Annotations, Ch 51
On Sanskrit
I have a friend studying Sanskrit right now, and I based Ancient Vulcan off of a discussion I had with her. Sanskrit has eight cases (Finnish has fifteen, Russian has six, scholars debate about English having anywhere between two and maybe four), which allows for incredible precision of expression. Interestingly, our conversation turned to the implications of such precision in flirting. Flirting, at least in English, often depends on ambiguity of meaning and lots of interpretation. It’s not so much what you say, but how you say it.
We thought that in Sanskrit, it’d be impossible to flirt, since what you say is exactly what you mean. There’s probably no room for misinterpretation. But, she noted that there’s lots of incredibly erotic literature and poetry written in Sanskrit.
I know there’re lots of theories out there about Vulcan language and all that-some people writing Star Trek fanfiction recently seem to think that humans can speak Vulcan. Well. They can’t. Humans are physically incapable of producing the necessary sounds. Anyway, this is my take on Ancient Vulcan. Given that they have words like t’hy’la, I thought it’d be an intriguing concept to give the language similarities to Sanskrit.