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Cambridge has finally closed the door on Sanskrit as a hallowed subject of undergraduate study, nearly one-and-a-half centuries after it first established a chair in the 3,000-year-old language. The Times of India sought -- and received -- confirmation of the university's decision within hours of Cambridge honouring Prime Minister Manmohan Singh with a doctor of law degree, in what some scholars believe to be the most cynical form of "tactless academic marketing"... Dr John Smith, reader in Sanskrit at Cambridge, told TOI that it is "not a trivial decision...this is a decision about letting the subject wither on the vine....

Iran Jews express Holocaust shock By Sadeq Saba BBC News The Iranian president is accused of ignorance and political prejudice The chairman of Iran's Jewish Council has strongly criticised the country's hardline president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for saying the Holocaust was a myth. In a letter to the president, Haroun Yashayaei said the leader's remarks had shocked the international community and caused fear in Iran's Jewish community. Mr Yashayaei described the Holocaust as one of the most obvious and sad events in the 20th Century. Six million Jews were killed in Nazi persecution during World War II. This is the first...

JERUSALEM: Some forty scholars from all over the world recently took part in a summer programme on second millennium Sanskrit literature at Hebrew University here. Eminent Indologist, Prof David Shulman, who was instrumental in organising the programme, pointed out that so far the Sanskrit works in the first millennium (those of Kalidasa et al) have been explored to a great extent by the modern-day Sanskrit scholars, but the later period literature hasn't got much attention. "The second millennium A.D. Also witnessed intense creativity in Sanskrit throughout South Asia. Every major region produced its own distinctive corpus of Sanskrit literary works...

New Delhi -- In the walled quarters of the old city, a Sanskrit language scholar walks purposefully along the packed, narrow and twisting alleyways, jostling past rows of jewelry shoppers, cycle rickshaws, bullock carts and beggars. When he comes upon an old temple with an ornately carved doorway, he stops, sweating profusely in the sweltering sun. "Do you have any ancient handwritten manuscripts here?" Dilipkumar Rana, the scholar, asks in a whisper. The stunned temple manager nods. "The government is doing a survey of old manuscripts," Rana says. "But I have very few left now," temple manager Jaipal Jain says....

A BBC journalist is urging helpful linguists to come forward to help solve a mystery - why the Hindi (India's official language, along with English) accent has so much in common with Welsh. Sonia Mathur, a native Hindi speaker, had her interest sparked when she moved from India to work for the BBC in Wales - and found that two accents from countries 5,000 miles apart seemed to have something in common. It has long been known that the two languages stem from Indo-European, the "mother of all languages" - but the peculiar similarities between the two accents when spoken...

The three wise men who came to worship the Christ child hailed from India and named him Isa, or "Lord" in Sanskrit - a name that became Jesus in the Bible. Later, Jesus travelled to India, where he practiced yoga meditation with the great sages some time during his "lost years" from age 13 to 30, a time of his life scarcely mentioned in the Bible. As Christians immerse themselves in the Advent season to prepare for Christmas, such assertions might sound like blasphemy or pure fantasy. But they come from a renowned Indian guru, the late Paramahansa Yogananda, in...

From the issue dated October 4, 2002 http://chronicle.com/free/v49/i06/06a01801.htm A Lost Buddhist Literary Tradition Is Found Scholars decipher a stunning findan unknown canon in an ancient dialect By PETER MONAGHAN Seattle In certain cliffhangers on late-night television, dashing and strangely underdressed archaeologists in faraway places unearth artifacts of uncertain provenance. The discoveries cast new light on an ancient civilization. In reality, archaeologists are less swashbuckling, but once in a great while they do turn up objects -- ancient manuscripts, say, inscribed in little-known languages -- that have that effect. Through some stunning finds over the last decade, researchers studying early Buddhist manuscripts here...