Talk:Sanskrit

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Sanskrit was one of the Language and literature good articles, but it has been removed from the list. There are suggestions below for improving the article to meet the good article criteria. Once these issues have been addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake.

Article milestones
Date	Process	Result
January 10, 2005	Featured article candidate	Not promoted
September 14, 2006	Peer review	Reviewed
April 17, 2007	Good article nominee	Listed
June 8, 2007	Good article reassessment	Delisted
October 20, 2014	Good article nominee	Not listed
February 1, 2016	Good article nominee	Not listed
Current status: Delisted good article

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Section sizes

Section size for Sanskrit (57 sections)
Section name	Byte count	Section total
(Top)	40,124	40,124
Etymology and nomenclature	3,681	3,681
History	14	45,183
Origin and development	8,530	8,530
Vedic Sanskrit	8,043	8,043
Classical Sanskrit	13,716	13,716
Sanskrit and Prakrit languages	11,012	11,012
Dravidian influence on Sanskrit	3,868	3,868
Influence	17,340	30,722
Decline	9,155	9,155
Modern Indo-Aryan languages	4,227	4,227
Geographic distribution	6,616	8,618
Official status	2,002	2,002
Phonology	1,430	24,509
Vowels	6,431	6,431
Consonants	7,298	7,298
Phonological alternations, sandhi rules	4,854	4,854
Pronunciation	4,496	4,496
Morphology	7,616	20,548
Tense and voice	2,309	2,309
Number, person	1,051	1,051
Gender, mood	1,620	1,620
Prosody, metre	7,952	7,952
Writing system	7,148	19,965
Scripts	111	10,436
Brahmi script	3,729	3,729
Nagari script	3,783	3,783
Other writing systems	2,813	2,813
Transliteration schemes, Romanisation	1,811	1,811
Epigraphy	570	570
Literature	2,019	10,737
Works	8,718	8,718
Lexicon	835	2,965
Dravidian lexical influence	1,039	1,039
Nominal-form preference	1,091	1,091
Influence on other languages	1,391	18,708
Indian subcontinent	7,390	7,390
Beyond the Indian subcontinent	785	9,927
East Asia	3,720	3,720
Southeast Asia	2,054	4,052
Indonesia	1,998	1,998
Rest of the world	1,370	1,370
Modern era	18	33,233
Liturgy, ceremonies and meditation	3,613	3,613
Literature and arts	5,487	5,487
Media	1,964	1,964
Schools and contemporary status	4,971	7,900
In the West	2,929	2,929
European studies and discourse	3,097	3,097
Symbolic usage	5,659	5,659
In popular culture	5,495	5,495
See also	286	286
Notes	31	31
References	35	19,024
Bibliography	18,989	18,989
Further reading	14,379	14,379
External links	2,416	2,416
Total	295,129	295,129

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Semi-protected edit request on 21 September 2024

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Remove note j and its associated reference 121. Note j is irrelevant to its sentence's meaning, and ref 121 has no other usages on the page.

The note's sentence ("...suggests that by the start of the common era, hardly anybody other than learned monks had the capacity to understand the old Prakrit languages...") refers to the "start of the common era", which was a couple millennia ago, but ethnologue.com, the website of ref 121, only documents current language status, which means the reference is irrelevant. Pali's current status says nothing about its status 2000 years ago.

(Side note: ref 121's link is broken, and the correct link for Pali (https://www.ethnologue.com/language/pli/) now lists it as "endangered" instead of "extinct", which means note j is not just irrelevant, but unsupported by its reference.) SashaBerkman (talk) 12:06, 21 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@SashaBerkman I removed the note. Asteramellus (talk) 12:54, 21 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Done Cowboygilbert - (talk) ♥ 02:55, 22 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Introduction

The introduction to the article on Sanskrit is nearly illegible. An introduction should be a concise synthesis -- clear, easy to understand, and memorable -- that prepares the reader for what follows and sparks curiosity to learn more.

Instead, it presents a visually cluttered and dense paragraph, difficult to read and even harder to grasp and retain.

This issue is widespread across Wikipedia. If not addressed, the encyclopedia risks being gradually supplanted by alternatives that offer a better reading experience. 2A01:CB1C:854A:D400:99CA:8F1E:4111:1742 (talk) 00:31, 13 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

If you have suggestions, you can request suggested changes here. Asteramellus (talk) 18:40, 13 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Semi-protected edit request on 19 October 2024

This edit request has been answered. Set the |answered= or |ans= parameter to no to reactivate your request.

Tamil is the oldest language in the world not sanskrit 94.129.166.246 (talk) 22:54, 19 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

This article doesn't say Sanskrit is the "oldest language in the world". --AntiDionysius (talk) 22:56, 19 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

This article's length

user:W.andrea has brought attention to the length of the article in this notice. I tend to agree with them; it probably is too long at 14,841 words, and inching toward WP:TOOBIG.

Among featured articles, there aren't too many languages represented (see here), but among the few there are:

Mayan languages has on 5,724 words.
Levantine Arabic has 6,806 words, and
Nahuatl has 6,476 words

In the category Good Articles: Language and literature:
English language has 14,401 words. (So, it too is creeping up to overlong status), but
Biblical Hebrew has 8,415 words and the others have fewer.

I will now look at the history of this article and report back. Thank you user:W.andrea Fowler&fowler «Talk» 14:48, 14 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

And here's the history. (I shall be soft pinging various editors by citing their diffs, but no comment on their edit is implied:

On March 28, 2022, at the time of this edit by user:Dāsānudāsa, the article had 14,876 words.
Three days before Armistice Day 2019, at the time of this edit by user:Austronesier, the article had 12,460 words
On Halloween 2018, at the time of this edit by user:Ms Sarah Welch, the article had 12,474 words
On the day after St Patrick's Day, 2018, the article had 4,140 words
On April Fool's Day 2017, at the time of this edit by yours truly, the article had 3,950 words, and finally,
On Boxing Day 2016, at the time of this edit by user:Joshua Jonathan, this article had 3,907 words.

So there seems to have been a jump in 2018. Can someone help with identifying and reducing the additions? Thanks. Fowler&fowler «Talk» 15:15, 14 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Just to mention, you can see a size graph (in bytes) here on Xtools: Page statistics § Year counts. It confirms there was a jump in 2018. — W.andrea (talk) 17:58, 14 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Much of it is related to the overblown sections §Phonology and §Morphology. We have a dedicated article Sanskrit grammar that also includes a phonology section. The two sections in this article should be trimmed to summary size, with the rest merged into the subarticle, ideally with another subarticle about Sanskrit phonology which oddly doesn't exist–with Sanskrit being the first language in the world to be described in a structuralist phonological framework millenia before Trubetzkoy. Apart from the current length issue, this is also a classical case ("aptly" so for a classical language) of unsychronized content forking.

Moving/merging the content will a formidable task. For my part, I have to pass, at least for the near future. –Austronesier (talk) 20:28, 17 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Agree about those two sections, but note that § Writing systems is half again as large as either of them, and has a long § Epigraphy subsection (6.5kb, 1,016 words). Would be nice to summarize it, but there is currently no Sanskrit epigraphy article, but we do have Early Indian epigraphy, with some additional information at Western Satraps, some sources at Prashasti, and bits and pieces of various biographies, such as of John Faithfull Fleet, B. Lewis Rice, K. V. Ramesh, Vasudev Vishnu Mirashi et al., and sources like The Indian Antiquary, Epigraphia Indica and Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum.^[redirect] That ought to be more than enough to spin off a new article and summarize it here. Mathglot (talk) 20:52, 18 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Would you like to bell the cat @Mathglot: or you @W.andrea:? Fowler&fowler «Talk» 21:31, 18 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

What about @Joshua Jonathan, Ms Sarah Welch, and Dāsānudāsa:? Fowler&fowler «Talk» 21:35, 18 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I must admit, I'm unsure as to what the problem is here. What's the issue with the article being as long as it is? Is it just a case of being too much information to digest? Or putting strain on the servers? Too long to load? My instinct is that the more detailed it is, the better! Dāsānudāsa (talk) 22:14, 18 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, @Mathglot:, for the insightful analysis. Fowler&fowler «Talk» 21:38, 18 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks @Austronesier: for the in-depth suggestions. Fowler&fowler «Talk» 21:36, 18 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

(edit conflict) Actually, I've started on it: see Draft:Sanskrit epigraphy. First thing I noticed, is a rather haphazard organization of the existing content, as a mix of timeline-based, and region-based content (and the former is not in chrono order). I will continue for a little bit more, then pause to let anyone jump in; will give you a sign shortly... Mathglot (talk) 21:39, 18 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Great, Mathglot! More power to you. Fowler&fowler «Talk» 21:55, 18 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]