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The Korean alphabet, hangul, is “the most scientific writing system.” One often hears that in South Korea, a society that has taken to heart Asia scholar Edwin O. Reischauer’s description of hangul as “perhaps the most scientific system of writing in general use in any country.” But whatever their scientific credentials, all the other writing systems in use (and indeed out of use) have fascinating qualities of their own, a range of which are explained in the UsefulCharts video above on the writing systems of the world — not just the alphabets of the world, mind you, but also the...

The Buddha statue depicts Siddhartha Gautama, who lived in South Asia around 2,550 years ago. Born a prince, he would later renounce his worldly wealth and seek out enlightenment, eventually becoming the Buddha, a Sanskrit-derived word that means "the enlightened one," according to Buddhist tradition...The newfound statue dates to between A.D. 90 and 140, said Steven Sidebotham, a history professor at the University of Delaware who is co-director of the Berenike Project, told Live Science in an email.The 28-inch-tall (71 centimeters) statue shows the Buddha standing and holding parts of his robes in his left hand, representatives from the Egyptian...

NEW DELHI: Invites sent by Indian President Droupadi Murmu calling herself "President of Bharat" for a dinner on the sidelines of the G20 summit have stirred speculation that the government may be about to change the country's name. WHAT IS THE CONTROVERSY ABOUT INDIA'S NAME? By convention, invitations issued by Indian constitutional bodies have always mentioned the name India when the text is in English, and the name Bharat when the text is in Hindi. However, the invites - in English - for the G20 dinner called Murmu the President of Bharat. An official at the president's office said they...

NEW DELHI (AP) — Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has replaced the name India with a Sanskrit word in dinner invitations sent to guests attending this week’s Group of 20 summit, in a move that reflects his Hindu nationalist party’s efforts to eliminate what it sees as colonial-era names. Indian President Droupadi Murmu is referred to as “President of Bharat” instead of “President of India” in the invitation sent to G20 attendees. The nation of more than 1.4 billion people is officially known by two names, India and Bharat, but the former is most commonly used, both domestically and internationally....

While Lithuanian has changed, it changed more slowly than other Indo-European languages and so the contemporary language has features similar to those of such ancient ones as Sanskrit, Greek and Latin. Traditional Lithuanian houses are often adorned with a horse motif. The twin horse heads are known as ‘Ašvieniai’. In Lithuanian mythology, the Ašvieniai are divine twins portrayed as pulling the carriage of the sun god (Saule) through the sky. That their name sounds uncannily familiar to Indians is on account of the fact that the term and other details pertaining to their portrayal are akin to the Ashwin twins...

The 27-year-old accomplished the feat by decoding a rule taught by “the father of linguistics,” Pāṇini. The discovery makes it possible to “derive” any Sanskrit word – constructing millions of grammatically correct words including “mantra” and “guru” – using Pāṇini’s famous “language machine.” Pāṇini’s system — which includes 4,000 rules detailed in his greatest work, the Aṣṭādhyāyī — was written around 500 BC. Linguists say it works like a machine. Feed in the base and suffix of a word and it should turn them into grammatically correct words and sentences through a step-by-step process. Until now, however, there has been...

ELBERTON, Ga. -- Driving north from Atlanta on I-85 toward South Carolina, you exit east at Georgia Highway 51, then exit again at Highway 17, which takes you straight to the city of Elberton. Once in Elberton, population 5,000, you take Highway 77 north for almost nine miles. Eyes scanning the horizon, you finally see it perched on a high knoll, with an easy-to-miss turnoff onto a small road that leads practically up to its foot. It stands alone in all its mighty glory, and on any given day you’ll likely be the only visitor. Four rectangular slabs of granite...

The cubes were tiny - small enough to hold between the finger and thumb - and weighed 125g each. The symbols on them appeared to be some form of Sanskrit. Curious to know more, Read posted photographs of his discovery up on social media. "There were all sorts of stories flying around at first, the cubes really captured people's imaginations," he said. "What I learned is that they are Indian in origin and they show incantations for prayers which take effect when they are thrown in running water." Exactly how old the cubes are, however, continues to remain a mystery.

The State Department of Archaeology and Museums (DAM) is engaged in the chemical treatment of a treasure trove of 1,600 palm-leaf manuscripts, dated back to the 17th, 18th and 19th century, at the Andhra Sahitya Parishad Archaeology Museum and Research Institute here. DAM Assistant Director K. Timma Raju told The Hindu that the text in the manuscripts belongs to the fields of ayurveda, mathematics, astrology, Telugu and Sanskrit literature and classical music. "The text of the Hindu epics -- Ramayana and Mahabharata -- is also available in the manuscripts," said Mr. Timma Raju. AMD chemist K. Rambabu said the chemical...

For archaeologists and historians interested in the ancient politics, religion and language of the Indian subcontinent, two UCLA professors and their student researchers have creatively pinpointed sites that are likely to yield valuable transcriptions of the proclamations of Ashoka, the Buddhist king of northern India's Mauryan Dynasty who ruled from 304 B.C. to 232 B.C. In a study published this week in Current Science, archaeologist Monica Smith and geographer Thomas Gillespie identified 121 possible locations of what are known as Ashoka's "edicts." First they isolated shared features of 29 known locations of Ashokan edicts, which were found carved into natural...

Whatever their differences, all Indus researchers agree that there is no consensus on the meaning of the script. There are three main problems. First, no firm information is available about its underlying language. Was this an ancestor of Sanskrit or Dravidian, or of some other Indian language family, such as Munda, or was it a language that has disappeared? Linear B was deciphered because the tablets turned out to be in an archaic form of Greek; Mayan glyphs because Mayan languages are still spoken. Second, no names of Indus rulers or personages are known from myths or historical records: no...

Scientists who worked on the Archimedes Palimpsest are using modern imaging technologies to digitally restore a 700-year-old palm-leaf manuscript containing the essence of Hindu philosophy. The project led by P.R. Mukund and Roger Easton, professors at Rochester Institute of Technology, will digitally preserve the original Hindu writings known as the Sarvamoola granthas attributed to scholar Shri Madvacharya (1238-1317). The collection of 36 works contains commentaries written in Sanskrit on sacred Hindu scriptures and conveys the scholar's Dvaita philosophy of the meaning of life and the role of God... "It is literally crumbling to dust," says Mukund, the Gleason Professor of...

Ever since British jurist Sir William Jones noted in 1786 that there are marked similarities between diverse languages such as Greek, Sanskrit, and Celtic, linguists have assumed that most of the languages of Europe and the Indian subcontinent derive from a single ancient tongue. But researchers have fiercely debated just when and where this mother tongue was first spoken. Now a bold new study asserts that the common root of the 144 so-called Indo-European languages, which also include English and all the Germanic, Slavic, and Romance languages, is very ancient indeed. In this week's issue of Nature, evolutionary biologist Russell...

You may know more Sanskrit than you realize. In fact, the word know comes from the same Indo-European root for the Sanskrit jnana. A Greek form of the root inflected by Latin gives us the English term gnostic, referring to knowledge of spiritual mysteries. You, faithful reader, know what agnostic means. Have you ever watched or created a video? Again, an IE root is the source of the term. Some scholars think the Sanskrit vidya, another word for knowledge, arose from a lexeme for seeing. With the twists and turns of consonants and vowels as language developed, we have an...

In the middle of a terrifying desert north of Tibet, Chinese archaeologists have excavated an extraordinary cemetery. Its inhabitants died almost 4,000 years ago, yet their bodies have been well preserved by the dry air. The cemetery lies in what is now China's northwest province of Xinjiang, yet the people have European features, with brown hair and long noses. Their remains, though lying in one of the world's largest deserts, are buried in upside-down boats. And where tombstones might stand, declaring pious hope for some god's mercy in the afterlife, their cemetery sports instead a vigorous forest of phallic symbols,...

If you believe Mr. Edward Said and his numerous supporters, Sir William Jones was actually a racist pig who invented comparative linguistics in order to establish his dominance over "the Other." It's strange that Muslims didn't think of this when they ruled other peoples for centuries. After all, Persian, which they knew, is an Indo-European language, as is Sanskrit, as well as Greek, Armenian and the tongues of many of their subjects. Muslim scholars had access to a number of Semitic languages, from Arabic and Hebrew to Aramaic, in addition to languages of other Afro-Asiatic branches in North and East...

Vedic Recitations in a Christian Church on Thanksgiving http://newsblaze.com/story/20071101085222tsop.nb/newsblaze/TOPSTORY/Top-Stories.html http://tinyurl.com/2kmxfe Nov 1, 2007 Judyth Piazza, News Blaze Recitations from ancient Sanskrit scriptures will reverberate in a Christian church in Nevada on the occasion of coming Thanksgiving eve service. Rajan Zed, the prominent Hindu chaplain, will read from Rig-Veda (oldest existing scripture of the world dated from around 1,500 BCE), Upanishads (Hindu scriptures containing mystical teachings), and Bhagavad-Gita (famous philosophical and spiritual poem) in Trinity Episcopal Church in Reno (Nevada) during Twenty-second Annual Thanksgiving Service of Northwestern Nevada to be held on November 21 evening. Despite conflicts around the world, various...

Lithuanian and Latvian languages are not Slavic and not Balto-Slavic. I made a deep esearch and I can say that both Baltic languages are definitely not Slavic, not even close, and neither Balto-Slavic. They should be separated into a very early separation branch similar to Armenian. There are very few Slavic-sounding words in both Baltic languages and those words were borrowed in near modern times. All other words (99,999999%) in both Baltic languages don't even remind of any Slavic language. There are words that sound Arabic, Franco, Latin, Greek, even English and Italiamn and even Pacific, but very few Slavic...

The rise of India's economy has brought an eagerness to learn the ancient 'language of the gods' – and a great-great aunt to English. ___ Deep inside the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on a Wednesday evening recently, a class of about a dozen students were speaking an arcane ancient tongue. "It is time for exams, and I play every day," says one. "Perhaps, you should study, too," counters another at the conversation table. The others laugh. No, this isn't Latin 101 – that would be easy. This is Sanskrit, a classical language that is the Indian equivalent of ancient Greek...

Excerpt - TOKYO (AFP) - A part of a Buddhism sutra was found inside one of the two giant Buddhas of Bamiyan, providing a hint for unveiling the mystery surrounding the creation of the statues, a Japanese news agency has reported. The fragment of the scripture was believed to be the original Sanscrit document, written with the letters often used in the sixth and seventh century, according to a Kyodo news dispatch from Kabul. A German team of researchers from the International Council on Monuments and Sites found the sutra in July inside the rubble of the remains of the...