More of one's working knowledge is loaded into the specifics of vocabulary in classical Chinese, whereas more of one's working knowledge is loaded into grammar in classical Sanskrit. At least it seems so at first. Wrestling with the complexities of compounds in Sanskrit and syntax in Chinese blurs this distinction though. The animating morphologies transcend the vocabulary/grammar distinction in highly modular languages.
At bottom both Chinese and Sanskrit, like many other classical languages (Latin, Greek, Arabic), are quite modular. While Chinese's phanopoetic menagerie may not at first glance appear as RISC-y as Sanskrit's lexis (comparing radicals to roots may not be fair anyway), basically it's rare in both languages to stumble across a word that is just a black box, whose etymology you can't pull apart so as to guess what it means. Rarer, at least, than modern languages, which seem more atomized and dictionary dependent, as opposed to the classical languages, which by their systematic modularity were able to function as universalist languages of empire.
I know both Classical Chinese and Sanskrit and have no idea what you are talking about.
"It's rare in both languages to stumble across a word that is just a black box, whose etymology you can't pull apart so as to guess what it means."
Err, yeah I guess you can guess from the morpheme of a Chinese character that a particular character is a type of tree or has something to do with trees, but that's about it. Similarly with Sanskrit, because of sandhi rules often times you can't even figure out what the word is in advance, and I'm not sure how you are suppose to "guess" the meaning absent looking it up in Monier Williams (unless you are guessing backwards from other Indo-European languages, in which case your potential guessable vocabulary will be quite small).
Jd, how do the sandhi rules keep you from finding out what the word is? They make it easier to find out. The rules are just that -- rules -- that bring order out of the chaos.
As to how you guess, yes, you infer from the etymology.
The fact that it's guessing doesn't mean it's easy, or that guessing gives you as much information as actually looking it up, parsing it, etc.
Glad my post survived the glance of a pro! (PS. Saw your evr.gr: please send me an email, I am working on ~LETS stuff tangentially and would like to share info.)
At bottom both Chinese and Sanskrit, like many other classical languages (Latin, Greek, Arabic), are quite modular. While Chinese's phanopoetic menagerie may not at first glance appear as RISC-y as Sanskrit's lexis (comparing radicals to roots may not be fair anyway), basically it's rare in both languages to stumble across a word that is just a black box, whose etymology you can't pull apart so as to guess what it means. Rarer, at least, than modern languages, which seem more atomized and dictionary dependent, as opposed to the classical languages, which by their systematic modularity were able to function as universalist languages of empire.