Sanskrit: a perfect language?

Most of us know about the classification of languages on the basis of the structure of simple sentences, viz. SOV, SVO, VSO, etc. Here S is the subject, V is the verb and O is the object; the three exhaustive elements of a simple sentence. Hindi and most of the contemporary Indian languages fall in the SOV category. English and most of the European languages on the contrary are of the SVO type. That’s the basics.

Now, here’s the twist (rather my observation). French fits in both the SVO and SOV classifications. This is because when the object is a noun (proper or common or wateva shit!) it follows the SVO structure, like English but when it is a pronoun it follows the SOV structure, like Hindi. I’ll give you an example.

SVO: Je parle à Amit. MEANING: I speak to Amit.
SOV: Je te parle. MEANING: I speak to you.

The first sentence is easy to comprehend (‘à’ means ‘to’). In the second one, the second word ‘te’ denotes the object which is second person singular. Thus, we can see that it is like Hindi (Main tumse bolta hu).

And now, here’s another twist. A big one this time. There is at least one, if not more, language that defies the whole bloody classification. It is Sanskrit. Simple sentences in Sanskrit do not need to follow any specified structure. The reason is simple and as I like to put it, it is: Sanskrit doesn’t have any stray dogs. That in Sanskrit, we do not have the little words like ‘to’, ‘for’, ‘in’, ‘or’, ‘and’, blah blah blah detached and roaming around freely in the sentence. They are attached either to the subject or the object in form of ‘vibhakti’. Thus, in principle, every simple sentence in Sanskrit can be condensed into three distinct words: the subject, the verb and the object. And now, the stray dogs being caged, we can write these three words in any order we want (all 3! =6 ways) and the sentence will bear the same meaning. A unique meaning.

Let me make it clear that this is just a layman’s observation and need not be absolutely correct. But even then, it sounds great, doesn’t it? It might make a sound argument for those who think that Sanskrit is the mother of all languages, but if not anything else, it does give it a unique position.