alt Hacker News> Sanskrit is not an ancestor of English
Sanskrit entered into Greek, Greek into Latin, Latin into English.
Edit: downvoter, express yourself clearly. I cannot see how the above sentence could be considered false, apart from gross interpretations of the chosen terms.
Again: you have a relation with "jñāna, gnō̃́sis, gnosco, knowledge"; then you have relations in other dimensions (jña, jñāti, gnṓmōn, gnṓmōn...): the awareness of those details enriches the awareness of the language. That is through the relation between Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, post-Latin - it is just there. What is contended is not clear.
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That still does not make Sanskrit an ancestor language of English, though both English and Sanskrit do share a common ancestry several thousand years ago.
English has borrowed words from many languages, as all but the most isolated languages have.
Both Vedic Sanskrit and Mycenaean Greek are the same age. Of course there may have been mutual influences as languages take cognates from each other.
Sanskrit is no older than Kurdish; English Greek etc have the same relation to it as to Kurdish — they are all alike of Indo European descent.
Like Greek and Latin, Sanskrit is an anciently written language associated with major states and ‘civilizations’ - and, crucially, is like Greek and Latin in that it is still remembered if only by some thin intellectual or priestly stratum of societies.
So by use of those three, Indo European unity could be especially well validated by pure textual scholarship (especially if the scholar was British or German and thus on another branch). It is surprising as the result is intuitively scientific — how could I arrive at it if all I do is read and write?! - and was indeed of massive importance to the framing of Darwin’s quite different scientific enterprise, which needed different evidence .