among school going children in India - "If you are not good in Sanskrit, write what you have in Hindi, spray some ink on the paper and shake it vigorously. What you have now is Sanskrit." It's a joke, but is a good indication of the similarity Sanskrit and Hindi bear.


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## xjm

In my opinion they are not mutually intelligible (in the same way that French and Latin are not, even though one can very easily identify cognates).  I'd say that the reason Sanskrit is often understood by Hindi speakers is a matter of education and culture as well as linguistic similarity.  Sanskrit often has literary, cultural, and religious prestige for Hindus (like Latin for European Christians a century or two ago).

Sanskrit has grammatical features not present in Hindi (and probably vice versa, but I don't know enough about Sanskrit to say for sure).  Based on my experiences, many Sanskrit words will sound erudite or bookish to Hindi speakers even though they are understood.

As a non-native Hindi student with no education in Sanskrit, I can only "sound out" written Sanskrit without understanding it, but I can definitely read and understand basic Urdu (when transliterated), Punjabi, etc.  The modern languages of the entire region (roughly from Punjab south to Maharashtra and from Gujurat east to Bangladesh) can be understood as occupying one big dialect continuum.  Sanskrit, as a classical/liturgical language, isn't on that map. 

Oh, a followup on etymologies:


> But many do not seem taken directly from Sanskrit. It would be interesting to find out their origin.
> ______________________________________________________________________________________________
> Jal      -> Paanee
> Vaayuu   -> Hawwa
> Kreeda   -> Khel      (D is a big R sound)


- Paani is from Sanskrit "to drink" or maybe "drinkable."  
- I'd bet my hat that hawaa (as in air or wind) is from Persian or Arabic, because both languages have very similar words for wind, air, breath.  (Note that it's onomatopoeic!)  
- Khel I am not sure about.


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## xjm

The original poster is a second-language learner asking whether he would find Sanskrit _intelligible_ from knowledge of Hindi.  In my opinion as another non-native student who has had to translate texts from Sanskrit, the answer is definitely no.  Sanskrit will be more difficult for an anglophone to learn.

Regarding the OP's question as to which to learn first:  If you want to go to India first, I'd suggest Hindi first.  If you are more interested in studying classical texts before you leave, I'd suggest Sanskrit first.


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## panjabigator

XJM, <havā> is certainly used in Persian to mean weather.


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## koniecswiata

I can't really say anything about similarity or dissimilarity of Hindi and Sanskrit, but I can say something about the mutual intelligibility issue.  When mutual intelligibility falls below 80% problems begin to occur in communication.  If you are reading and don't understand every fifth word, then you will have trouble truly understanding a text.  Sure, you will probably get the general idea.  If you are at only 50% intelligibility, then the situation is even worse.
In the case of modern Romance language (even English-speakers to some degree) and Latin, probably most Latin text words would seem somewhat "comprehensible" but what would be quite UN-intelligible is the grammatical relationship between the words.  If Sanskrit has 8 noun declensions (which I have already heard about) and Hindi is a largely non-declined language (in its use of nouns), I could imagine at least some confusion for Hindi-speakers when reading Sanskrit texts--unless, of course, they've had some kind of training in Sanskrit.


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## Lugubert

Sanskrit and Hindi are two _grammatically_ very different languages. Lots of _words_ are fairly similar, if you look at "high Hindi", which tries to avoid Arabo-Persian loans. A native Hindi speaker will probably have major difficulties with Sanskrit's rather free word order, being used to strictly verb final sentences. And (s)he would when writing face as many problems with Sanskrit noun cases as any European - or, speakers of Slavonic languages might cope even better.


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## omlick

ulyssez said:


> I've read that many Indo-Iranian languages have a high degree of mutual intelligibility. But to what extent is classical Sanskrit intelligibile with modern Hindi? Is the situation comparable to Latin and modern Romance languages? How much Sanskrit can a "typical" Hindi speaker (let's say with secondary education) read and understand?
> 
> I've been looking forward to learn both, but I wonder which may be a better place to start.
> 
> Also, are the devanagari used for Hindi and Sanskrit significantly different?


 

Sanskrit is a many years endeavor, it must be studied because you love it, or you will not last very long. Knowing Hindi first might help you a little, but from what I could tell from the few Sanskrit textbooks I have tried to read, knowing Hindi doesn't get you that far.



Lugubert said:


> Sanskrit and Hindi are two _grammatically_ very different languages. Lots of _words_ are fairly similar, if you look at "high Hindi", which tries to avoid Arabo-Persian loans. A native Hindi speaker will probably have major difficulties with Sanskrit's rather free word order, being used to strictly verb final sentences. And (s)he would when writing face as many problems with Sanskrit noun cases as any European - or, speakers of Slavonic languages might cope even better.


 

Yeah, native English speakers are very "noun-declension" naive, unless they studied Latin or Russian or something. Hindi has a bit of this, but not much compared to the language I mentioned. I believe Sanskrit nouns can have 24 different spelling changes a piece. Lots to absorb. There is also the "sandhi" issue, where words are joined together (this too occurs in high Hindi as well when forming words and adding suffixes, prefixes to words) and thus, you get the Sanskrit sentence, which looks like one giant word, and you have to be good at picking the individual words out of it. In other words, you will have to learn the sandhi rules very well.


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## bakshink

You will need to know basic Hindi for communication and you must know Sanskrit thoroughly for reading Hinduism/Budhism scriptures. All North Indians who know Sanskrit will certainly be knowing Hindi as well (though reverse is not true) but any South Indian knowing Sanskrit may not understand a word of Hindi. Our ex-president Dr. S. Radhakrishnan was an eminent Sanskrit scholar (His translation of The Holy Geeta is an excellent book). He couldn't speak a word of Hindi. I am a North Indian well conversant with Hindi but can't understand any Sanskrit text (and nearly 95% of us can't), though I can read it a little haltingly still I will need it to be translated before being able to understand it.


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## Not.A.Linguist

bakshink said:


> You will need to know basic Hindi for communication and you must know Sanskrit thoroughly for reading Hinduism/Budhism scriptures. All North Indians who know Sanskrit will certainly be knowing Hindi as well (though reverse is not true) but any South Indian knowing Sanskrit may not understand a word of Hindi. Our ex-president Dr. S. Radhakrishnan was an eminent Sanskrit scholar (His translation of The Holy Geeta is an excellent book). He couldn't speak a word of Hindi. I am a North Indian well conversant with Hindi but can't understand any Sanskrit text (and nearly 95% of us can't), though I can read it a little haltingly still I will need it to be translated before being able to understand it.



>> I am a North Indian well conversant with Hindi but can't understand any Sanskrit text (and nearly 95% of us can't) <<

This is something personal to you then. I was the weakest in my Sanskrit class, never paid any attention to it whatsoever, and can still read all Sanskrit text and understand to a fair extent.

>> and nearly 95% of us can't << I specifically contest that. How do you know you are 95%? Most of my colleagues could read Sanskrit better than me and they scored higher than me. I do not think 95% is a figure you can back up with some credible argument.


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## panjabigator

> [Off topic] Too bad the Government of the Republic of India did not enforce a single standard Script as Official Script as did some other governments (Japan, China), which was really a *significant* step towards keeping these diverse countries unified.



How is the promotion of a monoculture fair to a space characterized by a plurality of traditions, languages, faiths, and cultures?


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## Anatoli

As far as I know Sanskrit and Hindi are not mutually intelligible but a very educated speech may be full of Sanskrit words in the same way Urdu may be rich of Arabic and Persian words. Both Hindi and Urdu have layers of Sanskrit, Persian and Arabic words, now also many English words.

Is *Hindustani* (the term itself and its idea) popular in both India and Pakistan? I also wonder if it is possible to write longer texts (perhaps dialogues) in a style, which is considered both Hindi and Urdu (ignoring the script differences)? I have a phrasebook, which shows amazing similarities but in some areas there are big differences (where a more high level language is to be used).


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## Subhash Kumar

Anatoli said:


> Is *Hindustani* (the term itself and its idea) popular in both India and Pakistan? I also wonder if it is possible to write longer texts (perhaps dialogues) in a style, which is considered both Hindi and Urdu (ignoring the script differences)?


As of today, the term Hindustani or the idea is not popular (or commonly used) at least in India (or at least in Mumbai where I am from). In a place like Mumbai, people just call the language Hindi although I suppose they are actually talking in Hindustani (actually not even Hindustani which is supposed to be a mixture of Hindi/Urdu; but a creole of Hindi/Urdu/Persian/Marathi/Gujarati/English etc). The term Hindustani for a language is virtually unknown to common masses (at least in Mumbai). I am not sure of the rest of India or places where pure Hindi/Urdu is spoken.
About writing longer texts in Hindustani, I think all the Hindi (or Hindustani?) movies from early 20th century untill as late as today have been using Hindustani language (though calling them Hindi). These days, though, one finds a lot of Bombay Hindi (which is the creole I mentioned above) in many of the movies. But majority of characters still speak Hindustani.
As far as formal government literature (notices, rules, office documents etc), I think, in India, Hindi (not Hindustani) is used along with English although I would still say that people actually talk more in Hindustani than pure Hindi.
I have absolutely no idea about Pakistan.


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## South Africa

Anatoli said:


> As far as I know Sanskrit and Hindi are not mutually intelligible but a very educated speech may be full of Sanskrit words in the same way Urdu may be rich of Arabic and Persian words. Both Hindi and Urdu have layers of Sanskrit, Persian and Arabic words, now also many English words.
> 
> Is *Hindustani* (the term itself and its idea) popular in both India and Pakistan? I also wonder if it is possible to write longer texts (perhaps dialogues) in a style, which is considered both Hindi and Urdu (ignoring the script differences)? I have a phrasebook, which shows amazing similarities but in some areas there are big differences (where a more high level language is to be used).


 
Hi Anatoli. Thanks for reply. In regards to reading Sanskrit and Hindi, as opposed to spoken, would the average educated person who is proficient in Hindi or Sanskrit be able to read the majority of either or both languages. Another question - How many letters are in the Hindi and Sanskrit alphabet respectively? Have seen different amounts - some sites say 49, some 50 for Sanskrit - is a little confusing!


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## Lugubert

For a simple grammar comparison:
There was a king in the village.
Skt: Asid gramye raja. Verb first, village in locative case (eight noun cases in all).
Hindi: Raja gram mem tha. Verb last, postposition following village (in oblique case, here identical to nominative, the other case).

For more complex sentences, Hindi can for example have long chains of auxiliary verbs at sentence ends to epress fine nuances, in a way that is totally absent from Sanskrit.



South Africa said:


> How many letters are in the Hindi and Sanskrit alphabet respectively? Have seen different amounts - some sites say 49, some 50 for Sanskrit - is a little confusing!


It gets even more confusing if you count the additional letters needed for Hindi to transcribe English vowels and Urdu consonants.


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## drkpp

Lugubert said:


> For a simple grammar comparison:
> There was a king in the village.
> Skt: Asid gramye raja. Verb first, village in locative case (eight noun cases in all).
> Hindi: Raja gram mem tha. Verb last, postposition following village (in oblique case, here identical to nominative, the other case).
> 
> For more complex sentences, Hindi can for example have long chains of auxiliary verbs at sentence ends to epress fine nuances, in a way that is totally absent from Sanskrit.
> 
> 
> It gets even more confusing if you count the additional letters needed for Hindi to transcribe English vowels and Urdu consonants.


In Sanskrit, it should be : aasiid graame raajaa - आसीद् ग्रामे राजा


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