I'm not the OP, but can comment about Sanskrit a bit. (I had studied Sanskrit in school.) [Edit:] As a third language, apart from English and Hindi.
This is mostly all IMO, except where specified otherwise:
- it's an interesting language, because it is the ancestor of many Indian languages (except the languages of the southern Indian states - Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada - and their dialects - and except the languages of the North-Eastern states beyond Assam, maybe - not sure on this one). In fact, even those languages (southern Indian at least) have some Sanskrit-derived words; I think the term is loanwords.
- it's grammar rules are very regular (compared to many other languages, I've heard), which makes it less of a chore and easier to remember and learn;
- (probably many) parts of the language are sort of mathematical / logical in the sense that some of the rules build upon other rules, so you can use your knowledge of the latter to understand the former; e.g. a part of the language called sandhi, which gives the rules for how to combine smaller words/sounds into larger ones. Once you learn those rules (and there are only a handful), a) you can use them both to create new words according to those sandhi rules, by combining existing words (and those new words would be legal Sanskrit, BTW - poets and prose writers did it all the time), and b) can use them to figure out what compound words mean (that you have newly come across), i.e. the reverse process of a). So in that and maybe some other aspects its a bit like a programming language [1], where you build up higher abstractions from lower-level ones. [Edit:] It's my guess that people who like languages like Lisp, Haskell, Clojure, etc. - that are built upon mathematical principles and so on, might find Sanskrit interesting to learn.
- [1] I've also read a few times that due to the mentioned regular qualities of the grammar (and also, I think, due to the unambiguous nature of the sounds in it - each letter or small letter grouping can be (legally) pronounced in only one way), CS and Sanskrit-knowing people have done research on using Sanskrit in computer research in various ways (programming languages (research), AI? No idea about the success or not of those efforts, though.
"The name Pāṇini Backus form has also been suggested in view of the fact that the expansion Backus normal form may not be accurate, and that Pāṇini had independently developed a similar notation earlier."
So that may be one of the (few or common?) cases where something was named (or considered being named) after a person thousands of years after the person existed :)
Cool context! Thanks. I've often been tempted to learn Esperanto bc I've heard arguments made as to its general logical consistency. There's also a constructed language called Toki Pona [1] that is fascinating for similar reasons.
Indeed, these are all good qualities of a fine language. It's just that I am not sure if it is those qualities what attracts people and makes them want to learn it. There also must be something else.
Shame I saw this comment so late, but I do have a reason for this.
I'm an enthusiastic student of Buddhism. I long time ago, during university (late 80s) I attended a guest seminar called "What the Buddha Said" It was fascinating for a number of reasons, but the one that stuck with me over the years was about the translation.
As we know, language changes over time (my favorite example is from rap: "Not bad meaning bad but bad meaning good) So what had happened in the translation of a key Buddhist text was the understanding of one word: year. It was translated literally to mean a year, but actually, at that moment in time, the word actually meant a season. So 20 years passed, really meant 20 seasons, or 5 years had passed. And this led to a knock on in the meaning of words used.
So after that, I decided that one day, I will learn to read the texts in their original language.
