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To: Lonesome in Massachussets
One feature is particulary intriguing, the "number" of a noun can be singular, dual or plural

Another interesting thing about Sanskrit is the ability to form non-linear sentences. Because the each word has a case imbedded in it, the words of a sentence can theoretically be placed in any order and the sentence still makes sense. The Sanskrit alpahabet is also fascinating as the letters are grouped by how the mouth is formed when pronouncing them. pa pha ba bha ma is the 'labial' group, for example.

42 posted on 11/26/2003 11:21:49 PM PST by servantoftheservant
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To: servantoftheservant
Another interesting thing about Sanskrit is the ability to form non-linear sentences.

I'm not a linguist, but I believe that it shares this characteristic with all older IE languages. In general, they evolved stylistic conventions that became set as rules. For instance in most Western European EI languages the convention was verb-second in declarative sentences, with the element one wished to stress first. This lead to subject-verb order as the norm in the descendents of these languages. (In interogative sentences it was verb first. Did you get that?) As English lost its inflections, it came to depend on word order to convey meaning. It shares this trait with Chinese. In spoken English we also depend on stress and tone to convey meaning.

50 posted on 11/27/2003 4:46:33 AM PST by Lonesome in Massachussets (Uday and Qusay and Idi-ay are ead-day)
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