Sanskrit

The chapter begins with a discussion of Sanskrit’s place in the Indo-European family tree, showing how both the roots of individual words and the patterns seen in grammatical endings have close correspondences to Greek, Latin, and English. It also considers some of the features that are especially characteristic of Sanskrit, such as the voiced aspirate stops (seen in words like dharma) and the complex workings of sandhi, whereby the ends of Sanskrit words change their shape to match the sounds that occur at the beginning of the following word. In the second half, it turns to several short excerpts from the Rig Veda, demonstrating not only how its language has more connections to English than one might think at first but also how it draws on some of the same poetic diction found in other Indo-European traditions.