Law of One & Language

[jivatman]

I am interested in one particular quote in the Law of One:

Questioner: How did the users of these sounds, Sanskrit and Hebrew, determine what these sounds were?

Ra: I am Ra. In the case of the Hebrew that entity known as Yahweh aided this knowledge through impression upon the material of genetic coding which became language, as you call it.

In the case of Sanskrit the sound vibrations are pure due to the lack of previous, what you call, alphabet or letter-naming. Thus the sound vibration complexes seemed to fall into place as from the Logos. This was a more, shall we say, natural or unaided situation or process.

I'm going to begin a treatment of what the underlined portion means:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanskrit#Writing_system
From Wikipedia:

The pre-Classical form of Sanskrit is known as Vedic Sanskrit, with the language of the Rigveda being the oldest and most archaic stage preserved, its oldest core dating back to as early as 1500 BCE.[6] This qualifies Rigvedic Sanskrit as one of the oldest attestations of any Indo-Iranian language, and one of the earliest attested members of the Indo-European language family, the family which includes English and most European languages.[7]

Ok, so Possibly the original Indo-European language. The vedas and other texts were preserved orally only for over a thousand years...

Sanskrit was spoken in an oral society, and the oral tradition was maintained through the development of early classical Sanskrit literature.[30] Writing was not introduced to India until after Sanskrit had evolved into the Prakrits; when it was written, the choice of writing system was influenced by the regional scripts of the scribes. Therefore, Sanskrit has no native script of its own.[2] As such, virtually all of the major writing systems of South Asia have been used for the production of Sanskrit manuscripts.

The earliest known inscriptions in Sanskrit date to the 1st century BCE.[32] They are in the Brahmi script, which was originally used for Prakrit, not Sanskrit.[33] It has been described as a "paradox" that the first evidence of written Sanskrit occurs centuries later than that of the Prakrit languages which are its linguistic descendants.[32][34] When Sanskrit was written down, it was first used for texts of an administrative, literary or scientific nature. The sacred texts were preserved orally, and were set down in writing, "reluctantly" (according to one commentator), and at a comparatively late date.[33]

There was an extreme reluctance to using a writing system at all, and various scripts were taken from other languages, all this in order to preserve the purity of the sound. A language older than 1500 BC, possibly the oldest systematized spoken language, had no writing system all until 100 BC, when scripts were taken from other languages.

One more thing I'd like to add is that Panini, who lived in 600 BC, wrote probably the best book on grammar and language rules ever written, such that language theory experts today use Sanskrit from panini terms heavily, and that Sanskrit is considered, grammatically, the most perfect language and is being investigated for use in creating computer languages.

Now I'd like to treat another language, Chinese, because in many ways it's the opposite of Sanskrit.

Written Chinese (Chinese: 中文; pinyin: zhōngwén) comprises Chinese characters (漢字 / 汉字 hànzì) used to represent the Chinese language, and the rules about how they are arranged and punctuated. Chinese characters do not constitute an alphabet or a compact syllabary. Rather, the writing system is roughly logosyllabic; that is, a character generally represents one syllable of spoken Chinese and may be a word on its own or a part of a polysyllabic word. The characters themselves are often composed of parts that may represent physical objects, abstract notions,[1] or pronunciation.[2]

Various current Chinese characters have been traced back to the late 商 Shāng Dynasty about 1200–1050 BC,[3][4][5] but the process of creating characters is thought to have begun some centuries earlier.[6] After a period of variation and evolution, Chinese characters were standardized under the 秦 Qín dynasty (221–206 BC).[7] Over the millennia, these characters have evolved into well-developed styles of Chinese calligraphy.[8]

In Chinese it's the script itself that is ancient and revered, It's logo-syllabic, that is the script primarily represents meanings and not sounds...

The Chinese had no uniform phonetic transcription system until the mid-20th century, although enunciation patterns were recorded in early rime books and dictionaries. Early Indian translators, working in Sanskrit and Pali, were the first to attempt to describe the sounds and enunciation patterns of Chinese in a foreign language. After the 15th century, the efforts of Jesuits and Western court missionaries resulted in some rudimentary Latin transcription systems, based on the Nanjing Mandarin dialect.

Hah! see, for Chinese there was no phonetic, or spoken transcription until later... and guess who attempted it? The Indians of course!

All right, all right. So what is the significance of all this?

Well, we now understand what is meant by Spoken Sanskrit being purer or "seemed to fall into place as from the Logos." So, it would seem, Language is the superior language for Mantra usage or verbal contexts.

But my deduction here... is that for Chinese, it is the script itself that is purer or "seemed to fall in place from the logos". So it may be that if one wants to use visualize letters in meditation or in a yantra, Chinese may be better because it's script is purer.