SANSKRIT, GREEK AND LATIN: A TALE OF THREE SISTERS

Dhruv Raj Sharma

CEO of Logophilia Education, the world’s only etymology education organisation, Dhruv Raj Sharma took a class from the Samvad stage at the ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival, on the joys and unexpected learnings to be gleaned from studying etymology.

In his work with Logophilia Education, Sharma advocates the teaching of vocabulary to school children as a means to enable them to learn more holistically, rather than learning by rote. He described vocabulary as “the most important subject you can study” and simultaneously, “the subject that they don’t teach you in school”. A strong vocabulary through learning the roots of words would enable people to spot connections between different words, Sharma highlighted, stating that “spotting connections is what creates deep memory”.

Speaking critically of how schools underestimate the importance of learning language, Sharma pointed out that “schools talk about aptitude without realizing that aptitude and attitude mean the same thing.” He espoused that “the most essential unit of knowledge is words” because “if you understand words you understand books, if you understand books you can understand what you study.”

Sharma demonstrated the power of such etymological inquisitiveness by taking the audience through a quick run of common words in Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin that all share the same root. Words such as mother (‘matr’ in Sanskrit, ‘matr’ in Greek, and ‘mater’ in Latin) or even boat (‘nav’ in Sanskrit, ‘nau’ in Greek, and ‘nav’ in Latin) share similar roots leading to similar-sounding words for similar ideas and objects across multiple languages in Europe and India. The origin of these connections was revealed to be the Proto-Indo-European language, which was defined as the mother for whom Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin were revealed to be daughters.

Advocating the elimination of “the blind spot”, which stops people from being able to truly understand and appreciate the full dimension of the language they speak, Sharma pointed out that 64% of all the words in the English language come from a Proto-Indo-European root. “Thus 64% of English is our language”, Sharma concluded.