--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Duveyoung <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Card, > > I am always so impressed with your scholarship. Not knowing hardly > anything at all, I would be easy to impress, but I do think you're > purdy good at Sanskrit. > > That said, how's 'bout you also include a "purport" section after you > translate. I'd like to see how you sum up, "in American" the meaning > of the passages. > > Edg >
Thanks, but I'm actually not very good at translating Sanskrit, mainly because my vocabulary is so deplorably scarce. It's kinda ironic that even my vocabulary in my native language (Finnish) is IMO rather limited. I dare to say I'm quite good at analyzing linguistic structures, though. That's a great asset in case of languages like Sanskrit, with lots of inflections, and stuff. OTOH, one thing that makes Classical Sanskrit rather demanding is the use of sometimes huge compound words. Unless you know what type of compound the writer has had in mind, it's often next to impossible to decide what s/he's "up to", especially if one is not that familiar with the subject matter. The syntactic hierarchy "inside" a compound can in many cases be anybody's guess, so to speak. That's how I feel, at least.
