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Sanskrit

Sanskrit (/ˈsænskrɪt/; attributively संस्कृत-, saṃskṛta-;[15][16] nominally संस्कृतम्, saṃskṛtam, IPA: [ˈsɐ̃skr̩tɐm][17][d]) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages.[19][20][21] It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had diffused there from the northwest in the late Bronze Age.[22][23] Sanskrit is the sacred language of Hinduism, the language of classical Hindu philosophy, and of historical texts of Buddhism and Jainism. It was a link language in ancient and medieval South Asia, and upon transmission of Hindu and Buddhist culture to Southeast Asia, East Asia and Central Asia in the early medieval era, it became a language of religion and high culture, and of the political elites in some of these regions.[24][25] As a result, Sanskrit had a lasting impact on the languages of South Asia, Southeast Asia and East Asia, especially in their formal and learned vocabularies.[26]

Sanskrit
संस्कृत-, संस्कृतम्
Saṃskṛta-, Saṃskṛtam
(top) A 19th-century illustrated Sanskrit manuscript from the Bhagavad Gita,[1] composed c. 400 BCE – 200 BCE.[2][3] (bottom) The 175th-anniversary stamp of the third-oldest Sanskrit college, Sanskrit College, Calcutta. The oldest is Benares Sanskrit College, founded in 1791.
Pronunciation[ˈsɐ̃skr̩tɐm]
RegionSouth Asia (ancient and medieval), parts of Southeast Asia (medieval)
Erac. 1500 – 600 BCE (Vedic Sanskrit);[4]
700 BCE – 1350 CE (Classical Sanskrit)[5]
RevivalThere are no known native speakers of Sanskrit.[6][7][8][9][10][11]
Early form
Originally orally transmitted. Not attested in writing until the 1st century BCE, when it was written in the Brahmi script, and later in various Brahmic scripts.[a][12][13]
Official status
Official language in
 India (state-additional official)[b]
Recognised minority
language in
Language codes
ISO 639-1sa
ISO 639-2san
ISO 639-3san
Glottologsans1269
This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA.

Sanskrit generally connotes several Old Indo-Aryan language varieties.[27][28] The most archaic of these is the Vedic Sanskrit found in the Rigveda, a collection of 1,028 hymns composed between 1500 BCE and 1200 BCE by Indo-Aryan tribes migrating east from what are today Afghanistan across northern Pakistan and into northwestern India.[29][30] Vedic Sanskrit interacted with the preexisting ancient languages of the subcontinent, absorbing names of newly encountered plants and animals; in addition, the ancient Dravidian languages influenced Sanskrit's phonology and syntax.[31] Sanskrit can also more narrowly refer to Classical Sanskrit, a refined and standardized grammatical form that emerged in the mid-1st millennium BCE and was codified in the most comprehensive of ancient grammars,[e] the Aṣṭādhyāyī ('Eight chapters') of Pāṇini.[32] The greatest dramatist in Sanskrit, Kālidāsa, wrote in classical Sanskrit, and the foundations of modern arithmetic were first described in classical Sanskrit.[f][33] The two major Sanskrit epics, the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa, however, were composed in a range of oral storytelling registers called Epic Sanskrit which was used in northern India between 400 BCE and 300 CE, and roughly contemporary with classical Sanskrit.[34] In the following centuries, Sanskrit became tradition-bound, stopped being learned as a first language, and ultimately stopped developing as a living language.[9]

The hymns of the Rigveda are notably similar to the most archaic poems of the Iranian and Greek language families, the Gathas of old Avestan and Iliad of Homer.[35] As the Rigveda was orally transmitted by methods of memorisation of exceptional complexity, rigour and fidelity,[36][37] as a single text without variant readings,[38] its preserved archaic syntax and morphology are of vital importance in the reconstruction of the common ancestor language Proto-Indo-European.[35] Sanskrit does not have an attested native script: from around the turn of the 1st-millennium CE, it has been written in various Brahmic scripts, and in the modern era most commonly in Devanagari.[a][12][13]

Sanskrit's status, function, and place in India's cultural heritage are recognized by its inclusion in the Constitution of India's Eighth Schedule languages.[39][40] However, despite attempts at revival,[8][41] there are no first language speakers of Sanskrit in India.[8][10][42] In each of India's recent decennial censuses, several thousand citizens have reported Sanskrit to be their mother tongue,[g] but the numbers are thought to signify a wish to be aligned with the prestige of the language.[6][7][8][43] Sanskrit has been taught in traditional gurukulas since ancient times; it is widely taught today at the secondary school level. The oldest Sanskrit college is the Benares Sanskrit College founded in 1791 during East India Company rule.[44] Sanskrit continues to be widely used as a ceremonial and ritual language in Hindu and Buddhist hymns and chants.

Etymology and nomenclature

 
 
Historic Sanskrit manuscripts: a religious text (top), and a medical text

In Sanskrit, the verbal adjective sáṃskṛta- is a compound word consisting of sáṃ ('together, good, well, perfected') and kṛta- ('made, formed, work').[45][46] It connotes a work that has been "well prepared, pure and perfect, polished, sacred".[47][48][49] According to Biderman, the perfection contextually being referred to in the etymological origins of the word is its tonal—rather than semantic—qualities. Sound and oral transmission were highly valued qualities in ancient India, and its sages refined the alphabet, the structure of words and its exacting grammar into a "collection of sounds, a kind of sublime musical mold", states Biderman, as an integral language they called Sanskrit.[46] From the late Vedic period onwards, state Annette Wilke and Oliver Moebus, resonating sound and its musical foundations attracted an "exceptionally large amount of linguistic, philosophical and religious literature" in India. Sound was visualized as "pervading all creation", another representation of the world itself; the "mysterious magnum" of Hindu thought. The search for perfection in thought and the goal of liberation were among the dimensions of sacred sound, and the common thread that wove all ideas and inspirations together became the quest for what the ancient Indians believed to be a perfect language, the "phonocentric episteme" of Sanskrit.[50][51]

Sanskrit as a language competed with numerous, less exact vernacular Indian languages called Prakritic languages (prākṛta-). The term prakrta literally means "original, natural, normal, artless", states Franklin Southworth.[52] The relationship between Prakrit and Sanskrit is found in Indian texts dated to the 1st millennium CE. Patañjali acknowledged that Prakrit is the first language, one instinctively adopted by every child with all its imperfections and later leads to the problems of interpretation and misunderstanding. The purifying structure of the Sanskrit language removes these imperfections. The early Sanskrit grammarian Daṇḍin states, for example, that much in the Prakrit languages is etymologically rooted in Sanskrit, but involves "loss of sounds" and corruptions that result from a "disregard of the grammar". Daṇḍin acknowledged that there are words and confusing structures in Prakrit that thrive independent of Sanskrit. This view is found in the writing of Bharata Muni, the author of the ancient Natya Shastra text. The early Jain scholar Namisādhu acknowledged the difference, but disagreed that the Prakrit language was a corruption of Sanskrit. Namisādhu stated that the Prakrit language was the pūrvam ('came before, origin') and that it came naturally to children, while Sanskrit was a refinement of Prakrit through "purification by grammar".[53]

History

Origin and development

 
 
Left: The Kurgan hypothesis on Indo-European migrations between 4000–1000 BCE; right: The geographical spread of the Indo-European languages at 500 CE, with Sanskrit in South Asia

Sanskrit belongs to the Indo-European family of languages. It is one of the three earliest ancient documented languages that arose from a common root language now referred to as Proto-Indo-European language:[19][20][21]

Other Indo-European languages distantly related to Sanskrit include archaic and Classical Latin (c. 600 BCE–100 CE, Italic languages), Gothic (archaic Germanic language, c. 350 CE), Old Norse (c. 200 CE and after), Old Avestan (c. late 2nd millennium BCE[55]) and Younger Avestan (c. 900 BCE).[20][21] The closest ancient relatives of Vedic Sanskrit in the Indo-European languages are the Nuristani languages found in the remote Hindu Kush region of northeastern Afghanistan and northwestern Himalayas,[21][56][57] as well as the extinct Avestan and Old Persian – both are Iranian languages.[58][59][60] Sanskrit belongs to the satem group of the Indo-European languages.

Colonial era scholars familiar with Latin and Greek were struck by the resemblance of the Sanskrit language, both in its vocabulary and grammar, to the classical languages of Europe. In The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World, Mallory and Adams illustrate the resemblance with the following examples of cognate forms[61] (with the addition of Old English for further comparison):

  English   Old English   Latin   Greek   Sanskrit Glossary
  mother   mōdor   māter   mētēr   mātár- mother
  father   fæder   pater   patēr   pitár- father
  brother   brōþor   frāter   phreter   bhrā́tar- brother
  sister   sweoster   soror   eor   svásar- sister
  son   sunu  -   hyiós   sūnú- son
  daughter   dohtor  -   thugátēr   duhitár- daughter
  cow   cū   bōs   bous   gáu- cow
  tame, timber   tam, timber   domus   dom-   dām- house, tame, build

The correspondences suggest some common root, and historical links between some of the distant major ancient languages of the world.[h]

The Indo-Aryan migrations theory explains the common features shared by Sanskrit and other Indo-European languages by proposing that the original speakers of what became Sanskrit arrived in South Asia from a region of common origin, somewhere north-west of the Indus region, during the early 2nd millennium BCE. Evidence for such a theory includes the close relationship between the Indo-Iranian tongues and the Baltic and Slavic languages, vocabulary exchange with the non-Indo-European Uralic languages, and the nature of the attested Indo-European words for flora and fauna.[63]

The pre-history of Indo-Aryan languages which preceded Vedic Sanskrit is unclear and various hypotheses place it over a fairly wide limit. According to Thomas Burrow, based on the relationship between various Indo-European languages, the origin of all these languages may possibly be in what is now Central or Eastern Europe, while the Indo-Iranian group possibly arose in Central Russia.[64] The Iranian and Indo-Aryan branches separated quite early. It is the Indo-Aryan branch that moved into eastern Iran and then south into South Asia in the first half of the 2nd millennium BCE. Once in ancient India, the Indo-Aryan language underwent rapid linguistic change and morphed into the Vedic Sanskrit language.[65]

Vedic Sanskrit

 
Rigveda (padapatha) manuscript in Devanagari, early 19th century. The red horizontal and vertical lines mark low and high pitch changes for chanting.

The pre-Classical form of Sanskrit is known as Vedic Sanskrit. The earliest attested Sanskrit text is the Rigveda, a Hindu scripture from the mid- to late-second millennium BCE. No written records from such an early period survive, if any ever existed, but scholars are generally confident that the oral transmission of the texts is reliable: they are ceremonial literature, where the exact phonetic expression and its preservation were a part of the historic tradition.[66][67][68]

However some scholars have suggested that the original Ṛg-veda differed in some fundamental ways in phonology compared to the sole surviving version available to us. In particular that retroflex consonants did not exist as a natural part of the earliest Vedic language,[69] and that these developed in the centuries after the composition had been completed, and as a gradual unconscious process during the oral transmission by generations of reciters.

The primary source for this argument is internal evidence of the text which betrays an instability of the phenomenon of retroflexion, with the same phrases having sandhi-induced retroflexion in some parts but not other.[70] This is taken along with evidence of controversy, for example, in passages of the Aitareya-Āraṇyaka (700 BCE), which features a discussion on whether retroflexion is valid in particular cases.[71]

The Ṛg-veda is a collection of books, created by multiple authors from distant parts[citation needed] of ancient India[citation needed]. These authors represented different generations, and the mandalas 2 to 7 are the oldest while the mandalas 1 and 10 are relatively the youngest.[72][73] Yet, the Vedic Sanskrit in these books of the Ṛg-veda "hardly presents any dialectical diversity", states Louis Renou – an Indologist known for his scholarship of the Sanskrit literature and the Ṛg-veda in particular. According to Renou, this implies that the Vedic Sanskrit language had a "set linguistic pattern" by the second half of the 2nd millennium BCE.[74] Beyond the Ṛg-veda, the ancient literature in Vedic Sanskrit that has survived into the modern age include the Samaveda, Yajurveda, Atharvaveda, along with the embedded and layered Vedic texts such as the Brahmanas, Aranyakas, and the early Upanishads.[66] These Vedic documents reflect the dialects of Sanskrit found in the various parts of the northwestern, northern, and eastern Indian subcontinent.[75][76]: 9 

Vedic Sanskrit was both a spoken and literary language of ancient India[citation needed]. According to Michael Witzel, Vedic Sanskrit was a spoken language of the semi-nomadic Aryans who temporarily settled in one place, maintained cattle herds, practiced limited agriculture, and after some time moved by wagon trains they called grama.[76]: 16–17 [77] The Vedic Sanskrit language or a closely related Indo-European variant was recognized beyond ancient India as evidenced by the "Mitanni Treaty" between the ancient Hittite and Mitanni people, carved into a rock, in a region that now includes parts of Syria and Turkey.[78][i] Parts of this treaty, such as the names of the Mitanni princes and technical terms related to horse training, for reasons not understood, are in early forms of Vedic Sanskrit. The treaty also invokes the gods Varuna, Mitra, Indra, and Nasatya found in the earliest layers of the Vedic literature.[78][80]

O Bṛhaspati, when in giving names
they first set forth the beginning of Language,
Their most excellent and spotless secret
was laid bare through love,
When the wise ones formed Language with their mind,
purifying it like grain with a winnowing fan,
Then friends knew friendships –
an auspicious mark placed on their language.

Rigveda 10.71.1–4
Translated by Roger Woodard[81]

The Vedic Sanskrit found in the Ṛg-veda is distinctly more archaic than other Vedic texts, and in many respects, the Rigvedic language is notably more similar to those found in the archaic texts of Old Avestan Zoroastrian Gathas and Homer's Iliad and Odyssey.[82] According to Stephanie W. Jamison and Joel P. Brereton – Indologists known for their translation of the Ṛg-veda – the Vedic Sanskrit literature "clearly inherited" from Indo-Iranian and Indo-European times the social structures such as the role of the poet and the priests, the patronage economy, the phrasal equations, and some of the poetic metres.[83][j] While there are similarities, state Jamison and Brereton, there are also differences between Vedic Sanskrit, the Old Avestan, and the Mycenaean Greek literature. For example, unlike the Sanskrit similes in the Ṛg-veda, the Old Avestan Gathas lack simile entirely, and it is rare in the later version of the language. The Homerian Greek, like Ṛg-vedic Sanskrit, deploys simile extensively, but they are structurally very different.[85]

Classical Sanskrit

 
A 17th-century birch bark manuscript of Pāṇini's grammar treatise from Kashmir

The early Vedic form of the Sanskrit language was far less homogenous compared to the Classical Sanskrit as defined by grammarians by about the mid-1st millennium BCE. According to Richard Gombrich—an Indologist and a scholar of Sanskrit, Pāli and Buddhist Studies—the archaic Vedic Sanskrit found in the Rigveda had already evolved in the Vedic period, as evidenced in the later Vedic literature. Gombrich posits that the language in the early Upanishads of Hinduism and the late Vedic literature approaches Classical Sanskrit, while the archaic Vedic Sanskrit had by the Buddha's time become unintelligible to all except ancient Indian sages.[86]

The formalization of the Sanskrit language is credited to Pāṇini, along with Patanjali's Mahābhāṣya and Katyayana's commentary that preceded Patañjali's work.[87] Panini composed Aṣṭādhyāyī ('Eight-Chapter Grammar'). The century in which he lived is unclear and debated, but his work is generally accepted to be from sometime between the 6th and 4th centuries BCE.[88][89][90]

The Aṣṭādhyāyī was not the first description of Sanskrit grammar, but it is the earliest that has survived in full, and the culmination of a long grammatical tradition that Fortson says, is "one of the intellectual wonders of the ancient world."[91] Pāṇini cites ten scholars on the phonological and grammatical aspects of the Sanskrit language before him, as well as the variants in the usage of Sanskrit in different regions of India.[92] The ten Vedic scholars he quotes are Āpiśali, Kaśyapa, Gārgya, Gālava, Cakravarmaṇa, Bhāradvāja, Śākaṭāyana, Śākalya, Senaka and Sphoṭāyana.[93][94] The Aṣṭādhyāyī of Panini became the foundation of Vyākaraṇa, a Vedānga.[92]

In the Aṣṭādhyāyī, language is observed in a manner that has no parallel among Greek or Latin grammarians. Pāṇini's grammar, according to Renou and Filliozat, is a classic that defines the linguistic expression and sets the standard for the Sanskrit language.[95] Pāṇini made use of a technical metalanguage consisting of a syntax, morphology and lexicon. This metalanguage is organised according to a series of meta-rules, some of which are explicitly stated while others can be deduced.[96] Despite differences in the analysis from that of modern linguistics, Pāṇini's work has been found valuable and the most advanced analysis of linguistics until the twentieth century.[91]

Pāṇini's comprehensive and scientific theory of grammar is conventionally taken to mark the start of Classical Sanskrit.[97] His systematic treatise inspired and made Sanskrit the preeminent Indian language of learning and literature for two millennia.[98] It is unclear whether Pāṇini himself wrote his treatise or he orally created the detailed and sophisticated treatise then transmitted it through his students. Modern scholarship generally accepts that he knew of a form of writing, based on references to words such as Lipi ('script') and lipikara ('scribe') in section 3.2 of the Aṣṭādhyāyī.[99][100][101][k]

The Classical Sanskrit language formalized by Pāṇini, states Renou, is "not an impoverished language", rather it is "a controlled and a restrained language from which archaisms and unnecessary formal alternatives were excluded".[108] The Classical form of the language simplified the sandhi rules but retained various aspects of the Vedic language, while adding rigor and flexibilities, so that it had sufficient means to express thoughts as well as being "capable of responding to the future increasing demands of an infinitely diversified literature", according to Renou. Pāṇini included numerous "optional rules" beyond the Vedic Sanskrit's bahulam framework, to respect liberty and creativity so that individual writers separated by geography or time would have the choice to express facts and their views in their own way, where tradition followed competitive forms of the Sanskrit language.[109]

The phonetic differences between Vedic Sanskrit and Classical Sanskrit, as discerned from the current state of the surviving literature,[71] are negligible when compared to the intense change that must have occurred in the pre-Vedic period between the Proto-Indo-Aryan language and Vedic Sanskrit.[110] The noticeable differences between the Vedic and the Classical Sanskrit include the much-expanded grammar and grammatical categories as well as the differences in the accent, the semantics and the syntax.[111] There are also some differences between how some of the nouns and verbs end, as well as the sandhi rules, both internal and external.[111] Quite many words found in the early Vedic Sanskrit language are never found in late Vedic Sanskrit or Classical Sanskrit literature, while some words have different and new meanings in Classical Sanskrit when contextually compared to the early Vedic Sanskrit literature.[111]

Arthur Macdonell was among the early colonial era scholars who summarized some of the differences between the Vedic and Classical Sanskrit.[111][112] Louis Renou published in 1956, in French, a more extensive discussion of the similarities, the differences and the evolution of the Vedic Sanskrit within the Vedic period and then to the Classical Sanskrit along with his views on the history. This work has been translated by Jagbans Balbir.[113]

Sanskrit and Prakrit languages

 
An early use of the word for "Sanskrit" in Late Brahmi script (also called Gupta script):
    Saṃ-skṛ-ta

Mandsaur stone inscription of Yashodharman-Vishnuvardhana, 532 CE.[114]

The earliest known use of the word Saṃskṛta (Sanskrit), in the context of a speech or language, is found in verses 5.28.17–19 of the Ramayana.[16] Outside the learned sphere of written Classical Sanskrit, vernacular colloquial dialects (Prakrits) continued to evolve. Sanskrit co-existed with numerous other Prakrit languages of ancient India. The Prakrit languages of India also have ancient roots and some Sanskrit scholars have called these Apabhramsa, literally 'spoiled'.[115][116] The Vedic literature includes words whose phonetic equivalent are not found in other Indo-European languages but which are found in the regional Prakrit languages, which makes it likely that the interaction, the sharing of words and ideas began early in the Indian history. As the Indian thought diversified and challenged earlier beliefs of Hinduism, particularly in the form of Buddhism and Jainism, the Prakrit languages such as Pali in Theravada Buddhism and Ardhamagadhi in Jainism competed with Sanskrit in the ancient times.[117][118][119] However, states Paul Dundas, a scholar of Jainism, these ancient Prakrit languages had "roughly the same relationship to Sanskrit as medieval Italian does to Latin."[119] The Indian tradition states that the Buddha and the Mahavira preferred the Prakrit language so that everyone could understand it. However, scholars such as Dundas have questioned this hypothesis. They state that there is no evidence for this and whatever evidence is available suggests that by the start of the common era, hardly anybody other than learned monks had the capacity to understand the old Prakrit languages such as Ardhamagadhi.[119][l]

Colonial era scholars questioned whether Sanskrit was ever a spoken language, or just a literary language.[121] Scholars disagree in their answers. A section of Western scholars state that Sanskrit was never a spoken language, while others and particularly most Indian scholars state the opposite.[122] Those who affirm Sanskrit to have been a vernacular language point to the necessity of Sanskrit being a spoken language for the oral tradition that preserved the vast number of Sanskrit manuscripts from ancient India. Secondly, they state that the textual evidence in the works of Yaksa, Panini and Patanajali affirms that the Classical Sanskrit in their era was a language that is spoken (bhasha) by the cultured and educated. Some sutras expound upon the variant forms of spoken Sanskrit versus written Sanskrit.[122] The 7th-century Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Xuanzang mentioned in his memoir that official philosophical debates in India were held in Sanskrit, not in the vernacular language of that region.[122]

 
Sanskrit's link to the Prakrit languages and other Indo-European languages

According to Sanskrit linguist professor Madhav Deshpande, Sanskrit was a spoken language in a colloquial form by the mid-1st millennium BCE which coexisted with a more formal, grammatically correct form of literary Sanskrit.[123] This, states Deshpande, is true for modern languages where colloquial incorrect approximations and dialects of a language are spoken and understood, along with more "refined, sophisticated and grammatically accurate" forms of the same language being found in the literary works.[123] The Indian tradition, states Winternitz (1996), has favored the learning and the usage of multiple languages from the ancient times. Sanskrit was a spoken language in the educated and the elite classes, but it was also a language that must have been understood in a wider circle of society because the widely popular folk epics and stories such as the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Bhagavata Purana, the Panchatantra and many other texts are all in the Sanskrit language.[124] The Classical Sanskrit with its exacting grammar was thus the language of the Indian scholars and the educated classes, while others communicated with approximate or ungrammatical variants of it as well as other natural Indian languages.[123] Sanskrit, as the learned language of Ancient India, thus existed alongside the vernacular Prakrits.[123] Many Sanskrit dramas indicate that the language coexisted with the vernacular Prakrits. The cities of Varanasi, Paithan, Pune and Kanchipuram were centers of classical Sanskrit learning and public debates until the arrival of the colonial era.[125]

According to Lamotte (1976), an Indologist and Buddhism scholar, Sanskrit became the dominant literary and inscriptional language because of its precision in communication. It was, states Lamotte, an ideal instrument for presenting ideas, and as knowledge in Sanskrit multiplied, so did its spread and influence.[126] Sanskrit was adopted voluntarily as a vehicle of high culture, arts, and profound ideas. Pollock disagrees with Lamotte, but concurs that Sanskrit's influence grew into what he terms a "Sanskrit Cosmopolis" over a region that included all of South Asia and much of southeast Asia. The Sanskrit language cosmopolis thrived beyond India between 300 and 1300 CE.[127]

Dravidian influence on Sanskrit

Reinöhl mentions that not only have the Dravidian languages borrowed from Sanskrit vocabulary, but they have also impacted Sanskrit on deeper levels of structure, "for instance in the domain of phonology where Indo-Aryan retroflexes have been attributed to Dravidian influence".[128] Hock et al. quoting George Hart state that there was influence of Old Tamil on Sanskrit.[129] Hart compared Old Tamil and Classical Sanskrit to arrive at a conclusion that there was a common language from which these features both derived – "that both Tamil and Sanskrit derived their shared conventions, metres, and techniques from a common source, for it is clear that neither borrowed directly from the other."[130]

Reinöhl further states that there is a symmetric relationship between Dravidian languages like Kannada or Tamil, with Indo-Aryan languages like Bengali or Hindi, whereas the same relationship is not found for non-Indo-Aryan languages, for example, Persian or English:

"A sentence in a Dravidian language like Tamil or Kannada becomes ordinarily good Bengali or Hindi by substituting Bengali or Hindi equivalents for the Dravidian words and forms, without modifying the word order; but the same thing is not possible in rendering a Persian or English sentence into a non-Indo-Aryan language". — Reinöhl[128]

Shulman mentions that "Dravidian nonfinite verbal forms (called vinaiyeccam in Tamil) shaped the usage of the Sanskrit nonfinite verbs (originally derived from inflected forms of action nouns in Vedic). This particularly salient case of the possible influence of Dravidian on Sanskrit is only one of many items of syntactic assimilation, not least among them the large repertoire of morphological modality and aspect that, once one knows to look for it, can be found everywhere in classical and postclassical Sanskrit".[131]

The main influence of Dravidian on Sanskrit is found to have been concentrated in the timespan between the late Vedic period and the crystallization of Classical Sanskrit. As in this period the Indo-Aryan tribes had not yet made contact with the inhabitants of the South of the subcontinent, this suggests a significant presence of Dravidian speakers in North India (the central Gangetic plain and the classical Madhyadeśa) who were instrumental in this substratal influence on Sanskrit.[132]

Influence

Extant manuscripts in Sanskrit number over 30 million, one hundred times those in Greek and Latin combined, constituting the largest cultural heritage that any civilization has produced prior to the invention of the printing press.

— Foreword of Sanskrit Computational Linguistics (2009), Gérard Huet, Amba Kulkarni and Peter Scharf[133][134][m]

Sanskrit has been the predominant language of Hindu texts encompassing a rich tradition of philosophical and religious texts, as well as poetry, music, drama, scientific, technical and others.[136][137] It is the predominant language of one of the largest collection of historic manuscripts. The earliest known inscriptions in Sanskrit are from the 1st century BCE, such as the Ayodhya Inscription of Dhana and Ghosundi-Hathibada (Chittorgarh).[138]

Though developed and nurtured by scholars of orthodox schools of Hinduism, Sanskrit has been the language for some of the key literary works and theology of heterodox schools of Indian philosophies such as Buddhism and Jainism.[139][140] The structure and capabilities of the Classical Sanskrit language launched ancient Indian speculations about "the nature and function of language", what is the relationship between words and their meanings in the context of a community of speakers, whether this relationship is objective or subjective, discovered or is created, how individuals learn and relate to the world around them through language, and about the limits of language?[139][141] They speculated on the role of language, the ontological status of painting word-images through sound, and the need for rules so that it can serve as a means for a community of speakers, separated by geography or time, to share and understand profound ideas from each other.[141][n] These speculations became particularly important to the Mīmāṃsā and the Nyaya schools of Hindu philosophy, and later to Vedanta and Mahayana Buddhism, states Frits Staal—a scholar of Linguistics with a focus on Indian philosophies and Sanskrit.[139] Though written in a number of different scripts, the dominant language of Hindu texts has been Sanskrit. It or a hybrid form of Sanskrit became the preferred language of Mahayana Buddhism scholarship;[144] for example, one of the early and influential Buddhist philosophers, Nagarjuna (~200 CE), used Classical Sanskrit as the language for his texts.[145] According to Renou, Sanskrit had a limited role in the Theravada tradition (formerly known as the Hinayana) but the Prakrit works that have survived are of doubtful authenticity. Some of the canonical fragments of the early Buddhist traditions, discovered in the 20th century, suggest the early Buddhist traditions used an imperfect and reasonably good Sanskrit, sometimes with a Pali syntax, states Renou. The Mahāsāṃghika and Mahavastu, in their late Hinayana forms, used hybrid Sanskrit for their literature.[146] Sanskrit was also the language of some of the oldest surviving, authoritative and much followed philosophical works of Jainism such as the Tattvartha Sutra by Umaswati.[o][148]

 
The Spitzer Manuscript is dated to about the 2nd century CE (above: folio 383 fragment). Discovered in the Kizil Caves, near the northern branch of the Central Asian Silk Route in northwest China,[149] it is the oldest Sanskrit philosophical manuscript known so far.[150][151]

The Sanskrit language has been one of the major means for the transmission of knowledge and ideas in Asian history. Indian texts in Sanskrit were already in China by 402 CE, carried by the influential Buddhist pilgrim Faxian who translated them into Chinese by 418 CE.[152] Xuanzang, another Chinese Buddhist pilgrim, learnt Sanskrit in India and carried 657 Sanskrit texts to China in the 7th century where he established a major center of learning and language translation under the patronage of Emperor Taizong.[153][154] By the early 1st millennium CE, Sanskrit had spread Buddhist and Hindu ideas to Southeast Asia,[155] parts of the East Asia[156] and the Central Asia.[157] It was accepted as a language of high culture and the preferred language by some of the local ruling elites in these regions.[158] According to the Dalai Lama, the Sanskrit language is a parent language that is at the foundation of many modern languages of India and the one that promoted Indian thought to other distant countries. In Tibetan Buddhism, states the Dalai Lama, Sanskrit language has been a revered one and called legjar lhai-ka or "elegant language of the gods". It has been the means of transmitting the "profound wisdom of Buddhist philosophy" to Tibet.[159]

 
A 5th-century Sanskrit inscription discovered in Java, Indonesia—one of the earliest in southeast Asia after the Mulavarman inscription discovered in Kutai, eastern Borneo. The Ciaruteun inscription combines two writing scripts and compares the king to the Hindu god Vishnu. It provides a terminus ad quem to the presence of Hinduism in the Indonesian islands. The oldest southeast Asian Sanskrit inscription—called the Vo Canh inscription—so far discovered is near Nha Trang, Vietnam, and it is dated to the late 4th century to early 5th century CE.[160][161]

The Sanskrit language created a pan-Indo-Aryan accessibility to information and knowledge in the ancient and medieval times, in contrast to the Prakrit languages which were understood just regionally.[125][162] It created a cultural bond across the subcontinent.[162] As local languages and dialects evolved and diversified, Sanskrit served as the common language.[162] It connected scholars from distant parts of South Asia such as Tamil Nadu and Kashmir, states Deshpande, as well as those from different fields of studies, though there must have been differences in its pronunciation given the first language of the respective speakers. The Sanskrit language brought Indo-Aryan speaking people together, particularly its elite scholars.[125] Some of these scholars of Indian history regionally produced vernacularized Sanskrit to reach wider audiences, as evidenced by texts discovered in Rajasthan, Gujarat, and Maharashtra. Once the audience became familiar with the easier to understand vernacularized version of Sanskrit, those interested could graduate from colloquial Sanskrit to the more advanced Classical Sanskrit. Rituals and the rites-of-passage ceremonies have been and continue to be the other occasions where a wide spectrum of people hear Sanskrit, and occasionally join in to speak some Sanskrit words such as namah.[125]

Classical Sanskrit is the standard register as laid out in the grammar of Pāṇini, around the fourth century BCE.[163] Its position in the cultures of Greater India is akin to that of Latin and Ancient Greek in Europe. Sanskrit has significantly influenced most modern languages of the Indian subcontinent, particularly the languages of the northern, western, central and eastern Indian subcontinent.[164][165][166]

Decline

Sanskrit declined starting about and after the 13th century.[127][167] This coincides with the beginning of Islamic invasions of South Asia to create, and thereafter expand the Muslim rule in the form of Sultanates, and later the Mughal Empire.[168] Sheldon Pollock characterises the decline of Sanskrit as a long-term "cultural, social, and political change". He dismisses the idea that Sanskrit declined due to "struggle with barbarous invaders", and emphasises factors such as the increasing attractiveness of vernacular language for literary expression.[169]

With the fall of Kashmir around the 13th century, a premier center of Sanskrit literary creativity, Sanskrit literature there disappeared,[170] perhaps in the "fires that periodically engulfed the capital of Kashmir" or the "Mongol invasion of 1320" states Pollock.[169]: 397–398  The Sanskrit literature which was once widely disseminated out of the northwest regions of the subcontinent, stopped after the 12th century.[169]: 398  As Hindu kingdoms fell in the eastern and the South India, such as the great Vijayanagara Empire, so did Sanskrit.[170] There were exceptions and short periods of imperial support for Sanskrit, mostly concentrated during the reign of the tolerant Mughal emperor Akbar.[171] Muslim rulers patronized the Middle Eastern language and scripts found in Persia and Arabia, and the Indians linguistically adapted to this Persianization to gain employment with the Muslim rulers.[172] Hindu rulers such as Shivaji of the Maratha Empire, reversed the process, by re-adopting Sanskrit and re-asserting their socio-linguistic identity.[172][173][174] After Islamic rule disintegrated in South Asia and the colonial rule era began, Sanskrit re-emerged but in the form of a "ghostly existence" in regions such as Bengal. This decline was the result of "political institutions and civic ethos" that did not support the historic Sanskrit literary culture.[170]

Scholars are divided on whether or when Sanskrit died. Western authors such as John Snelling state that Sanskrit and Pali are both dead Indian languages.[175] Indian authors such as M Ramakrishnan Nair state that Sanskrit was a dead language by the 1st millennium BCE.[176] Sheldon Pollock states that in some crucial way, "Sanskrit is dead".[169]: 393  After the 12th century, the Sanskrit literary works were reduced to "reinscription and restatements" of ideas already explored, and any creativity was restricted to hymns and verses. This contrasted with the previous 1,500 years when "great experiments in moral and aesthetic imagination" marked the Indian scholarship using Classical Sanskrit, states Pollock.[169]: 398 

Other scholars state that the Sanskrit language did not die, only declined. Hanneder disagrees with Pollock, finding his arguments elegant but "often arbitrary". According to Hanneder, a decline or regional absence of creative and innovative literature constitutes a negative evidence to Pollock's hypothesis, but it is not positive evidence. A closer look at Sanskrit in the Indian history after the 12th century suggests that Sanskrit survived despite the odds. According to Hanneder,[177]

On a more public level the statement that Sanskrit is a dead language is misleading, for Sanskrit is quite obviously not as dead as other dead languages and the fact that it is spoken, written and read will probably convince most people that it cannot be a dead language in the most common usage of the term. Pollock's notion of the "death of Sanskrit" remains in this unclear realm between academia and public opinion when he says that "most observers would agree that, in some crucial way, Sanskrit is dead."[170]

 
 
 
 
 
Sanskrit language manuscripts exist in many scripts. Above from top: Isha Upanishad (Devanagari), Samaveda (Tamil Grantha), Bhagavad Gita (Gurmukhi), Vedanta Sara (Telugu), Jatakamala (early Sharada). All are Hindu texts except the last Buddhist text.

The Sanskrit language scholar Moriz Winternitz states, Sanskrit was never a dead language and it is still alive though its prevalence is lesser than ancient and medieval times. Sanskrit remains an integral part of Hindu journals, festivals, Ramlila plays, drama, rituals and the rites-of-passage.[178] Similarly, Brian Hatcher states that the "metaphors of historical rupture" by Pollock are not valid, that there is ample proof that Sanskrit was very much alive in the narrow confines of surviving Hindu kingdoms between the 13th and 18th centuries, and its reverence and tradition continues.[179]

Hanneder states that modern works in Sanskrit are either ignored or their "modernity" contested.[180]

According to Robert Goldman and Sally Sutherland, Sanskrit is neither "dead" nor "living" in the conventional sense. It is a special, timeless language that lives in the numerous manuscripts, daily chants, and ceremonial recitations, a heritage language that Indians contextually prize, and which some practice.[181]

When the British introduced English to India in the 19th century, knowledge of Sanskrit and ancient literature continued to flourish as the study of Sanskrit changed from a more traditional style into a form of analytical and comparative scholarship mirroring that of Europe.[182]

Modern Indo-Aryan languages

The relationship of Sanskrit to the Prakrit languages, particularly the modern form of Indian languages, is complex and spans about 3,500 years, states Colin Masica—a linguist specializing in South Asian languages. A part of the difficulty is the lack of sufficient textual, archaeological and epigraphical evidence for the ancient Prakrit languages with rare exceptions such as Pali, leading to a tendency of anachronistic errors.[183] Sanskrit and Prakrit languages may be divided into Old Indo-Aryan (1500 BCE–600 BCE), Middle Indo-Aryan (600 BCE–1000 CE) and New Indo-Aryan (1000 CE–present), each can further be subdivided into early, middle or second, and late evolutionary substages.[183]

Vedic Sanskrit belongs to the early Old Indo-Aryan stage, while Classical Sanskrit to the later Old Indo-Aryan stage. The evidence for Prakrits such as Pali (Theravada Buddhism) and Ardhamagadhi (Jainism), along with Magadhi, Maharashtri, Sinhala, Sauraseni and Niya (Gandhari), emerge in the Middle Indo-Aryan stage in two versions—archaic and more formalized—that may be placed in early and middle substages of the 600 BCE–1000 CE period.[183] Two literary Indo-Aryan languages can be traced to the late Middle Indo-Aryan stage and these are Apabhramsa and Elu (a literary form of Sinhalese). Numerous North, Central, Eastern and Western Indian languages, such as Hindi, Gujarati, Sindhi, Punjabi, Kashmiri, Nepali, Braj, Awadhi, Bengali, Assamese, Oriya, Marathi, and others belong to the New Indo-Aryan stage.[183]

There is an extensive overlap in the vocabulary, phonetics and other aspects of these New Indo-Aryan languages with Sanskrit, but it is neither universal nor identical across the languages. They likely emerged from a synthesis of the ancient Sanskrit language traditions and an admixture of various regional dialects. Each language has some unique and regionally creative aspects, with unclear origins. Prakrit languages do have a grammatical structure, but like Vedic Sanskrit, it is far less rigorous than Classical Sanskrit. While the roots of all Prakrit languages may be in Vedic Sanskrit and ultimately the Proto-Indo-Aryan language, their structural details vary from Classical Sanskrit.[28][183] It is generally accepted by scholars and widely believed in India that the modern Indo-Aryan languages – such as Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, and Punjabi – are descendants of the Sanskrit language.[184][185][186] Sanskrit, states Burjor Avari, can be described as "the mother language of almost all the languages of north India".[187]

Geographic distribution

 
Sanskrit language's historical presence has been attested in many countries. The evidence includes manuscript pages and inscriptions discovered in South Asia, Southeast Asia and Central Asia. These have been dated between 300 and 1800 CE.

The Sanskrit language's historic presence is attested across a wide geography beyond South Asia. Inscriptions and literary evidence suggests that Sanskrit language was already being adopted in Southeast Asia and Central Asia in the 1st millennium CE, through monks, religious pilgrims and merchants.[188][189][190]

South Asia has been the geographic range of the largest collection of the ancient and pre-18th-century Sanskrit manuscripts and inscriptions.[135] Beyond ancient India, significant collections of Sanskrit manuscripts and inscriptions have been found in China (particularly the Tibetan monasteries),[191][192] Myanmar,[193] Indonesia,[194] Cambodia,[195] Laos,[196] Vietnam,[197] Thailand,[198] and Malaysia.[196] Sanskrit inscriptions, manuscripts or its remnants, including some of the oldest known Sanskrit written texts, have been discovered in dry high deserts and mountainous terrains such as in Nepal,[199][200][p] Tibet,[192][201] Afghanistan,[202][203] Mongolia,[204] Uzbekistan,[205] Turkmenistan, Tajikistan,[205] and Kazakhstan.[206] Some Sanskrit texts and inscriptions have also been discovered in Korea and Japan.[207][208][209]

Official status

In India, Sanskrit is among the 22 official languages of India in the Eighth Schedule to the Constitution.[210] In 2010, Uttarakhand became the first state in India to make Sanskrit its second official language.[211] In 2019, Himachal Pradesh made Sanskrit its second official language, becoming the second state in India to do so.[212]

Phonology

Sanskrit shares many Proto-Indo-European phonological features, although it features a larger inventory of distinct phonemes. The consonantal system is the same, though it systematically enlarged the inventory of distinct sounds. For example, Sanskrit added a voiceless aspirated "tʰ", to the voiceless "t", voiced "d" and voiced aspirated "dʰ" found in PIE languages.[213]

The most significant and distinctive phonological development in Sanskrit is vowel merger.[213] The short *e, *o and *a, all merge as a (अ) in Sanskrit, while long , and , all merge as long ā (आ). Compare Sanskrit nāman to Latin nōmen. These mergers occurred very early and significantly impacted Sanskrit's morphological system.[213] Some phonological developments in it mirror those in other PIE languages. For example, the labiovelars merged with the plain velars as in other satem languages. The secondary palatalization of the resulting segments is more thorough and systematic within Sanskrit.[213] A series of retroflex dental stops were innovated in Sanskrit to more thoroughly articulate sounds for clarity. For example, unlike the loss of the morphological clarity from vowel contraction that is found in early Greek and related southeast European languages, Sanskrit deployed *y, *w, and *s intervocalically to provide morphological clarity.[213]

Vowels

 
This is one of the oldest surviving and dated palm-leaf manuscripts in Sanskrit (828 CE). Discovered in Nepal, the bottom leaf shows all the vowels and consonants of Sanskrit (the first five consonants are highlighted in blue and yellow).

The cardinal vowels (svaras) i (इ), u (उ), a (अ) distinguish length in Sanskrit.[214][215] The short a (अ) in Sanskrit is a closer vowel than ā, equivalent to schwa. The mid vowels ē (ए) and ō (ओ) in Sanskrit are monophthongizations of the Indo-Iranian diphthongs *ai and *au. The Old Iranian language preserved *ai and *au.[214] The Sanskrit vowels are inherently long, though often transcribed e and o without the diacritic. The vocalic liquid in Sanskrit is a merger of PIE *r̥ and *l̥. The long is an innovation and it is used in a few analogically generated morphological categories.[214][216][217]

Sanskrit vowels in the Devanagari script[218][q]
Independent form IAST/
ISO
IPA Independent form IAST/
ISO
IPA
kaṇṭhya
(Guttural)
a /ɐ/ ā /ɑː/
tālavya
(Palatal)
i /i/ ī /iː/
oṣṭhya
(Labial)
u /u/ ū /uː/
mūrdhanya
(Retroflex)
/ // /r̥̄ /r̩ː/
dantya
(Dental)
/ // () (/l̥̄)[r] /l̩ː/
kaṇṭhatālavya
(Palatoguttural)
e/ē // ai /ɑj/
kaṇṭhoṣṭhya
(Labioguttural)
o/ō // au /ɑw/
(consonantal allophones) अं aṃ/aṁ[220] /ɐ̃/ अः aḥ[221] /ɐh/

According to Masica, Sanskrit has four traditional semivowels, with which were classed, "for morphophonemic reasons, the liquids: y, r, l, and v; that is, as y and v were the non-syllabics corresponding to i, u, so were r, l in relation to r̥ and l̥".[222] The northwestern, the central and the eastern Sanskrit dialects have had a historic confusion between "r" and "l". The Paninian system that followed the central dialect preserved the distinction, likely out of reverence for the Vedic Sanskrit that distinguished the "r" and "l". However, the northwestern dialect only had "r", while the eastern dialect probably only had "l", states Masica. Thus literary works from different parts of ancient India appear inconsistent in their use of "r" and "l", resulting in doublets that are occasionally semantically differentiated.[222]

Consonants

Sanskrit possesses a symmetric consonantal phoneme structure based on how the sound is articulated, though the actual usage of these sounds conceals the lack of parallelism in the apparent symmetry possibly from historical changes within the language.[223]

Sanskrit consonants in the Devanagari script[218][q]
sparśa
(Plosive)
anunāsika
(Nasal)
antastha
(Approximant)
ūṣman/saṃgharṣhī
(Fricative)
Voicing aghoṣa ghoṣa aghoṣa
Aspiration alpaprāṇa mahāprāṇa alpaprāṇa mahāprāṇa alpaprāṇa mahāprāṇa
kaṇṭhya
(Guttural)
ka
[k]
kha
[]
ga
[ɡ]
gha
[ɡʱ]
ṅa
[ŋ]
ha
[ɦ]
tālavya
(Palatal)
ca
[t͜ɕ]
cha
[t͜ɕʰ]
ja
[d͜ʑ]
jha
[d͜ʑʱ]
ña
[ɲ]
ya
[j]
śa
[ɕ]
mūrdhanya
(Retroflex)
ṭa
[ʈ]
ṭha
[ʈʰ]
ḍa
[ɖ]
ḍha
[ɖʱ]
ṇa
[ɳ]
ra
[ɽ]
ṣa
[ʂ]
dantya
(Dental)
ta
[t]
tha
[]
da
[d]
dha
[]
na
[n]
la
[l]
sa
[s]
oṣṭhya
(Labial)
pa
[p]
pha
[]
ba
[b]
bha
[]
ma
[m]
va
[ʋ]

Sanskrit had a series of retroflex stops originating as conditioned alternants of dentals, albeit by Sanskrit they had become phonemic.[223]

Regarding the palatal plosives, the pronunciation is a matter of debate. In contemporary attestation, the palatal plosives are a regular series of palatal stops, supported by most Sanskrit sandhi rules. However, the reflexes in descendant languages, as well as a few of the sandhi rules regarding ch, could suggest an affricate pronunciation.

jh was a marginal phoneme in Sanskrit, hence its phonology is more difficult to reconstruct; it was more commonly employed in the Middle Indo-Aryan languages as a result of phonological processes resulting in the phoneme.

The palatal nasal is a conditioned variant of n occurring next to palatal obstruents.[223] The anusvara that Sanskrit deploys is a conditioned alternant of postvocalic nasals, under certain sandhi conditions.[224] Its visarga is a word-final or morpheme-final conditioned alternant of s and r under certain sandhi conditions.[224]

The system of Sanskrit Sounds
[The] order of Sanskrit sounds works along three principles: it goes from simple to complex; it goes from the back to the front of the mouth; and it groups similar sounds together. [...] Among themselves, both the vowels and consonants are ordered according to where in the mouth they are pronounced, going from back to front.

— A. M. Ruppel, The Cambridge Introduction to Sanskrit[225]

The voiceless aspirated series is also an innovation in Sanskrit but is significantly rarer than the other three series.[223]

While the Sanskrit language organizes sounds for expression beyond those found in the PIE language, it retained many features found in the Iranian and Balto-Slavic languages. An example of a similar process in all three is the retroflex sibilant ʂ being the automatic product of dental s following i, u, r, and k.[224]

Phonological alternations, sandhi rules

Sanskrit deploys extensive phonological alternations on different linguistic levels through sandhi rules (literally, the rules of "putting together, union, connection, alliance"), similar to the English alteration of "going to" as gonna.[226] The Sanskrit language accepts such alterations within it, but offers formal rules for the sandhi of any two words next to each other in the same sentence or linking two sentences. The external sandhi rules state that similar short vowels coalesce into a single long vowel, while dissimilar vowels form glides or undergo diphthongization.[226] Among the consonants, most external sandhi rules recommend regressive assimilation for clarity when they are voiced. These rules ordinarily apply at compound seams and morpheme boundaries.[226] In Vedic Sanskrit, the external sandhi rules are more variable than in Classical Sanskrit.[227]

The internal sandhi rules are more intricate and account for the root and the canonical structure of the Sanskrit word. These rules anticipate what are now known as the Bartholomae's law and Grassmann's law. For example, states Jamison, the "voiceless, voiced, and voiced aspirated obstruents of a positional series regularly alternate with each other (p ≈ b ≈ bʰ; t ≈ d ≈ dʰ, etc.; note, however, c ≈ j ≈ h), such that, for example, a morpheme with an underlying voiced aspirate final may show alternants[clarification needed] with all three stops under differing internal sandhi conditions".[228] The velar series (k, g, gʰ) alternate with the palatal series (c, j, h), while the structural position of the palatal series is modified into a retroflex cluster when followed by dental. This rule creates two morphophonemically distinct series from a single palatal series.[228]

Vocalic alternations in the Sanskrit morphological system is termed "strengthening", and called guṇa and vr̥ddhi in the preconsonantal versions. There is an equivalence to terms deployed in Indo-European descriptive grammars, wherein Sanskrit's unstrengthened state is same as the zero-grade, guṇa corresponds to normal-grade, while vr̥ddhi is same as the lengthened-state.[229] The qualitative ablaut is not found in Sanskrit just like it is absent in Iranian, but Sanskrit retains quantitative ablaut through vowel strengthening.[229] The transformations between unstrengthened to guṇa is prominent in the morphological system, states Jamison, while vr̥ddhi is a particularly significant rule when adjectives of origin and appurtenance are derived. The manner in which this is done slightly differs between the Vedic and the Classical Sanskrit.[229][230]

Sanskrit grants a very flexible syllable structure, where they may begin or end with vowels, be single consonants or clusters. Similarly, the syllable may have an internal vowel of any weight. Vedic Sanskrit shows traces of following the Sievers–Edgerton law, but Classical Sanskrit does not.[citation needed] Vedic Sanskrit has a pitch accent system (inherited from Proto-Indo-European) which was acknowledged by Pāṇini, states Jamison; but in his Classical Sanskrit the accents disappear.[231] Most Vedic Sanskrit words have one accent. However, this accent is not phonologically predictable, states Jamison.[231] It can fall anywhere in the word and its position often conveys morphological and syntactic information.[231] The presence of an accent system in Vedic Sanskrit is evidenced from the markings in the Vedic texts. This is important because of Sanskrit's connection to the PIE languages and comparative Indo-European linguistics.[232]

Sanskrit, like most early Indo-European languages, lost the so-called "laryngeal consonants (cover-symbol *H) present in the Proto-Indo-European", states Jamison.[231] This significantly impacted the evolutionary path of the Sanskrit phonology and morphology, particularly in the variant forms of roots.[233]

Pronunciation

Because Sanskrit is not anyone's native language, it does not have a fixed pronunciation. People tend to pronounce it as they do their native language. The articles on Hindustani, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya and Bengali phonology will give some indication of the variation that is encountered. When Sanskrit was a spoken language, its pronunciation varied regionally and also over time. Nonetheless, Panini described the sound system of Sanskrit well enough that people have a fairly good idea of what he intended.

Various renditions of Sanskrit pronunciation
Transcription Goldman
(2002)[s]
Cardona
(2003)[235]
a ɐ ɐ
ā
i ɪ ɪ
ī
u ʊ ʊ
ū
ɽɪ ɽɪ ᵊɾᵊ or ᵊɽᵊ[t]
r̥̄ ɽiː ɽiː?[u] ?[u]
?[v] [w]
ē
ai ai ai ɐi or ɛi
ō
au au au ɐu or ɔu
aṃ ɐ̃, ɐɴ ɐ̃, ɐɴ[x]
aḥ ɐh ɐhɐ[y] ɐh
k k k
kh
g ɡ ɡ
gh ɡʱ ɡʱ
ŋ ŋ
h ɦ ɦ ɦ
c t͡ɕ t͡ɕ
ch t͡ɕʰ t͡ɕʰ
j d͡ʑ d͡ʑ
jh d͡ʑʱ d͡ʑʱ
ñ n n
y j j j
ś ɕ ɕ ɕ
ṭh t̠ʰ t̠ʰ
ḍh d̠ʱ d̠ʱ
r ɽ ɾ̪, ɾ or ɽ
ʂ
t
th t̪ʰ t̪ʰ
d
dh d̪ʱ d̪ʱ
n
l l l
s s s
p p p
ph
b b b
bh
m m m
v ʋ ʋ ʋ
stress (ante)pen-
ultimate[z]

Morphology

The basis of Sanskrit morphology is the root, states Jamison, "a morpheme bearing lexical meaning".[236] The verbal and nominal stems of Sanskrit words are derived from this root through the phonological vowel-gradation processes, the addition of affixes, verbal and nominal stems. It then adds an ending to establish the grammatical and syntactic identity of the stem. According to Jamison, the "three major formal elements of the morphology are (i) root, (ii) affix, and (iii) ending; and they are roughly responsible for (i) lexical meaning, (ii) derivation, and (iii) inflection respectively".[237]

A Sanskrit word has the following canonical structure:[236]

Root + Affix
0-n
+ Ending
0–1

The root structure has certain phonological constraints. Two of the most important constraints of a "root" is that it does not end in a short "a" (अ) and that it is monosyllabic.[236] In contrast, the affixes and endings commonly do. The affixes in Sanskrit are almost always suffixes, with exceptions such as the augment "a-" added as prefix to past tense verb forms and the "-na/n-" infix in single verbal present class, states Jamison.[236]

Sanskrit verbs have the following canonical structure:[238]

Root + Suffix
Tense-Aspect
+ Suffix
Mood
+ Ending
Personal-Number-Voice

According to Ruppel, verbs in Sanskrit express the same information as other Indo-European languages such as English.[239] Sanskrit verbs describe an action or occurrence or state, its embedded morphology informs as to "who is doing it" (person or persons), "when it is done" (tense) and "how it is done" (mood, voice). The Indo-European languages differ in the detail. For example, the Sanskrit language attaches the affixes and ending to the verb root, while the English language adds small independent words before the verb. In Sanskrit, these elements co-exist within the word.[239][aa]

Word morphology in Sanskrit, A. M. Ruppel[239][ab]
Sanskrit word equivalent
English expression IAST/ISO Devanagari
you carry bharasi भरसि
they carry bharanti भरन्ति
you will carry bhariṣyasi भरिष्यसि

Both verbs and nouns in Sanskrit are either thematic or athematic, states Jamison.[241] Guna (strengthened) forms in the active singular regularly alternate in athematic verbs. The finite verbs of Classical Sanskrit have the following grammatical categories: person, number, voice, tense-aspect, and mood. According to Jamison, a portmanteau morpheme generally expresses the person-number-voice in Sanskrit, and sometimes also the ending or only the ending. The mood of the word is embedded in the affix.[241]

These elements of word architecture are the typical building blocks in Classical Sanskrit, but in Vedic Sanskrit these elements fluctuate and are unclear. For example, in the Rigveda preverbs regularly occur in tmesis, states Jamison, which means they are "separated from the finite verb".[236] This indecisiveness is likely linked to Vedic Sanskrit's attempt to incorporate accent. With nonfinite forms of the verb and with nominal derivatives thereof, states Jamison, "preverbs show much clearer univerbation in Vedic, both by position and by accent, and by Classical Sanskrit, tmesis is no longer possible even with finite forms".[236]

While roots are typical in Sanskrit, some words do not follow the canonical structure.[237] A few forms lack both inflection and root. Many words are inflected (and can enter into derivation) but lack a recognizable root. Examples from the basic vocabulary include kinship terms such as mātar- (mother), nas- (nose), śvan- (dog). According to Jamison, pronouns and some words outside the semantic categories also lack roots, as do the numerals. Similarly, the Sanskrit language is flexible enough to not mandate inflection.[237]

The Sanskrit words can contain more than one affix that interact with each other. Affixes in Sanskrit can be athematic as well as thematic, according to Jamison.[242] Athematic affixes can be alternating. Sanskrit deploys eight cases, namely nominative, accusative, instrumental, dative, ablative, genitive, locative, vocative.[242]

Stems, that is "root + affix", appear in two categories in Sanskrit: vowel stems and consonant stems. Unlike some Indo-European languages such as Latin or Greek, according to Jamison, "Sanskrit has no closed set of conventionally denoted noun declensions". Sanskrit includes a fairly large set of stem-types.[243] The linguistic interaction of the roots, the phonological segments, lexical items and the grammar for the Classical Sanskrit consist of four Paninian components. These, states Paul Kiparsky, are the Astadhyaayi, a comprehensive system of 4,000 grammatical rules, of which a small set are frequently used; Sivasutras, an inventory of anubandhas (markers) that partition phonological segments for efficient abbreviations through the pratyharas technique; Dhatupatha, a list of 2,000 verbal roots classified by their morphology and syntactic properties using diacritic markers, a structure that guides its writing systems; and, the Ganapatha, an inventory of word groups, classes of lexical systems.[244] There are peripheral adjuncts to these four, such as the Unadisutras, which focus on irregularly formed derivatives from the roots.[244]

Sanskrit morphology is generally studied in two broad fundamental categories: the nominal forms and the verbal forms. These differ in the types of endings and what these endings mark in the grammatical context.[237] Pronouns and nouns share the same grammatical categories, though they may differ in inflection. Verb-based adjectives and participles are not formally distinct from nouns. Adverbs are typically frozen case forms of adjectives, states Jamison, and "nonfinite verbal forms such as infinitives and gerunds also clearly show frozen nominal case endings".[237]

Tense and voice

The Sanskrit language includes five tenses: present, future, past imperfect, past aorist and past perfect.[240] It outlines three types of voices: active, passive and the middle.[240] The middle is also referred to as the mediopassive, or more formally in Sanskrit as parasmaipada (word for another) and atmanepada (word for oneself).[238]

Voice in Sanskrit, Stephanie Jamison[238][ac]
Active Middle
(Mediopassive)
Singular Dual Plural Singular Dual Plural
1st person -mi -vas -mas -e -vahe -mahe
2nd person -si -thas -tha -se -āthe -dhve
3rd person -ti -tas -anti -te -āte -ante

The paradigm for the tense-aspect system in Sanskrit is the three-way contrast between the "present", the "aorist" and the "perfect" architecture.[245] Vedic Sanskrit is more elaborate and had several additional tenses. For example, the Rigveda includes perfect and a marginal pluperfect. Classical Sanskrit simplifies the "present" system down to two tenses, the perfect and the imperfect, while the "aorist" stems retain the aorist tense and the "perfect" stems retain the perfect and marginal pluperfect.[245] The classical version of the language has elaborate rules for both voice and the tense-aspect system to emphasize clarity, and this is more elaborate than in other Indo-European languages. The evolution of these systems can be seen from the earliest layers of the Vedic literature to the late Vedic literature.[246]

Number, person

Sanskrit recognizes three numbers—singular, dual, and plural.[242] The dual is a fully functioning category, used beyond naturally paired objects such as hands or eyes, extending to any collection of two. The elliptical dual is notable in the Vedic Sanskrit, according to Jamison, where a noun in the dual signals a paired opposition.[242] Illustrations include dyāvā (literally, "the two heavens" for heaven-and-earth), mātarā (literally, "the two mothers" for mother-and-father).[242] A verb may be singular, dual or plural, while the person recognized in the language are forms of "I", "you", "he/she/it", "we" and "they".[240]

There are three persons in Sanskrit: first, second and third.[238] Sanskrit uses the 3×3 grid formed by the three numbers and the three persons parameters as the paradigm and the basic building block of its verbal system.[246]

Gender, mood

The Sanskrit language incorporates three genders: feminine, masculine and neuter.[242] All nouns have inherent gender. With some exceptions, personal pronouns have no gender. Exceptions include demonstrative and anaphoric pronouns.[242] Derivation of a word is used to express the feminine. Two most common derivations come from feminine-forming suffixes, the -ā- (आ, Rādhā) and -ī- (ई, Rukmīnī). The masculine and neuter are much simpler, and the difference between them is primarily inflectional.[242][247] Similar affixes for the feminine are found in many Indo-European languages, states Burrow, suggesting links of the Sanskrit to its PIE heritage.[248]

Pronouns in Sanskrit include the personal pronouns of the first and second persons, unmarked for gender, and a larger number of gender-distinguishing pronouns and adjectives.[241] Examples of the former include ahám (first singular), vayám (first plural) and yūyám (second plural). The latter can be demonstrative, deictic or anaphoric.[241] Both the Vedic and Classical Sanskrit share the sá/tám pronominal stem, and this is the closest element to a third person pronoun and an article in the Sanskrit language, states Jamison.[241]

Indicative, potential and imperative are the three mood forms in Sanskrit.[240]

Prosody, metre

The Sanskrit language formally incorporates poetic metres.[249] By the late Vedic era, this developed into a field of study; it was central to the composition of the Hindu literature, including the later Vedic texts. This study of Sanskrit prosody is called chandas, and is considered one of the six Vedangas, or limbs of Vedic studies.[249][250]

Sanskrit prosody includes linear and non-linear systems.[251] The system started off with seven major metres, according to Annette Wilke and Oliver Moebus, called the "seven birds" or "seven mouths of Brihaspati", and each had its own rhythm, movements and aesthetics wherein a non-linear structure (aperiodicity) was mapped into a four verse polymorphic linear sequence.[251] A syllable in Sanskrit is classified as either laghu (light) or guru (heavy). This classification is based on a matra (literally, "count, measure, duration"), and typically a syllable that ends in a short vowel is a light syllable, while those that end in consonant, anusvara or visarga are heavy. The classical Sanskrit found in Hindu scriptures such as the Bhagavad Gita and many texts are so arranged that the light and heavy syllables in them follow a rhythm, though not necessarily a rhyme.[252][253][ad]

Sanskrit metres include those based on a fixed number of syllables per verse, and those based on fixed number of morae per verse.[255] The Vedic Sanskrit employs fifteen metres, of which seven are common, and the most frequent are three (8-, 11- and 12-syllable lines).[256] The Classical Sanskrit deploys both linear and non-linear metres, many of which are based on syllables and others based on diligently crafted verses based on repeating numbers of morae (matra per foot).[256]

There is no word without metre,
nor is there any metre without words.

Natya Shastra[257]

Metre and rhythm is an important part of the Sanskrit language. It may have played a role in helping preserve the integrity of the message and Sanskrit texts. The verse perfection in the Vedic texts such as the verse Upanishads[ae] and post-Vedic Smṛti texts are rich in prosody. This feature of the Sanskrit language led some Indologists from the 19th century onwards to identify suspected portions of texts where a line or sections are off the expected metre.[258][259][af]

The metre-feature of the Sanskrit language embeds another layer of communication to the listener or reader. A change in metres has been a tool of literary architecture and an embedded code to inform the reciter and audience that it marks the end of a section or chapter.[263] Each section or chapter of these texts uses identical metres, rhythmically presenting their ideas and making it easier to remember, recall and check for accuracy.[263] Authors coded a hymn's end by frequently using a verse of a metre different than that used in the hymn's body.[263] However, Hindu tradition does not use the Gayatri metre to end a hymn or composition, possibly because it has enjoyed a special level of reverence in Hinduism.[263]

Writing system

 
One of the oldest surviving Sanskrit manuscript pages in Gupta script (c. 828 CE), discovered in Nepal

The early history of writing Sanskrit and other languages in ancient India is a problematic topic despite a century of scholarship, states Richard Salomon – an epigraphist and Indologist specializing in Sanskrit and Pali literature.[264] The earliest possible script from South Asia is from the Indus Valley civilization (3rd/2nd millennium BCE), but this script – if it is a script – remains undeciphered. If any scripts existed in the Vedic period, they have not survived. Scholars generally accept that Sanskrit was spoken in an oral society, and that an oral tradition preserved the extensive Vedic and Classical Sanskrit literature.[265] Other scholars such as Jack Goody argue that the Vedic Sanskrit texts are not the product of an oral society, basing this view by comparing inconsistencies in the transmitted versions of literature from various oral societies such as the Greek, Serbian, and other cultures. This minority of scholars argue that the Vedic literature is too consistent and vast to have been composed and transmitted orally across generations, without being written down.[266][267]

Lipi is the term in Sanskrit which means "writing, letters, alphabet". It contextually refers to scripts, the art or any manner of writing or drawing.[99] The term, in the sense of a writing system, appears in some of the earliest Buddhist, Hindu, and Jaina texts. Pāṇini's Astadhyayi, composed sometime around the 5th or 4th century BCE, for example, mentions lipi in the context of a writing script and education system in his times, but he does not name the script.[99][100][268] Several early Buddhist and Jaina texts, such as the Lalitavistara Sūtra and Pannavana Sutta include lists of numerous writing scripts in ancient India.[ag] The Buddhist texts list the sixty four lipi that the Buddha knew as a child, with the Brahmi script topping the list. "The historical value of this list is however limited by several factors", states Salomon. The list may be a later interpolation.[270][ah] The Jain canonical texts such as the Pannavana Sutta – probably older than the Buddhist texts – list eighteen writing systems, with the Brahmi topping the list and Kharotthi (Kharoshthi) listed as fourth. The Jaina text elsewhere states that the "Brahmi is written in 18 different forms", but the details are lacking.[272] However, the reliability of these lists has been questioned and the empirical evidence of writing systems in the form of Sanskrit or Prakrit inscriptions dated prior to the 3rd century BCE has not been found. If the ancient surface for writing Sanskrit was palm leaves, tree bark and cloth—the same as those in later times, these have not survived.[273][ai] According to Salomon, many find it difficult to explain the "evidently high level of political organization and cultural complexity" of ancient India without a writing system for Sanskrit and other languages.[273][aj]

The oldest datable writing systems for Sanskrit are the Brāhmī script, the related Kharoṣṭhī script and the Brahmi derivatives.[276][277] The Kharosthi was used in the northwestern part of South Asia and it became extinct, while the Brahmi was used all over the subcontinent along with regional scripts such as Old Tamil.[278] Of these, the earliest records in the Sanskrit language are in Brahmi, a script that later evolved into numerous related Indic scripts for Sanskrit, along with Southeast Asian scripts (Burmese, Thai, Lao, Khmer, others) and many extinct Central Asian scripts such as those discovered along with the Kharosthi in the Tarim Basin of western China and in Uzbekistan.[279] The most extensive inscriptions that have survived into the modern era are the rock edicts and pillar inscriptions of the 3rd century BCE Mauryan emperor Ashoka, but these are not in Sanskrit.[280][ak]

Scripts

Over the centuries, and across countries, a number of scripts have been used to write Sanskrit.

Brahmi script

 
One of the oldest Hindu Sanskrit[al] inscriptions, the broken pieces of this early-1st-century BCE Hathibada Brahmi Inscription were discovered in Rajasthan. It is a dedication to deities Vāsudeva-Samkarshana (Krishna-Balarama) and mentions a stone temple.[138][281]

The Brahmi script for writing Sanskrit is a "modified consonant-syllabic" script. The graphic syllable is its basic unit, and this consists of a consonant with or without diacritic modifications.[277] Since the vowel is an integral part of the consonants, and given the efficiently compacted, fused consonant cluster morphology for Sanskrit words and grammar, the Brahmi and its derivative writing systems deploy ligatures, diacritics and relative positioning of the vowel to inform the reader how the vowel is related to the consonant and how it is expected to be pronounced for clarity.[277][282][am] This feature of Brahmi and its modern Indic script derivatives makes it difficult to classify it under the main script types used for the writing systems for most of the world's languages, namely logographic, syllabic and alphabetic.[277]

The Brahmi script evolved into "a vast number of forms and derivatives", states Richard Salomon, and in theory, Sanskrit "can be represented in virtually any of the main Brahmi-based scripts and in practice it often is".[283] From the ancient times, it has been written in numerous regional scripts in South and Southeast Asia. Most of these are descendants of the Brahmi script.[an] The earliest datable varnamala Brahmi alphabet system, found in later Sanskrit texts, is from the 2nd century BCE, in the form of a terracotta plaque found in Sughana, Haryana. It shows a "schoolboy's writing lessons", states Salomon.[285][286]

Nagari script

Many modern era manuscripts are written and available in the Nagari script, whose form is attestable to the 1st millennium CE.[287] The Nagari script is the ancestor of Devanagari (north India), Nandinagari (south India) and other variants. The Nāgarī script was in regular use by 7th century CE, and had fully evolved into Devanagari and Nandinagari[288] scripts by about the end of the first millennium of the common era.[289][290] The Devanagari script, states Banerji, became more popular for Sanskrit in India since about the 18th century.[291] However, Sanskrit does have special historical connection to the Nagari script as attested by the epigraphical evidence.[292]

The Nagari script has been thought of as a northern Indic script for Sanskrit as well as the regional languages such as Hindi, Marathi, and Nepali. However, it has had a "supra-local" status as evidenced by 1st-millennium CE epigraphy and manuscripts discovered all over India and as far as Sri Lanka, Burma, Indonesia, and in its parent form, called the Siddhamatrka script, found in manuscripts of East Asia.[293] The Sanskrit and Balinese languages Sanur inscription on Belanjong pillar of Bali (Indonesia), dated to about 914 CE, is in part in the Nagari script.[294]

The Nagari script used for Classical Sanskrit has the fullest repertoire of characters consisting of fourteen vowels and thirty three consonants. For Vedic Sanskrit, it has two more allophonic consonantal characters (the intervocalic ळ ḷa, and ळ्ह ḷha).[293] To communicate phonetic accuracy, it also includes several modifiers such as the anusvara dot and the visarga double dot, punctuation symbols and others such as the halanta sign.[293]

Other writing systems

 
Sanskrit in modern Indian and other Brahmi scripts: May Śiva bless those who take delight in the language of the gods. (Kālidāsa)

Other scripts such as Gujarati, Bangla, Odia and major south Indian scripts, states Salomon, "have been and often still are used in their proper territories for writing Sanskrit".[287] These and many Indian scripts look different to the untrained eye, but the differences between Indic scripts is "mostly superficial and they share the same phonetic repertoire and systemic features", states Salomon.[295] They all have essentially the same set of eleven to fourteen vowels and thirty-three consonants as established by the Sanskrit language and attestable in the Brahmi script. Further, a closer examination reveals that they all have the similar basic graphic principles, the same varnamala (literally, "garland of letters") alphabetic ordering following the same logical phonetic order, easing the work of historic skilled scribes writing or reproducing Sanskrit works across South Asia.[296][ao] The Sanskrit language written in some Indic scripts exaggerate angles or round shapes, but this serves only to mask the underlying similarities. Nagari script favours symmetry set with squared outlines and right angles. In contrast, Sanskrit written in the Bangla script emphasizes the acute angles while the neighbouring Odia script emphasizes rounded shapes and uses cosmetically appealing "umbrella-like curves" above the script symbols.[298]

 
One of the earliest known Sanskrit inscriptions in Tamil Grantha script at a rock-cut Hindu Trimurti temple (Mandakapattu, c. 615 CE)

In the south, where Dravidian languages predominate, scripts used for Sanskrit include the Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam and Grantha alphabets.

Transliteration schemes, Romanisation

Since the late 18th century, Sanskrit has been transliterated using the Latin alphabet. The system most commonly used today is the IAST (International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration), which has been the academic standard since 1888. ASCII-based transliteration schemes have also evolved because of difficulties representing Sanskrit characters in computer systems. These include Harvard-Kyoto and ITRANS, a transliteration scheme that is used widely on the Internet, especially in Usenet and in email, for considerations of speed of entry as well as rendering issues. With the wide availability of Unicode-aware web browsers, IAST has become common online. It is also possible to type using an alphanumeric keyboard and transliterate to Devanagari using software like Mac OS X's international support.

European scholars in the 19th century generally preferred Devanagari for the transcription and reproduction of whole texts and lengthy excerpts. However, references to individual words and names in texts composed in European Languages were usually represented with Roman transliteration. From the 20th century onwards, because of production costs, textual editions edited by Western scholars have mostly been in Romanised transliteration.[299]

Epigraphy

The earliest known stone inscriptions in Sanskrit are in the Brahmi script from the first century BCE.[138][ap][aq] These include the Ayodhyā (Uttar Pradesh) and Hāthībādā-Ghosuṇḍī (near Chittorgarh, Rajasthan) inscriptions.[138][302] Both of these, states Salomon, are "essentially standard" and "correct Sanskrit", with a few exceptions reflecting an "informal Sanskrit usage".[138] Other important Hindu inscriptions dated to the 1st century BCE, in relatively accurate classical Sanskrit and Brahmi script are the Yavanarajya inscription on a red sandstone slab and the long Naneghat inscription on the wall of a cave rest stop in the Western Ghats.[303]

Besides these few examples from the 1st century BCE, the earliest Sanskrit and hybrid dialect inscriptions are found in Mathura (Uttar Pradesh).[304] These date to the 1st and 2nd century CE, states Salomon, from the time of the Indo-Scythian Northern Satraps and the subsequent Kushan Empire.[ar] These are also in the Brahmi script.[306] The earliest of these, states Salomon, are attributed to Ksatrapa Sodasa from the early years of 1st century CE. Of the Mathura inscriptions, the most significant is the Mora Well Inscription.[306] In a manner similar to the Hathibada inscription, the Mora well inscription is a dedicatory inscription and is linked to the cult of the Vrishni heroes: it mentions a stone shrine (temple), pratima (murti, images) and calls the five Vrishnis as bhagavatam.[306][307] There are many other Mathura Sanskrit inscriptions in Brahmi script overlapping the era of Indo-Scythian Northern Satraps and early Kushanas.[306] Other significant 1st-century inscriptions in reasonably good classical Sanskrit in the Brahmi script include the Vasu Doorjamb Inscription and the Mountain Temple inscription.[308] The early ones are related to the Brahmanical, except for the inscription from Kankali Tila which may be Jaina, but none are Buddhist.[309][310] A few of the later inscriptions from the 2nd century CE include Buddhist Sanskrit, while others are in "more or less" standard Sanskrit and related to the Brahmanical tradition.[311]

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Starting in about the 1st century BCE, Sanskrit has been written in many South Asian, Southeast Asian and Central Asian scripts.

In Maharashtra and Gujarat, Brahmi script Sanskrit inscriptions from the early centuries of the common era exist at the Nasik Caves site, near the Girnar mountain of Junagadh and elsewhere such as at Kanakhera, Kanheri, and Gunda.[312] The Nasik inscription dates to the mid-1st century CE, is a fair approximation of standard Sanskrit and has hybrid features.[312] The Junagadh rock inscription of Western Satraps ruler Rudradaman I (c. 150 CE, Gujarat) is the first long poetic-style inscription in "more or less" standard Sanskrit that has survived into the modern era. It represents a turning point in the history of Sanskrit epigraphy, states Salomon.[313][as] Though no similar inscriptions are found for about two hundred years after the Rudradaman reign, it is important because its style is the prototype of the eulogy-style Sanskrit inscriptions found in the Gupta Empire era.[313] These inscriptions are also in the Brahmi script.[314]

The Nagarjunakonda inscriptions are the earliest known substantial South Indian Sanskrit inscriptions, probably from the late 3rd century or early 4th century CE, or both.[315] These inscriptions are related to Buddhism and the Shaivism tradition of Hinduism.[316] A few of these inscriptions from both traditions are verse-style in the classical Sanskrit language, while some such as the pillar inscription is written in prose and a hybridized Sanskrit language.[315] An earlier hybrid Sanskrit inscription found on Amaravati slab is dated to the late 2nd century, while a few later ones include Sanskrit inscriptions along with Prakrit inscriptions related to Hinduism and Buddhism.[317] After the 3rd century CE, Sanskrit inscriptions dominate and many have survived.[318] Between the 4th and 7th centuries CE, south Indian inscriptions are exclusively in the Sanskrit language.[at] In the eastern regions of South Asia, scholars report minor Sanskrit inscriptions from the 2nd century, these being fragments and scattered. The earliest substantial true Sanskrit language inscription of Susuniya (West Bengal) is dated to the 4th century.[319] Elsewhere, such as Dehradun (Uttarakhand), inscriptions in more or less correct classical Sanskrit inscriptions are dated to the 3rd century.[319]

According to Salomon, the 4th-century reign of Samudragupta was the turning point when the classical Sanskrit language became established as the "epigraphic language par excellence" of the Indian world.[320] These Sanskrit language inscriptions are either "donative" or "panegyric" records. Generally in accurate classical Sanskrit, they deploy a wide range of regional Indic writing systems extant at the time.[321] They record the donation of a temple or stupa, images, land, monasteries, pilgrim's travel record, public infrastructure such as water reservoir and irrigation measures to prevent famine. Others praise the king or the donor in lofty poetic terms.[322] The Sanskrit language of these inscriptions is written on stone, various metals, terracotta, wood, crystal, ivory, shell, and cloth.[323][au]

The evidence of the use of the Sanskrit language in Indic writing systems appears in southeast Asia in the first half of the 1st millennium CE.[326] A few of these in Vietnam are bilingual where both the Sanskrit and the local language is written in the Indian alphabet. Early Sanskrit language inscriptions in Indic writing systems are dated to the 4th century in Malaysia, 5th to 6th centuries in Thailand near Si Thep and the Sak River, early 5th century in Kutai (known as the Mulavarman inscription discovered in eastern Borneo), and mid-5th century in west Java (Indonesia).[327] Both major writing systems for Sanskrit, the North Indian and South Indian scripts, have been discovered in southeast Asia, but the Southern variety with its rounded shapes are far more common.[328] The Indic scripts, particularly the Pallava script prototype,[329] spread and ultimately evolved into Mon-Burmese, Khmer, Thai, Lao, Sumatran, Celebes, Javanese and Balinese scripts.[330] From about the 5th century, Sanskrit inscriptions become common in many parts of South Asia and Southeast Asia, with significant discoveries in Nepal, Vietnam and Cambodia.[320]

Literature

Literature in Sanskrit[av] can be broadly divided into texts composed in Vedic Sanskrit and the later Classical Sanskrit.[332] Vedic Sanskrit is the language of the extensive liturgical works of the Vedic religion, [aw] which aside from the four Vedas, include the Brāhmaṇas and the Sūtras.[334][335][336]

The Vedic literature that survives is entirely of a religious form, whereas works in Classical Sanskrit exist in a wide variety of fields including epics, lyric, drama, romance, fairytale, fables, grammar, civil and religious law, the science of politics and practical life, the science of love and sex, philosophy, medicine, astronomy, astrology and mathematics, and is largely secular in subject-matter.[337][338]

While Vedic literature is essentially optimistic in spirit, portraying man as strong and powerful capable of finding fulfilment both here and in the afterworld, the later literature is pessimistic, portraying humans as controlled by the forces of fate with worldly pleasures deemed the cause of misery. These fundamental differences in psychology are attributed to the absence of the doctrines of Karma and reincarnation in the Vedic period, notions which are very prevalent in later times.[339]

Works

Sanskrit has been written in various scripts on a variety of media such as palm leaves, cloth, paper, rock and metal sheets, from ancient times.[340]

Sanskrit literature by tradition
Tradition Sanskrit texts, genre or collection Example References
Hinduism Scriptures Vedas, Upaniṣads, Āgamas, the Bhagavad·Gītā [341][342]
Language, Grammar Aṣṭādhyāyī, Gaṇa·pāṭha, Pada·pāṭha, Vārttikas, Mahābhāṣya, Vākya·padīya, Phiṭ·sūtra [343][344][345]
Civil and Religious Law Dharma·sūtras/Dharma·śāstras,[ax] Manu·smṛti [346][347]
Statecraft, political science Artha·śāstra [348]
Timekeeping, Mathematics, Logic Kalpa, Jyotiṣa, Gaṇita·śāstra, Śulba·sūtras, Siddhāntas, Āryabhaṭīya, Daśa·gītikā·sutra, Siddhānta·śiromaṇi, Gaṇita·sāra·saṅgraha, Bīja·gaṇita[ay] [349][350]
Life sciences, health Āyurveda, Suśruta·saṃhitā, Caraka·saṃhitā [351][352]
Sex, emotions[az] Kāma·sūtra, Pañca·sāyaka, Rati·rahasya, Rati·mañjari, Anaṅga·ranga [353][354]
Epics Rāmāyaṇa, Mahābhārata [355][356]
Court Epic (Kāvya) Raghu·vaṃśa, Kumāra·sambhava [357]
Gnomic and didactic literature Subhāṣitas, Nīti·śataka, Bodhicary'âvatāra, Śṛṅgāra·jñāna·nirṇaya, Kalā·vilāsa, Catur·varga·saṅgraha, Nīti·mañjari, Mugdh'ôpadeśa, Subhāṣita·ratna·sandoha, Yoga·śāstra, Śṛṅgāra·vairāgya·taraṅgiṇī [358]
Drama, dance and the performance arts Nāṭya·śāstra [359][360][361]
Music Sangīta·śāstra [362][363]
Poetics Kāvya·śāstra [364]
Mythology Purāṇas [365]
Mystical speculations, Philosophy Darśana, Sāṅkhya, Yoga (philosophy), Nyāya, Vaiśeṣika, Mīmāṅsa, Vedānta, Vaishnavism, Shaivism, Shaktism, Smārta Tradition and others [366]
Agriculture and food Kṛṣi·śāstra [367]
Design, architecture (Vastu, Śilpa) Śilpa·śāstra [368][369]
Temples, Sculpture Bṛhat·saṃhitā [370]
Saṃskāra (rites-of-passage) Gṛhya·sūtras [371]
Buddhism Sutras, Vinaya, Kāvya, Medicine, Buddhist philosophy Tripiṭaka,[ba] Mahayana sutras and shastras, tantras, grammar texts, Buddhist poetry, drama, Buddhist medical texts [372][373][374]
Jainism Theology, philosophy Tattvārtha Sūtra, Mahāpurāṇa and others [375][376]

Lexicon

As an Indo-European language, Sanskrit's core lexicon is inherited from Proto-Indo-European. Over time however, the language exhibits a tendency to shed many of these inherited words and borrow others in their place from other sources.

In the oldest Vedic literature, there are few such non-Indo-European words, but these progressively grow in volume.[377]

The following are some of the old Indo-European words that eventually fade out of use in Sanskrit:[378]

ápas work c.f. Latin opus
kravís   raw flesh   c.f. Latin crūdus
dáma-   house   c.f. Latin domus
dā́nu- moisture
háras- heat

Dravidian lexical influence

The sources of these new loanwords are many, and vary across the different regions of the Indian subcontinent. But of all influences on the lexicon of Sanskrit, the most important is Dravidian.

The following is a list of Dravidian entrants into Sanskrit lexicon, although some may have been contested:[379][380]

phálam ripe fruit Proto-Dravidian *paḷam
múkham   mouth Proto-Dravidian *mukam
kajjala-   soot, lampblack  
kaṭu- sharp, pungent
kaṭhina- hard, firm
kuṭi- hut, house
kuṭṭ- to pound
kuṇḍala-
 
loop, ring, earring,
coil of rope
khala- a rogue
mayū́ra- peacock
mallikā jasmine
mīna- fish
vallī- creeper
heramba-   buffalo

Nominal-form preference

While Vedic and epic form of speech is largely cognate to that of other Indo-European languages such as Greek and Latin, later Sanskrit shows a tendency to move away from using verbal forms to nominal ones. Examples of nominal forms taking the place of conventional conjugation are:

past participle with  
the instrumental
nareṇa gataḥ  
 
  "the man went",
(lit. "by the man [it was] gone")
 
active past participle  
in -vant
kṛta·vān
 
  "he did"
 

However the most notable development is the prolific use of word-compounding to express ideas normally conveyed by verbal forms and subclauses introduced by conjunctions.[381]

Classical Sanskrit's pre-eminent playwright Kālidāsa uses:

vīcikṣobhastanitavihagaśreṇikāñcīguṇā  
 
  whose girdle-string is a row of birds,
loquacious through the agitation of the waves

Influence on other languages

For nearly 2,000 years, Sanskrit was the language of a cultural order that exerted influence across South Asia, Inner Asia, Southeast Asia, and to a certain extent East Asia.[169] A significant form of post-Vedic Sanskrit is found in the Sanskrit of Indian epic poetry—the Ramayana and Mahabharata. The deviations from Pāṇini in the epics are generally considered to be on account of interference from Prakrits, or innovations, and not because they are pre-Paninian.[382] Traditional Sanskrit scholars call such deviations ārṣa (आर्ष), meaning 'of the ṛṣis', the traditional title for the ancient authors. In some contexts, there are also more "prakritisms" (borrowings from common speech) than in Classical Sanskrit proper. Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit is a literary language heavily influenced by the Middle Indo-Aryan languages, based on early Buddhist Prakrit texts which subsequently assimilated to the Classical Sanskrit standard in varying degrees.[383]

Indian subcontinent

Sanskrit has greatly influenced the languages of India that grew from its vocabulary and grammatical base; for instance, Hindi is a "Sanskritised register" of Hindustani. All modern Indo-Aryan languages, as well as Munda and Dravidian languages have borrowed many words either directly from Sanskrit (tatsama words), or indirectly via middle Indo-Aryan languages (tadbhava words). Words originating in Sanskrit are estimated at roughly fifty percent of the vocabulary of modern Indo-Aryan languages, as well as the literary forms of Malayalam and Kannada.[384] Literary texts in Telugu are lexically Sanskrit or Sanskritised to an enormous extent, perhaps seventy percent or more.[385] Marathi is another prominent language in Western India, that derives most of its words and Marathi grammar from Sanskrit.[386] Sanskrit words are often preferred in the literary texts in Marathi over corresponding colloquial Marathi word.[387]

There has been a profound influence of Sanskrit on the lexical and grammatical systems of Dravidian languages. As per Dalby, India has been a single cultural area for about two millennia which has helped Sanskrit influence on all the Indic languages.[388] Emeneau and Burrow mention the tendency "for all four of the Dravidian literary languages in South to make literary use of total Sanskrit lexicon indiscriminately".[389] There are a large number of loanwords found in the vocabulary of the three major Dravidian languages Malayalam, Kannada and Telugu.[388] Tamil also has significant loanwords from Sanskrit.[390] Krishnamurthi mentions that although it is not clear when the Sanskrit influence happened on the Dravidian languages, it might have been around the 5th century BCE at the time of separation of Tamil and Kannada from a common ancestral stage.[391] ‌The borrowed words are classified into two types based on phonological integration – tadbhava – those words derived from Prakrit and tatsama – unassimilated loanwords from Sanskrit.[392]

Strazny mentions that "so massive has been the influence that it is hard to utter Sanskrit words have influenced Kannada from the early times".[393] The first document in Kannada, the Halmidi inscription has a large number of Sanskrit words. As per Kachru, the influence has not only been on single lexical items in Kannada but also on "long nominal compounds and complicated syntactic expressions". New words have been created in Kannada using Sanskrit derivational prefixes and suffixes like vike:ndri:karaṇa, anili:karaṇa, bahi:skruTa. Similar stratification is found in verb morphology. Sanskrit words readily undergo verbalization in Kannada, verbalizing suffixes as in: cha:pisu, dowDa:yisu, rava:nisu.[394]

George mentions that "No other Dravidian language has been so deeply influenced by Sanskrit as Malayalam".[395] According to Lambert, Malayalam is so immensely Sanskritised that every Sanskrit word can be used in Malayalam by integrating "prosodic phonological" changes as per Grant.[396] Loanwords have been integrated into Malayalam by "prosodic phonological" changes as per Grant. These phonological changes are either by replacement of a vowel as in sant-am coming from Sanskrit santa, sāgar-am from sāgara, or addition of prothetic vowel as in aracan from rājā-, uruvam from rūpa, codyam from sodhya.[392]

Hans Henrich et al. note that, the language of the pre-modern Telugu literature was also highly influenced by Sanskrit and was standardized between 11th and 14th centuries.[397] Aiyar has shown that in a class of tadbhavas in Telugu the first and second letters are often replaced by the third and fourth letters and fourth again replaced often by h. Examples of the same are: Sanskrit artha becomes ardhama, vīthi becomes vidhi, putra becomes bidda, mukham becomes muhamu.[398]

Tamil also has been influenced from Sanskrit. Hans Henrich et al. mention that propagation of Jainism and Buddhism into south India had its influence.[397] Shulman mentions that although contrary to the views held by Tamil purists, modern Tamil has been significantly influenced from Sanskrit, further states that "Indeed there may well be more Sanskrit in Tamil than in the Sanskrit derived north-Indian vernaculars". Sanskrit words have been Tamilized through the "Tamil phonematic grid".[390]

Beyond the Indian subcontinent

 
 
Sanskrit has had a historical presence and influence in many parts of Asia. Above (top clockwise): [i] a Sanskrit manuscript from Turkestan, [ii] another from Miran-China.

Sanskrit was a language for religious purposes and for the political elite in parts of medieval era Southeast Asia, Central Asia and East Asia, having been introduced in these regions mainly along with the spread of Buddhism. In some cases, it has competed with Pāli for prominence.[158][399]

East Asia

 
 
[i] a bell with Sanskrit engravings in South Korea [ii] the Kūkai calligraphy of Siddham-Sanskrit in Japan

Buddhist Sanskrit has had a considerable influence on Sino-Tibetan languages such as Chinese, state William Wang and Chaofen Sun.[400] Many words have been adopted from Sanskrit into the Chinese, both in its historic religious discourse and everyday use.[400][bb] This process likely started about 200 CE and continued through about 1400 CE, with the efforts of monks such as Yuezhi, Anxi, Kangju, Tianzhu, Yan Fodiao, Faxian, Xuanzang and Yijing.[400]

Further, as the Chinese languages and culture influenced the rest of East Asia, the ideas in Sanskrit texts and some of its linguistic elements migrated further.[156][401]

Many terms were transliterated directly and added to the Chinese vocabulary. Chinese words like 剎那 chànà (Devanagari: क्षण kṣaṇa 'instantaneous period') were borrowed from Sanskrit. Many Sanskrit texts survive only in Tibetan collections of commentaries to the Buddhist teachings, the Tengyur.

Sanskrit has also influenced the religious register of Japanese mostly through transliterations. These were borrowed from Chinese transliterations.[402] In particular, the Shingon (lit.'True Words') sect of esoteric Buddhism has been relying on Sanskrit and original Sanskrit mantras and writings, as a means of realizing Buddhahood.[403]

Southeast Asia

 
 
[i] the Thai script [ii] a Sanskrit inscription in Cambodia

A large number of inscriptions in Sanskrit across Southeast Asia testify the influence the language held in these regions.[404]

Languages such as Indonesian, Thai and Lao contain many loanwords from Sanskrit, as does Khmer. Many Sanskrit loanwords are also found in Austronesian languages, such as Javanese, particularly the older form in which nearly half the vocabulary is borrowed.[405]

Other Austronesian languages, such as Malay (descended into modern Malaysian and Indonesian standards) also derive much of their vocabulary from Sanskrit. Similarly, Philippine languages such as Tagalog have some Sanskrit loanwords, although more are derived from Spanish.

A Sanskrit loanword encountered in many Southeast Asian languages is the word bhāṣā, or spoken language, which is used to refer to the names of many languages.[406]

To this day, Southeast Asian languages such as Thai are known to draw upon Sanskrit for technical vocabulary.[407]

Indonesia
 
The ancient Yūpa inscription (one of the earliest and oldest Sanskrit texts written in ancient Indonesia) dating back to the 4th century CE written by Brahmins under the rule of King Mulavarman of the Kutai Martadipura Kingdom located in eastern Borneo

The earliest Sanskrit text which was founded in the Indonesian archipelago was at Eastern Borneo dating back to 400 CE known as the Mulavarman inscription.[408] This is one of the reason of strong influence of Indian culture that entered the Malay archipelago during the Indianization era, and since then, Indian culture has been absorbed towards Indonesian culture and language. Thus, the Sanskrit culture in Indonesia exists not as a religious aspect but more towards a cultural aspect that has been present for generations, resulting in a more cultural rather than Hinduistic value of the Indonesian people. As a result, it is common to find Muslim or Christian Indonesians with names that have Indian or Sanskrit nuances. Unlike names derived from Sanskrit in Thai and Khmer, the pronunciation of Sanskrit names in Indonesia is more similar to the original Indian pronunciation, except that "v" is changed to "w", for example, "Vishnu" in India will be spelled "Wisnu" in Indonesia.

Sanskrit has influenced Indonesian to a great extent.[409] Many words in Indonesian are taken from Sanskrit, for example from the word "language" (bhāṣa) itself comes from Sanskrit which means: "talking accent". In fact, names of cities such as Jayapura (the capital city of Papua province), including terms and mottoes of government, educational and military institutions use Sanskrit, such as the rank of general for example in the Indonesian Navy is "Laksamana" (taken from the Ramayana). The name of the environmental award given to cities throughout Indonesia by the central government is also taken from Sanskrit known as the "Adipura" award, namely from the words "Adi" (which means "role model") and "Pura" (which means "city") literally "A role model city" or "a city worthy of being an example". Sanskrit terms are also widely used in numerous government institutions such as the armed forces and national police, for example, the motto of the Indonesian National Police which reads "Rashtra Sevakottama", the motto of the Indonesian Military Academy which reads "Adhitakarya Mahatvavirya Nagarabhakti" (अधिकाऱ्या विर्य नगरभक्ति) and the motto of the Indonesian Naval Academy which reads "Hree Dharma Shanti" are one of the small examples. Other Sanskrit terms such as: "Adhi Makayasa", "Chandradimuka", "Tri Dharma Eka Karma", "Taruna", etc are also used intensively in the Indonesian security and defence forces.[410]

Rest of the world

In ancient and medieval times, several Sanskrit words in the field of food and spices made their way into European languages including Greek, Latin and later English. Some of these are pepper, ginger and sugar. English today has several words of Sanskrit origin, most of them borrowed[411][better source needed] during the British Raj or later. Some of these words have in turn been borrowed by other European or world languages.

Modern era

Liturgy, ceremonies and meditation

Sanskrit is the sacred language of various Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain traditions. It is used during worship in Hindu temples. In Newar Buddhism, it is used in all monasteries, while Mahayana and Tibetan Buddhist religious texts and sutras are in Sanskrit as well as vernacular languages. Some of the revered texts of Jainism including the Tattvartha sutra, Ratnakaranda śrāvakācāra, the Bhaktamara Stotra and later versions of the Agamas are in Sanskrit. Further, states Paul Dundas, Sanskrit mantras and Sanskrit as a ritual language was commonplace among Jains throughout their medieval history.[412]

Many Hindu rituals and rites-of-passage such as the "giving away the bride" and mutual vows at weddings, a baby's naming or first solid food ceremony and the goodbye during a cremation invoke and chant Sanskrit hymns.[413] Major festivals such as the Durga Puja ritually recite entire Sanskrit texts such as the Devi Mahatmya every year particularly amongst the numerous communities of eastern India.[414][415] In the south, Sanskrit texts are recited at many major Hindu temples such as the Meenakshi Temple.[416] According to Richard H. Davis, a scholar of Religion and South Asian studies, the breadth and variety of oral recitations of the Sanskrit text Bhagavad Gita is remarkable. In India and beyond, its recitations include "simple private household readings, to family and neighborhood recitation sessions, to holy men reciting in temples or at pilgrimage places for passersby, to public Gita discourses held almost nightly at halls and auditoriums in every Indian city".[417]

Literature and arts

More than 3,000 Sanskrit works have been composed since India's independence in 1947.[418] Much of this work has been judged of high quality, in comparison to both classical Sanskrit literature and modern literature in other Indian languages.[419][420]

The Sahitya Akademi has given an award for the best creative work in Sanskrit every year since 1967. In 2009, Satya Vrat Shastri became the first Sanskrit author to win the Jnanpith Award, India's highest literary award.[421]

Sanskrit is used extensively in the Carnatic and Hindustani branches of classical music. Kirtanas, bhajans, stotras, and shlokas of Sanskrit are popular throughout India. The Samaveda uses musical notations in several of its recessions.[422]

In Mainland China, musicians such as Sa Dingding have written pop songs in Sanskrit.[423]

Numerous loan Sanskrit words are found in other major Asian languages. For example, Filipino,[424] Cebuano,[425] Lao, Khmer[426] Thai and its alphabets, Malay (including Malaysian and Indonesian), Javanese (old Javanese-English dictionary by P.J. Zoetmulder contains over 25,500 entries), and even in English.

Media

Since 1974, there has been a short daily news broadcast on state-run All India Radio.[427] These broadcasts are also made available on the internet on AIR's website.[428][429] Sanskrit news is broadcast on TV and on the internet through the DD National channel at 6:55 AM IST.[430]

Over 90 weeklies, fortnightlies and quarterlies are published in Sanskrit. Sudharma, a daily printed newspaper in Sanskrit, has been published out of Mysore, India, since 1970. It was started by K.N. Varadaraja Iyengar, a Sanskrit scholar from Mysore. Sanskrit Vartman Patram and Vishwasya Vrittantam started in Gujarat during the last five years.[427]

Schools and contemporary status

 
Sanskrit festival at Pramati Hillview Academy, Mysore, India

Sanskrit has been taught in schools from time immemorial in India. In modern times, the first Sanskrit University was Sampurnanand Sanskrit University, established in 1791 in the Indian city of Varanasi. Sanskrit is taught in 5,000 traditional schools (Pathashalas), and 14,000 schools[431] in India, where there are also 22 colleges and universities dedicated to the exclusive study of the language.[citation needed] Sanskrit is one of the 22 scheduled languages of India.[275] Despite it being a studied school subject in contemporary India, Sanskrit has not been spoken as a native language in centuries.[432][433][434]

The Central Board of Secondary Education of India (CBSE), along with several other state education boards, has made Sanskrit an alternative option to the state's own official language as a second or third language choice in the schools it governs. In such schools, learning Sanskrit is an option for grades 5 to 8 (Classes V to VIII). This is true of most schools affiliated with the Indian Certificate of Secondary Education (ICSE) board, especially in states where the official language is Hindi. Sanskrit is also taught in traditional gurukulas throughout India.[435]

A number of colleges and universities in India have dedicated departments for Sanskrit studies. In March 2020, the Indian Parliament passed the Central Sanskrit Universities Act, 2020 which upgraded three universities, National Sanskrit University, Central Sanskrit University and Shri Lal Bahadur Shastri National Sanskrit University, from the deemed to be university status to a central university status.[436]

Dmitri Mendeleev used the Sanskrit numbers of one, two and three ( eka-, dvi- or dwi-, and tri- respectively) to give provisional names to his predicted elements, like eka-boron being Gallium or eka-Radium being Ununennium.

In the province of Bali in Indonesia, a number of educational and scholarly institutions have also been conducting Sanskrit lessons for Hindu locals.[437]

In the West

St James Junior School and Avanti Schools Trust in London, England, offer Sanskrit as part of the curriculum.[438][439] Since September 2009, US high school students have been able to receive credits as Independent Study or toward Foreign Language requirements by studying Sanskrit as part of the "SAFL: Samskritam as a Foreign Language" program coordinated by Samskrita Bharati.[440] In Australia, the private boys' high school Sydney Grammar School offers Sanskrit from years 7 through to 12, including for the Higher School Certificate.[441] Other schools that offer Sanskrit include the Ficino School in Auckland, New Zealand; St James Preparatory Schools in Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg, South Africa; John Colet School, Sydney, Australia; Erasmus School, Melbourne, Australia.[442][443][444]

European studies and discourse

European scholarship in Sanskrit, begun by Heinrich Roth (1620–1668) and Johann Ernst Hanxleden (1681–1731), is considered responsible for the discovery of an Indo-European language family by Sir William Jones (1746–1794). This research played an important role in the development of Western philology, or historical linguistics.[445]

The 18th- and 19th-century speculations about the possible links of Sanskrit to ancient Egyptian language were later proven to be wrong, but it fed an orientalist discourse both in the form Indophobia and Indophilia, states Trautmann.[446] Sanskrit writings, when first discovered, were imagined by Indophiles to potentially be "repositories of the primitive experiences and religion of the human race, and as such confirmatory of the truth of Christian scripture", as well as a key to "universal ethnological narrative".[447]: 96–97  The Indophobes imagined the opposite, making the counterclaim that there is little of any value in Sanskrit, portraying it as "a language fabricated by artful [Brahmin] priests", with little original thought, possibly copied from the Greeks who came with Alexander or perhaps the Persians.[447]: 124–126 

Scholars such as William Jones and his colleagues felt the need for systematic studies of Sanskrit language and literature. This launched the Asiatic Society, an idea that was soon transplanted to Europe starting with the efforts of Henry Thomas Colebrooke in Britain, then Alexander Hamilton who helped expand its studies to Paris and thereafter his student Friedrich Schlegel who introduced Sanskrit to the universities of Germany. Schlegel nurtured his own students into influential European Sanskrit scholars, particularly through Franz Bopp and Friedrich Max Müller. As these scholars translated the Sanskrit manuscripts, the enthusiasm for Sanskrit grew rapidly among European scholars, states Trautmann, and chairs for Sanskrit "were established in the universities of nearly every German statelet" creating a competition for Sanskrit experts.[447]: 133–142 

Symbolic usage

In India, Indonesia, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Southeast Asia, Sanskrit phrases are widely used as mottoes for various national, educational and social organisations:

  • India: Satyameva Jayate (सत्यमेव जयते), meaning 'truth alone triumphs'.[448]
  • Nepal: Janani Janmabhūmischa Swargādapi Garīyasī (जननी जन्मभूमिश्च स्वर्गादपि गरीयसी), meaning 'mother and motherland are superior to heaven'.[citation needed]
  • Indonesia: In Indonesia, Sanskrit is widely used as terms and mottoes of the armed forces and other national organizations (See: Indonesian Armed Forces mottoes). Rastra Sewakottama (राष्ट्र सेवकोत्तम, transl. 'people's main servants') is the official motto of the Indonesian National Police, Tri Dharma Eka Karma (त्रिधर्म एक कर्म) is the official motto of the Indonesian Military, Kartika Eka Paksi (कार्तिक एक पक्षी, transl. 'unmatchable bird with noble goals') is the official motto of the Indonesian Army,[449] Adhitakarya Mahatvavirya Nagarabhakti (अधीतकार्य महत्ववीर्य नगरभक्ति, transl. 'hard-working knights serving bravery as nations hero') is the official motto of the Indonesian Military Academy,[450] Upakriya Labdha Prayojana Balottama (उपक्रिया लब्ध प्रयोजन बालोत्तम, transl. 'purpose of the unit is to give the best service to the nation by finding the perfect soldier') is the official motto of the Army Psychological Corps, Karmanye Vadikaraste Mafalesu Kadatjana (कर्मण्येवाधिकारस्ते मा फलेषु कदाचन, transl. 'working without counting the profit and loss') is the official motto of the Air-Force Special Forces (Paskhas),[451] Jalesu Bhumyamca Jayamahe (जलेषु भूम्यम्च जयमहे, transl. 'on the sea and land we are glorious') is the official motto of the Indonesian Marine Corps,[452] and there are more units and organizations in Indonesia either Armed Forces or civil which use the Sanskrit language respectively as their mottoes and other purposes.
  • Many of India's and Nepal's scientific and administrative terms use Sanskrit. The Indian guided missile program that was commenced in 1983 by the Defence Research and Development Organisation has named the five missiles (ballistic and others) that it developed Prithvi, Agni, Akash, Nag and the Trishul missile system. India's first modern fighter aircraft is named HAL Tejas.[citation needed]

In November 2020, Gaurav Sharma, a New Zealand politician of Indian origin swore into parliament using Sanskrit alongside Māori; the decision was made as a "homage to all Indian languages" compromising between his native Pahari and Punjabi.[453]

In popular culture

The song My Sweet Lord by George Harrison includes The Hare Krishna mantra, also referred to reverentially as the Maha Mantra, a 16-word Vaishnava mantra which is mentioned in the Kali-Santarana Upanishad. Satyagraha, an opera by Philip Glass, uses texts from the Bhagavad Gita, sung in Sanskrit.[454][455] In 1996, English psychedelic rock band Kula Shaker released Govinda, a song entirely sung in Sanskrit. The closing credits of The Matrix Revolutions has a prayer from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. The song "Cyber-raga" from Madonna's album Music includes Sanskrit chants,[456] and Shanti/Ashtangi from her 1998 album Ray of Light, which won a Grammy, is the ashtanga vinyasa yoga chant.[457] The lyrics include the mantra Om shanti.[458] Composer John Williams featured choirs singing in Sanskrit for Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace.[459][460][better source needed] The theme song of Battlestar Galactica 2004 is the Gayatri Mantra, taken from the Rigveda.[461] The lyrics of "The Child in Us" by Enigma also contain Sanskrit verses.[462][better source needed] In 2006, Mexican singer Paulina Rubio was influenced in Sanskrit for her concept album Ananda.[463]

See also

Notes

  1. ^ a b "In conclusion, there are strong systemic and paleographic indications that the Brahmi script derived from a Semitic prototype, which, mainly on historical grounds, is most likely to have been Aramaic. However, the details of this problem remain to be worked out, and in any case, it is unlikely that a complete letter-by-letter derivation will ever be possible; for Brahmi may have been more of an adaptation and remodeling, rather than a direct derivation, of the presumptive Semitic prototype, perhaps under the influence of a preexisting Indian tradition of phonetic analysis. However, the Semitic hypothesis is not so strong as to rule out the remote possibility that further discoveries could drastically change the picture. In particular, a relationship of some kind, probably partial or indirect, with the protohistoric Indus Valley script should not be considered entirely out of the question." Salomon 1998, p. 30
  2. ^ It is one of 22 Eighth Schedule languages for which the Constitution mandates development.
  3. ^ Sanskrit is "Protected Language" Under Constitution, Chapter 1 (6) (5) (b) (¡¡)[14]
  4. ^ "dhārayan·brāhmaṇam rupam·ilvalaḥ saṃskṛtam vadan..." - The Rāmāyaṇa 3.10.54 - said to be the first known use of saṃskṛta with reference to the language.[18]
  5. ^ "All these achievements are dwarfed, though, by the Sanskrit linguistic tradition culminating in the famous grammar by Pāṇini, known as the Aṣṭhādhyāyī. The elegance and comprehensiveness of its architecture have yet to be surpassed by any grammar of any language, and its ingenious methods of stratifying out use and mention, language and metalanguage, and theorem and metatheorem predate key discoveries in western philosophy by millennia."[32]
  6. ^ "The Sanskrit grammatical tradition is also the ultimate source of the notion of zero, which, once adopted in the Arabic system of numerals, allowed us to transcend the cumbersome notations of Roman arithmetic."[32]
  7. ^ 6,106 Indians in 1981, 49,736 in 1991, 14,135 in 2001, and 24,821 in 2011, have reported Sanskrit to be their mother tongue.[8]
  8. ^ William Jones (1786), quoted by Thomas Burrow in The Sanskrit Language:[62] "The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which perhaps no longer exists. There is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothick and the Celtick [sic], though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanscrit; and the Old Persian might be added to the same family.
  9. ^ The Mitanni treaty is generally dated to the 16th century BCE, but this date and its significance remains much debated.[79]
  10. ^ An example of the shared phrasal equations is the dyáuṣ pitṛ́ in Vedic Sanskrit, from Proto-Indo-European *dyḗws ph₂tḗr, meaning "sky father". The Mycenaean Greek equivalent is Zeus Pater, which evolved to Jupiter in Latin. Equivalent "paternal Heaven" phrasal equation is found in many Indo-European languages.[84]
  11. ^ Pāṇini's use of the term lipi has been a source of scholarly disagreements. Harry Falk in his 1993 overview states that ancient Indians neither knew nor used writing script, and Pāṇini's mention is likely a reference to Semitic and Greek scripts.[102] In his 1995 review, Salomon questions Falk's arguments and writes it is "speculative at best and hardly constitutes firm grounds for a late date for Kharoṣṭhī. The stronger argument for this position is that we have no specimen of the script before the time of Ashoka, nor any direct evidence of intermediate stages in its development; but of course this does not mean that such earlier forms did not exist, only that, if they did exist, they have not survived, presumably because they were not employed for monumental purposes before Ashoka".[103] According to Hartmut Scharfe, lipi of Pāṇini may be borrowed from the Old Persian dipi, in turn derived from Sumerian dup. Scharfe adds that the best evidence, at the time of his review, is that no script was used in India, aside from the Northwest Indian subcontinent, before around 300 BCE because Indian tradition "at every occasion stresses the orality of the cultural and literary heritage."[104] Kenneth Norman states writing scripts in ancient India evolved over the long period of time like other cultures, that it is unlikely that ancient Indians developed a single complete writing system at one and the same time in the Maurya era. It is even less likely, states Norman, that a writing script was invented during Ashoka's rule, starting from nothing, for the specific purpose of writing his inscriptions and then it was understood all over South Asia where the Ashoka pillars are found.[105] Goody (1987) states that ancient India likely had a "very old culture of writing" along with its oral tradition of composing and transmitting knowledge, because the Vedic literature is too vast, consistent and complex to have been entirely created, memorized, accurately preserved and spread without a written system.[106] Falk disagrees with Goody, and suggests that it is a Western presumption and inability to imagine that remarkably early scientific achievements such as Pāṇini's grammar (5th to 4th century BCE), and the creation, preservation and wide distribution of the large corpus of the Brahmanic Vedic literature and the Buddhist canonical literature, without any writing scripts. Bronkhorst (2002) disagrees with Falk, and states, "Falk goes too far. It is fair to expect that we believe that Vedic memorisation—though without parallel in any other human society—has been able to preserve very long texts for many centuries without losing a syllable. [...] However, the oral composition of a work as complex as Pāṇini's grammar is not only without parallel in other human cultures, it is without parallel in India itself. [...] It just will not do to state that our difficulty in conceiving any such thing is our problem".[107]
  12. ^ Pali is also an extinct language.[120]
  13. ^ The Indian Mission for Manuscripts initiative has already counted over 5 million manuscripts. The thirty million estimate is of David Pingree, a manuscriptologist and historian. – Peter M. Scharf[135]
  14. ^ A celebrated work on the philosophy of language is the Vakyapadiya by the 5th-century Hindu scholar Bhartrhari.[139][142][143]
  15. ^ 'That Which Is', known as the Tattvartha Sutra to Jains, is recognized by all four Jain traditions as the earliest, most authoritative, and comprehensive summary of their religion. — [147]
  16. ^ The oldest surviving Sanskrit inscription in the Kathmandu valley is dated to 464 CE.[200]
  17. ^ a b Sanskrit is written in many scripts. Sounds in grey are not phonemic.
  18. ^ is not an actual sound of Sanskrit, but rather a graphic convention included among the written vowels to maintain the symmetry of short–long pairs of letters.[219]
  19. ^ Correspondences are approximate.[234]
  20. ^ Consonant described as either at the roots of the teeth, alveolar, and retroflex. Vowels are very short, may be equivalent to short a, e or i.
  21. ^ a b Like the preceding but longer.
  22. ^ Pronounced somewhat like the lur in English "slurp".
  23. ^ Only found in the verb kl̥p "to be fit", "arrange".
  24. ^ As a nasal vowel or, if followed by a stop consonant (plosive, affricate or nasal), it is realized as the nasal in the same series as the following consonant.
  25. ^ Voiceless [h] followed by a short echo vowel. If the preceding vowel is /ai/ or /au/, the echo vowel will be [i] or [u], respectively.
  26. ^ Use depends on whether penultimate is light or heavy.
  27. ^ The "root + affix" is called the "stem".[240]
  28. ^ Other equivalents: bharāmi (I carry), bharati (he carries), bharāmas (we carry).[61] Similar morphology is found in some other Indo-European languages; for example, in the Gothic language, baira (I carry), bairis (you carry), bairiþ (he carries).
  29. ^ Ruppel gives the following endings for the "present indicative active" in the Sanskrit language: 1st dual: -vaḥ, 1st plural: -maḥ, 2nd dual: -thaḥ, 2nd plural: -tha and so on.[111]
  30. ^ The Sanskrit in the Indian epics such as the Mahabharata and the Ramayana are all in meter, and the structure of the metrics has attracted scholarly studies since the 19th century.[254]
  31. ^ Kena, Katha, Isha, Shvetashvatara, and Mundaka Upanishads are examples of verse-style ancient Upanishads.
  32. ^ Sudden or significant changes in metre, wherein the metre of succeeding sections return to earlier sections, suggest a corruption of the message, interpolations and insertion of text into a Sanskrit manuscript. It may also reflect that the text is a compilation of works of different authors and time periods.[260][261][262]
  33. ^ The Buddhist text Lalitavistara Sūtra describes the young Siddhartha—the future Buddha—to have mastered philology and scripts at a school from Brahmin Lipikara and Deva Vidyasinha.[269]
  34. ^ A version of this list of sixty-four ancient Indian scripts is found in the Chinese translation of an Indian Buddhist text, and this translation has been dated to 308 CE.[271]
  35. ^ The Greek Nearchos who visited ancient India with the army of Alexander the Great in the 4th century BCE, mentions that Indians wrote on cloth, but Nearchos could have confused Aramaic writers with the Indians.[274]
  36. ^ Salomon writes, in The World's Writing Systems (edited by Peter Daniels), that "many scholars feel that the origins of these scripts must have gone back further than this [mid-3rd century BCE Ashoka inscriptions], but there is no conclusive proof".[275]
  37. ^ Minor inscriptions discovered in the 20th century may be older, but their dating is uncertain.[280]
  38. ^ Salomon states that the inscription has a few scribal errors, but is essentially standard Sanskrit.[138]
  39. ^ Salomon illustrates this for the consonant ka which is written as " " in the Brahmi script and "क" in the Devanagari script, the vowel is marked together with the consonant before as in "कि", after "का", above "के" or below "कृ".[277]
  40. ^ Sanskrit and the Prakrits, at different times and places were written in a vast number of forms and derivatives of Brahmi. In the premodern period, in other words, these languages would be written by a given scribe in whatever happened to be the current local script ... – Richard Salomon, p 70 [284]
  41. ^ Salomon states that these shared graphic principles that combine syllabic and alphabetic writing are distinctive for Indic scripts when contrasted with other major world languages. The only known similarity is found in the Ethiopic scripts, but Ethiopic system lacks clusters and the Indic set of full vowels signs.[297]
  42. ^ Some scholars date these to the 2nd century BCE.[300][301]
  43. ^ Prakrit inscriptions of ancient India, such as those of Ashoka, are older. Louis Renou called it "the great linguistical paradox of India" that the Sanskrit inscriptions appear later than Prakrit inscriptions, although Prakrit is considered as a descendant of the Sanskrit language.[138]
  44. ^ According to Salomon, towards the end of pre-Christian era, "a smattering" of standard or nearly standard Sanskrit inscriptions came into vogue, and "we may assume that these are isolated survivals of what must have been then an increasingly common practice". He adds, that the Scythian rulers of northern and western India while not the originators, were promoters of the use of Sanskrit language for inscriptions, and "their motivation in promoting Sanskrit was presumably a desire to establish themselves as legitimate Indian or at least Indianized rulers and to curry the favor of the educated Brahmanical elite".[305]
  45. ^ The Rudradaman inscription is "not pure classical Sanskrit", but with few epic-vernacular Sanskrit exceptions, it approaches high classical Sanskrit.[313]
  46. ^ Finally, after this transitional period in the fourth and early fifth centuries CE, Prakrit fell out of use completely in southern Indian inscriptions. For the next few centuries Sanskrit was the sole epigraphic language, until the regional Dravidian languages began to come into use around the seventh century. — [319]
  47. ^ The use of the Sanskrit language in epigraphy gradually dropped after the arrival and the consolidation of Islamic Delhi Sultanate rule in the late 12th century, but it remained in active epigraphical use in the south and central regions of India. By about the 14th century, with the Islamic armies conquering more of South Asia, the use of Sanskrit language for inscriptions became rarer and it was replaced with Persian, Arabic, Dravidian and North-Indo-Aryan languages, states Salomon.[324] The Sanskrit language, particularly in bilingual form, re-emerged in the epigraphy of Hindu kingdoms such as the Vijayanagara, Yadavas, Hoysalas, Pandyas, and others that re-established themselves.[325] Some Muslim rulers such as Adil Shah also issued Sanskrit language inscriptions recording the donation of a mosque.[325]
  48. ^ "Since the Renaissance there has been no event of such worldwide significance in the history of culture as the discovery of Sanskrit literature in the latter part of the eighteenth century" - Macdonell[331]
  49. ^ 'The style of the [Vedic] works is more simple and spontaneous while that of the later works abounds in puns, conceits and long compounds. Rhetorical ornaments are more and more copious and complex and the rules of Poetic and Grammar more and more rigidly observed as time advances.' - Iyengar,[333]
  50. ^ These are just generic names for works of law
  51. ^ an account of Indian algebra
  52. ^ Kāma·śāstra, 'the science of love'
  53. ^ Most Tripiṭaka historic texts in the Pali language, but Sanskrit Tripiṭaka texts have been discovered.[372]
  54. ^ Examples of phonetically imported Sanskrit words in Chinese include samgha (Chinese: seng), bhiksuni (ni), kasaya (jiasha), namo or namas (namo), and nirvana (niepan). The list of phonetically transcribed and semantically translated words from Sanskrit into Chinese is substantial, states Xiangdong Shi.[400]

References

  1. ^ Mascaró, Juan (2003). The Bhagavad Gita. Penguin. pp. 13 ff. ISBN 978-0-14-044918-1. The Bhagawad Gita, an intensely spiritual work, that forms one of the cornerstones of the Hindu faith, and is also one of the masterpieces of Sanskrit poetry. (from the backcover)
  2. ^ Besant, Annie (trans) (1922). "Discourse 1". The Bhagavad-gita; or, The Lord's Song, with text in Devanagari, and English translation. Madras: G. E. Natesan & Co. प्रवृत्ते शस्त्रसम्पाते धनुरुद्यम्य पाण्डवः ॥ २० ॥
    Then, beholding the sons of Dhritarâshtra standing arrayed, and flight of missiles about to begin, ... the son of Pându, took up his bow,(20)
    हृषीकेशं तदा वाक्यमिदमाह महीपते । अर्जुन उवाच । ...॥ २१ ॥
    And spake this word to Hrishîkesha, O Lord of Earth: Arjuna said: ...
  3. ^ Radhakrishnan, S. (1948). The Bhagavadgītā: With an introductory essay, Sanskrit text, English translation, and notes. London, UK: George Allen and Unwin Ltd. p. 86. ... pravyite Sastrasampate
    dhanur udyamya pandavah (20)
    Then Arjuna, ... looked at the sons of Dhrtarastra drawn up in battle order; and as the flight of missiles (almost) started, he took up his bow.
    hystkesam tada vakyam
    idam aha mahipate ... (21)
    And, O Lord of earth, he spoke this word to Hrsikesha (Krsna): ...
  4. ^ Uta Reinöhl (2016). Grammaticalization and the Rise of Configurationality in Indo-Aryan. Oxford University Press. pp. xiv, 1–16. ISBN 978-0-19-873666-0.
  5. ^ Colin P. Masica 1993, p. 55: "Thus Classical Sanskrit, fixed by Panini’s grammar in probably the fourth century BC on the basis of a class dialect (and preceding grammatical tradition) of probably the seventh century BC, had its greatest literary flowering in the first millennium AD and even later, much of it therefore a full thousand years after the stage of the language it ostensibly represents."
  6. ^ a b McCartney, Patrick (10 May 2020), Searching for Sanskrit Speakers in the Indian Census, The Wire, retrieved 24 November 2020 Quote: "What this data tells us is that it is very difficult to believe the notion that Jhiri is a “Sanskrit village” where everyone only speaks fluent Sanskrit at a mother tongue level. It is also difficult to accept that the lingua franca of the rural masses is Sanskrit, when most the majority of L1, L2 and L3 Sanskrit tokens are linked to urban areas. The predominance of Sanskrit across the Hindi belt also shows a particular cultural/geographic affection that does not spread equally across the rest of the country. In addition, the clustering with Hindi and English, in the majority of variations possible, also suggests that a certain class element is involved. Essentially, people who identify as speakers of Sanskrit appear to be urban and educated, which possibly implies that the affiliation with Sanskrit is related in some way to at least some sort of Indian, if not, Hindu, nationalism."
  7. ^ a b McCartney, Patrick (11 May 2020), The Myth of 'Sanskrit Villages' and the Realm of Soft Power, The Wire, retrieved 24 November 2020 Quote: "Consider the example of this faith-based development narrative that has evolved over the past decade in the state of Uttarakhand. In 2010, Sanskrit became the state's second official language. ... Recently, an updated policy has increased this top-down imposition of language shift, toward Sanskrit. The new policy aims to create a Sanskrit village in every “block” (administrative division) of Uttarakhand. The state of Uttarakhand consists of two divisions, 13 districts, 79 sub-districts and 97 blocks. ... There is hardly a Sanskrit village in even one block in Uttarakhand. The curious thing is that, while 70% of the state's total population live in rural areas, 100pc of the total 246 L1-Sanskrit tokens returned at the 2011 census are from Urban areas. No L1-Sanskrit token comes from any villager who identifies as an L1-Sanskrit speaker in Uttarakhand."
  8. ^ a b c d e Sreevastan, Ajai (10 August 2014). "Where are the Sanskrit speakers?". The Hindu. Chennai. Retrieved 11 October 2020. Sanskrit is also the only scheduled language that shows wide fluctuations — rising from 6,106 speakers in 1981 to 49,736 in 1991 and then falling dramatically to 14,135 speakers in 2001. “This fluctuation is not necessarily an error of the Census method. People often switch language loyalties depending on the immediate political climate,” says Prof. Ganesh Devy of the People's Linguistic Survey of India. ... Because some people “fictitiously” indicate Sanskrit as their mother tongue owing to its high prestige and Constitutional mandate, the Census captures the persisting memory of an ancient language that is no longer anyone's real mother tongue, says B. Mallikarjun of the Center for Classical Language. Hence, the numbers fluctuate in each Census. ... “Sanskrit has influence without presence,” says Devy. “We all feel in some corner of the country, Sanskrit is spoken.” But even in Karnataka's Mattur, which is often referred to as India's Sanskrit village, hardly a handful indicated Sanskrit as their mother tongue.
  9. ^ a b Lowe, John J. (2017). Transitive Nouns and Adjectives: Evidence from Early Indo-Aryan. Oxford University Press. p. 53. ISBN 978-0-19-879357-1. The desire to preserve understanding and knowledge of Sanskrit in the face of ongoing linguistic change drove the development of an indigenous grammatical tradition, which culminated in the composition of the Aṣṭādhyāyī, attributed to the grammarian Pāṇini, no later than the early fourth century BCE. In subsequent centuries, Sanskrit ceased to be learnt as a native language, and eventually ceased to develop as living languages do, becoming increasingly fixed according to the prescriptions of the grammatical tradition.
  10. ^ a b Ruppel, A. M. (2017). The Cambridge Introduction to Sanskrit. Cambridge University Press. p. 2. ISBN 978-1-107-08828-3. The study of any ancient (or dead) language is faced with one main challenge: ancient languages have no native speakers who could provide us with examples of simple everyday speech
  11. ^ Annamalai, E. (2008). "Contexts of multilingualism". In Braj B. Kachru; Yamuna Kachru; S. N. Sridhar (eds.). Language in South Asia. Cambridge University Press. pp. 223–. ISBN 978-1-139-46550-2. Some of the migrated languages ... such as Sanskrit and English, remained primarily as a second language, even though their native speakers were lost. Some native languages like the language of the Indus valley were lost with their speakers, while some linguistic communities shifted their language to one or other of the migrants' languages.
  12. ^ a b Jain, Dhanesh (2007). "Sociolinguistics of the Indo-Aryan languages". In George Cardona; Dhanesh Jain (eds.). The Indo-Aryan Languages. Routledge. pp. 47–66, 51. ISBN 978-1-135-79711-9. In the history of Indo-Aryan, writing was a later development and its adoption has been slow even in modern times. The first written word comes to us through Asokan inscriptions dating back to the third century BC. Originally, Brahmi was used to write Prakrit (MIA); for Sanskrit (OIA) it was used only four centuries later (Masica 1991: 135). The MIA traditions of Buddhist and Jain texts show greater regard for the written word than the OIA Brahminical tradition, though writing was available to Old Indo-Aryans.
  13. ^ a b Salomon, Richard (2007). "The Writing Systems of the Indo-Aryan Languages". In George Cardona; Dhanesh Jain (eds.). The Indo-Aryan Languages. Routledge. pp. 67–102. ISBN 978-1-135-79711-9. Although in modern usage Sanskrit is most commonly written or printed in Nagari, in theory, it can be represented by virtually any of the main Brahmi-based scripts, and in practice it often is. Thus scripts such as Gujarati, Bangla, and Oriya, as well as the major south Indian scripts, traditionally have been and often still are used in their proper territories for writing Sanskrit. Sanskrit, in other words, is not inherently linked to any particular script, although it does have a special historical connection with Nagari.
  14. ^ "Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996 - Chapter 1: Founding Provisions". gov.za. Retrieved 6 December 2014.
  15. ^ Cardona, George; Luraghi, Silvia (2018). "Sanskrit". In Bernard Comrie (ed.). The World's Major Languages. Taylor & Francis. pp. 497–. ISBN 978-1-317-29049-0. Sanskrit (samskrita- 'adorned, purified') ... It is in the Ramayana that the term saṃskṛta- is encountered probably for the first time with reference to the language.
  16. ^ a b Wright, J.C. (1990). "Reviewed Works: Pāṇini: His Work and Its Traditions. Vol. I. Background and Introduction by George Cardona; Grammaire sanskrite pâninéenne by Pierre-Sylvain Filliozat". Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Cambridge University Press. 53 (1): 152–154. doi:10.1017/S0041977X0002156X. JSTOR 618999. The first reference to "Sanskrit" in the context of language is in the Ramayana, Book 5 (Sundarkanda), Canto 28, Verse 17: अहं ह्यतितनुश्चैव वनरश्च विशेषतः // वाचंचोदाहरिष्यामि मानुषीमिह संस्कृताम् // १७ // Hanuman says, "First, my body is very subtle, second I am a monkey. Especially as a monkey, I will use here the human-appropriate Sanskrit speech / language.
  17. ^ Apte, Vaman Shivaram (1957). Revised and enlarged edition of Prin. V.S. Apte's The practical Sanskrit-English Dictionary. Poona: Prasad Prakashan. p. 1596. from संस्कृत saṃskṛitə past passive participle: Made perfect, refined, polished, cultivated. -तः -tah A word formed regularly according to the rules of grammar, a regular derivative. -तम् -tam Refined or highly polished speech, the Sanskṛit language; संस्कृतं नाम दैवी वागन्वाख्याता महर्षिभिः ("named sanskritam the divine language elaborated by the sages") from Kāvyadarśa.1. 33. of Daṇḍin
  18. ^ Cardona 1997, p. 557.
  19. ^ a b Roger D. Woodard (2008). The Ancient Languages of Asia and the Americas. Cambridge University Press. pp. 1–2. ISBN 978-0-521-68494-1. The earliest form of this 'oldest' language, Sanskrit, is the one found in the ancient Brahmanic text called the Rigveda, composed c. 1500 BCE. The date makes Sanskrit one of the three earliest of the well-documented languages of the Indo-European family – the other two being Old Hittite and Myceanaean Greek – and, in keeping with its early appearance, Sanskrit has been a cornerstone in the reconstruction of the parent language of the Indo-European family – Proto-Indo-European.
  20. ^ a b c Bauer, Brigitte L. M. (2017). Nominal Apposition in Indo-European: Its forms and functions, and its evolution in Latin-romance. De Gruyter. pp. 90–92. ISBN 978-3-11-046175-6. For detailed comparison of the languages, see pp. 90–126.
  21. ^ a b c d Ramat, Anna Giacalone; Ramat, Paolo (2015). The Indo-European Languages. Routledge. pp. 26–31. ISBN 978-1-134-92187-4.
  22. ^ Dyson, Tim (2018). A Population History of India: From the First Modern People to the Present Day. Oxford University Press. pp. 14–15. ISBN 978-0-19-882905-8. Although the collapse of the Indus valley civilization is no longer believed to have been due to an ‘Aryan invasion’ it is widely thought that, at roughly the same time, or perhaps a few centuries later, new Indo-Aryan-speaking people and influences began to enter the subcontinent from the north-west. Detailed evidence is lacking. Nevertheless, a predecessor of the language that would eventually be called Sanskrit was probably introduced into the north-west sometime between 3,900 and 3,000 years ago. This language was related to one then spoken in eastern Iran; and both of these languages belonged to the Indo-European language family.
  23. ^ Pinkney, Andrea Marion (2014). "Revealing the Vedas in 'Hinduism': Foundations and issues of interpretation of religions in South Asian Hindu traditions". In Bryan S. Turner; Oscar Salemink (eds.). Routledge Handbook of Religions in Asia. Routledge. pp. 38–. ISBN 978-1-317-63646-5. According to Asko Parpola, the Proto-Indo-Aryan civilization was influenced by two external waves of migrations. The first group originated from the southern Urals (c. 2100 BCE) and mixed with the peoples of the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC); this group then proceeded to South Asia, arriving around 1900 BCE. The second wave arrived in northern South Asia around 1750 BCE and mixed with the formerly arrived group, producing the Mitanni Aryans (c. 1500 BCE), a precursor to the peoples of the Ṛgveda. Michael Witzel has assigned an approximate chronology to the strata of Vedic languages, arguing that the language of the Ṛgveda changed through the beginning of the Iron Age in South Asia, which started in the Northwest (Punjab) around 1000 BCE. On the basis of comparative philological evidence, Witzel has suggested a five-stage periodization of Vedic civilization, beginning with the Ṛgveda. On the basis of internal evidence, the Ṛgveda is dated as a late Bronze Age text composed by pastoral migrants with limited settlements, probably between 1350 and 1150 BCE in the Punjab region.
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  29. ^ Lowe, John J. (2015). Participles in Rigvedic Sanskrit: The syntax and semantics of adjectival verb forms. Oxford University Press. pp. 1–2. ISBN 978-0-19-100505-3. It consists of 1,028 hymns (suktas), highly crafted poetic compositions originally intended for recital during rituals and for the invocation of and communication with the Indo-Aryan gods. Modern scholarly opinion largely agrees that these hymns were composed between around 1500 BCE and 1200 BCE, during the eastward migration of the Indo-Aryan tribes from the mountains of what is today northern Afghanistan across the Punjab into north India.
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  31. ^ Shulman, David (2016). Tamil. Harvard University Press. pp. 17–19. ISBN 978-0-674-97465-4. (p. 17) Similarly, we find a large number of other items relating to flora and fauna, grains, pulses, and spices—that is, words that we might expect to have made their way into Sanskrit from the linguistic environment of prehistoric or early-historic India. ... (p. 18) Dravidian certainly influenced Sanskrit phonology and syntax from early on ... (p 19) Vedic Sanskrit was in contact, from very ancient times, with speakers of Dravidian languages, and that the two language families profoundly influenced one another.
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sanskrit, attributively, saṃskṛta, nominally, तम, saṃskṛtam, ˈsɐ, tɐm, classical, language, belonging, indo, aryan, branch, indo, european, languages, arose, south, asia, after, predecessor, languages, diffused, there, from, northwest, late, bronze, sacred, la. Sanskrit ˈ s ae n s k r ɪ t attributively स स क त saṃskṛta 15 16 nominally स स क तम saṃskṛtam IPA ˈsɐ skr tɐm 17 d is a classical language belonging to the Indo Aryan branch of the Indo European languages 19 20 21 It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had diffused there from the northwest in the late Bronze Age 22 23 Sanskrit is the sacred language of Hinduism the language of classical Hindu philosophy and of historical texts of Buddhism and Jainism It was a link language in ancient and medieval South Asia and upon transmission of Hindu and Buddhist culture to Southeast Asia East Asia and Central Asia in the early medieval era it became a language of religion and high culture and of the political elites in some of these regions 24 25 As a result Sanskrit had a lasting impact on the languages of South Asia Southeast Asia and East Asia especially in their formal and learned vocabularies 26 Sanskritस स क त स स क तम Saṃskṛta Saṃskṛtam top A 19th century illustrated Sanskrit manuscript from the Bhagavad Gita 1 composed c 400 BCE 200 BCE 2 3 bottom The 175th anniversary stamp of the third oldest Sanskrit college Sanskrit College Calcutta The oldest is Benares Sanskrit College founded in 1791 Pronunciation ˈsɐ skr tɐm RegionSouth Asia ancient and medieval parts of Southeast Asia medieval Erac 1500 600 BCE Vedic Sanskrit 4 700 BCE 1350 CE Classical Sanskrit 5 RevivalThere are no known native speakers of Sanskrit 6 7 8 9 10 11 Language familyIndo European Indo IranianIndo AryanSanskritEarly formVedic SanskritWriting systemOriginally orally transmitted Not attested in writing until the 1st century BCE when it was written in the Brahmi script and later in various Brahmic scripts a 12 13 Official statusOfficial language in India state additional official b Himachal Pradesh UttarakhandRecognised minoritylanguage in South Africa c Language codesISO 639 1 span class plainlinks sa span ISO 639 2 span class plainlinks san span ISO 639 3 a href https iso639 3 sil org code san class extiw title iso639 3 san san a Glottologsans1269This article contains IPA phonetic symbols Without proper rendering support you may see question marks boxes or other symbols instead of Unicode characters For an introductory guide on IPA symbols see Help IPA Part of a series onConstitutionally recognised languages of IndiaCategory22 Official Languages of the Indian RepublicAssamese Bengali Bodo Dogri Gujarati Hindi Kannada Kashmiri Konkani Maithili Malayalam Marathi Meitei Manipuri Nepali Odia Punjabi Sanskrit Santali Sindhi Tamil Telugu UrduRelatedEighth Schedule to the Constitution of India Official Languages Commission List of languages by number of native speakers in India Asia portal India portal Language portal Politics portalSanskrit generally connotes several Old Indo Aryan language varieties 27 28 The most archaic of these is the Vedic Sanskrit found in the Rigveda a collection of 1 028 hymns composed between 1500 BCE and 1200 BCE by Indo Aryan tribes migrating east from what are today Afghanistan across northern Pakistan and into northwestern India 29 30 Vedic Sanskrit interacted with the preexisting ancient languages of the subcontinent absorbing names of newly encountered plants and animals in addition the ancient Dravidian languages influenced Sanskrit s phonology and syntax 31 Sanskrit can also more narrowly refer to Classical Sanskrit a refined and standardized grammatical form that emerged in the mid 1st millennium BCE and was codified in the most comprehensive of ancient grammars e the Aṣṭadhyayi Eight chapters of Paṇini 32 The greatest dramatist in Sanskrit Kalidasa wrote in classical Sanskrit and the foundations of modern arithmetic were first described in classical Sanskrit f 33 The two major Sanskrit epics the Mahabharata and the Ramayaṇa however were composed in a range of oral storytelling registers called Epic Sanskrit which was used in northern India between 400 BCE and 300 CE and roughly contemporary with classical Sanskrit 34 In the following centuries Sanskrit became tradition bound stopped being learned as a first language and ultimately stopped developing as a living language 9 The hymns of the Rigveda are notably similar to the most archaic poems of the Iranian and Greek language families the Gathas of old Avestan and Iliad of Homer 35 As the Rigveda was orally transmitted by methods of memorisation of exceptional complexity rigour and fidelity 36 37 as a single text without variant readings 38 its preserved archaic syntax and morphology are of vital importance in the reconstruction of the common ancestor language Proto Indo European 35 Sanskrit does not have an attested native script from around the turn of the 1st millennium CE it has been written in various Brahmic scripts and in the modern era most commonly in Devanagari a 12 13 Sanskrit s status function and place in India s cultural heritage are recognized by its inclusion in the Constitution of India s Eighth Schedule languages 39 40 However despite attempts at revival 8 41 there are no first language speakers of Sanskrit in India 8 10 42 In each of India s recent decennial censuses several thousand citizens have reported Sanskrit to be their mother tongue g but the numbers are thought to signify a wish to be aligned with the prestige of the language 6 7 8 43 Sanskrit has been taught in traditional gurukulas since ancient times it is widely taught today at the secondary school level The oldest Sanskrit college is the Benares Sanskrit College founded in 1791 during East India Company rule 44 Sanskrit continues to be widely used as a ceremonial and ritual language in Hindu and Buddhist hymns and chants Contents 1 Etymology and nomenclature 2 History 2 1 Origin and development 2 2 Vedic Sanskrit 2 3 Classical Sanskrit 2 4 Sanskrit and Prakrit languages 2 5 Dravidian influence on Sanskrit 3 Influence 3 1 Decline 3 2 Modern Indo Aryan languages 4 Geographic distribution 4 1 Official status 5 Phonology 5 1 Vowels 5 2 Consonants 5 3 Phonological alternations sandhi rules 5 4 Pronunciation 6 Morphology 6 1 Tense and voice 6 2 Number person 6 3 Gender mood 6 4 Prosody metre 7 Writing system 7 1 Scripts 7 1 1 Brahmi script 7 1 2 Nagari script 7 1 3 Other writing systems 7 2 Transliteration schemes Romanisation 7 3 Epigraphy 8 Literature 8 1 Works 9 Lexicon 9 1 Dravidian lexical influence 9 2 Nominal form preference 10 Influence on other languages 10 1 Indian subcontinent 10 2 Beyond the Indian subcontinent 10 2 1 East Asia 10 2 2 Southeast Asia 10 2 2 1 Indonesia 10 2 3 Rest of the world 11 Modern era 11 1 Liturgy ceremonies and meditation 11 2 Literature and arts 11 3 Media 11 4 Schools and contemporary status 11 4 1 In the West 11 5 European studies and discourse 11 6 Symbolic usage 11 7 In popular culture 12 See also 13 Notes 14 References 14 1 Bibliography 15 External linksEtymology and nomenclature Historic Sanskrit manuscripts a religious text top and a medical text In Sanskrit the verbal adjective saṃskṛta is a compound word consisting of saṃ together good well perfected and kṛta made formed work 45 46 It connotes a work that has been well prepared pure and perfect polished sacred 47 48 49 According to Biderman the perfection contextually being referred to in the etymological origins of the word is its tonal rather than semantic qualities Sound and oral transmission were highly valued qualities in ancient India and its sages refined the alphabet the structure of words and its exacting grammar into a collection of sounds a kind of sublime musical mold states Biderman as an integral language they called Sanskrit 46 From the late Vedic period onwards state Annette Wilke and Oliver Moebus resonating sound and its musical foundations attracted an exceptionally large amount of linguistic philosophical and religious literature in India Sound was visualized as pervading all creation another representation of the world itself the mysterious magnum of Hindu thought The search for perfection in thought and the goal of liberation were among the dimensions of sacred sound and the common thread that wove all ideas and inspirations together became the quest for what the ancient Indians believed to be a perfect language the phonocentric episteme of Sanskrit 50 51 Sanskrit as a language competed with numerous less exact vernacular Indian languages called Prakritic languages prakṛta The term prakrta literally means original natural normal artless states Franklin Southworth 52 The relationship between Prakrit and Sanskrit is found in Indian texts dated to the 1st millennium CE Patanjali acknowledged that Prakrit is the first language one instinctively adopted by every child with all its imperfections and later leads to the problems of interpretation and misunderstanding The purifying structure of the Sanskrit language removes these imperfections The early Sanskrit grammarian Daṇḍin states for example that much in the Prakrit languages is etymologically rooted in Sanskrit but involves loss of sounds and corruptions that result from a disregard of the grammar Daṇḍin acknowledged that there are words and confusing structures in Prakrit that thrive independent of Sanskrit This view is found in the writing of Bharata Muni the author of the ancient Natya Shastra text The early Jain scholar Namisadhu acknowledged the difference but disagreed that the Prakrit language was a corruption of Sanskrit Namisadhu stated that the Prakrit language was the purvam came before origin and that it came naturally to children while Sanskrit was a refinement of Prakrit through purification by grammar 53 HistoryOrigin and development See also Indo European vocabulary Proto Indo Aryan language and Indo Iranian languages Left The Kurgan hypothesis on Indo European migrations between 4000 1000 BCE right The geographical spread of the Indo European languages at 500 CE with Sanskrit in South Asia Sanskrit belongs to the Indo European family of languages It is one of the three earliest ancient documented languages that arose from a common root language now referred to as Proto Indo European language 19 20 21 Vedic Sanskrit c 1500 500 BCE Mycenaean Greek c 1450 BCE 54 and Ancient Greek c 750 400 BCE Hittite c 1750 1200 BCE Other Indo European languages distantly related to Sanskrit include archaic and Classical Latin c 600 BCE 100 CE Italic languages Gothic archaic Germanic language c 350 CE Old Norse c 200 CE and after Old Avestan c late 2nd millennium BCE 55 and Younger Avestan c 900 BCE 20 21 The closest ancient relatives of Vedic Sanskrit in the Indo European languages are the Nuristani languages found in the remote Hindu Kush region of northeastern Afghanistan and northwestern Himalayas 21 56 57 as well as the extinct Avestan and Old Persian both are Iranian languages 58 59 60 Sanskrit belongs to the satem group of the Indo European languages Colonial era scholars familiar with Latin and Greek were struck by the resemblance of the Sanskrit language both in its vocabulary and grammar to the classical languages of Europe In The Oxford Introduction to Proto Indo European and the Proto Indo European World Mallory and Adams illustrate the resemblance with the following examples of cognate forms 61 with the addition of Old English for further comparison English Old English Latin Greek Sanskrit Glossary mother mōdor mater meter matar mother father faeder pater pater pitar father brother brōthor frater phreter bhra tar brother sister sweoster soror eor svasar sister son sunu hyios sunu son daughter dohtor thugater duhitar daughter cow cu bōs bous gau cow tame timber tam timber domus dom dam house tame buildThe correspondences suggest some common root and historical links between some of the distant major ancient languages of the world h The Indo Aryan migrations theory explains the common features shared by Sanskrit and other Indo European languages by proposing that the original speakers of what became Sanskrit arrived in South Asia from a region of common origin somewhere north west of the Indus region during the early 2nd millennium BCE Evidence for such a theory includes the close relationship between the Indo Iranian tongues and the Baltic and Slavic languages vocabulary exchange with the non Indo European Uralic languages and the nature of the attested Indo European words for flora and fauna 63 The pre history of Indo Aryan languages which preceded Vedic Sanskrit is unclear and various hypotheses place it over a fairly wide limit According to Thomas Burrow based on the relationship between various Indo European languages the origin of all these languages may possibly be in what is now Central or Eastern Europe while the Indo Iranian group possibly arose in Central Russia 64 The Iranian and Indo Aryan branches separated quite early It is the Indo Aryan branch that moved into eastern Iran and then south into South Asia in the first half of the 2nd millennium BCE Once in ancient India the Indo Aryan language underwent rapid linguistic change and morphed into the Vedic Sanskrit language 65 Vedic Sanskrit Main article Vedic Sanskrit Rigveda padapatha manuscript in Devanagari early 19th century The red horizontal and vertical lines mark low and high pitch changes for chanting The pre Classical form of Sanskrit is known as Vedic Sanskrit The earliest attested Sanskrit text is the Rigveda a Hindu scripture from the mid to late second millennium BCE No written records from such an early period survive if any ever existed but scholars are generally confident that the oral transmission of the texts is reliable they are ceremonial literature where the exact phonetic expression and its preservation were a part of the historic tradition 66 67 68 However some scholars have suggested that the original Ṛg veda differed in some fundamental ways in phonology compared to the sole surviving version available to us In particular that retroflex consonants did not exist as a natural part of the earliest Vedic language 69 and that these developed in the centuries after the composition had been completed and as a gradual unconscious process during the oral transmission by generations of reciters The primary source for this argument is internal evidence of the text which betrays an instability of the phenomenon of retroflexion with the same phrases having sandhi induced retroflexion in some parts but not other 70 This is taken along with evidence of controversy for example in passages of the Aitareya Araṇyaka 700 BCE which features a discussion on whether retroflexion is valid in particular cases 71 The Ṛg veda is a collection of books created by multiple authors from distant parts citation needed of ancient India citation needed These authors represented different generations and the mandalas 2 to 7 are the oldest while the mandalas 1 and 10 are relatively the youngest 72 73 Yet the Vedic Sanskrit in these books of the Ṛg veda hardly presents any dialectical diversity states Louis Renou an Indologist known for his scholarship of the Sanskrit literature and the Ṛg veda in particular According to Renou this implies that the Vedic Sanskrit language had a set linguistic pattern by the second half of the 2nd millennium BCE 74 Beyond the Ṛg veda the ancient literature in Vedic Sanskrit that has survived into the modern age include the Samaveda Yajurveda Atharvaveda along with the embedded and layered Vedic texts such as the Brahmanas Aranyakas and the early Upanishads 66 These Vedic documents reflect the dialects of Sanskrit found in the various parts of the northwestern northern and eastern Indian subcontinent 75 76 9 Vedic Sanskrit was both a spoken and literary language of ancient India citation needed According to Michael Witzel Vedic Sanskrit was a spoken language of the semi nomadic Aryans who temporarily settled in one place maintained cattle herds practiced limited agriculture and after some time moved by wagon trains they called grama 76 16 17 77 The Vedic Sanskrit language or a closely related Indo European variant was recognized beyond ancient India as evidenced by the Mitanni Treaty between the ancient Hittite and Mitanni people carved into a rock in a region that now includes parts of Syria and Turkey 78 i Parts of this treaty such as the names of the Mitanni princes and technical terms related to horse training for reasons not understood are in early forms of Vedic Sanskrit The treaty also invokes the gods Varuna Mitra Indra and Nasatya found in the earliest layers of the Vedic literature 78 80 O Bṛhaspati when in giving namesthey first set forth the beginning of Language Their most excellent and spotless secretwas laid bare through love When the wise ones formed Language with their mind purifying it like grain with a winnowing fan Then friends knew friendships an auspicious mark placed on their language Rigveda 10 71 1 4Translated by Roger Woodard 81 The Vedic Sanskrit found in the Ṛg veda is distinctly more archaic than other Vedic texts and in many respects the Rigvedic language is notably more similar to those found in the archaic texts of Old Avestan Zoroastrian Gathas and Homer s Iliad and Odyssey 82 According to Stephanie W Jamison and Joel P Brereton Indologists known for their translation of the Ṛg veda the Vedic Sanskrit literature clearly inherited from Indo Iranian and Indo European times the social structures such as the role of the poet and the priests the patronage economy the phrasal equations and some of the poetic metres 83 j While there are similarities state Jamison and Brereton there are also differences between Vedic Sanskrit the Old Avestan and the Mycenaean Greek literature For example unlike the Sanskrit similes in the Ṛg veda the Old Avestan Gathas lack simile entirely and it is rare in the later version of the language The Homerian Greek like Ṛg vedic Sanskrit deploys simile extensively but they are structurally very different 85 Classical Sanskrit A 17th century birch bark manuscript of Paṇini s grammar treatise from Kashmir The early Vedic form of the Sanskrit language was far less homogenous compared to the Classical Sanskrit as defined by grammarians by about the mid 1st millennium BCE According to Richard Gombrich an Indologist and a scholar of Sanskrit Pali and Buddhist Studies the archaic Vedic Sanskrit found in the Rigveda had already evolved in the Vedic period as evidenced in the later Vedic literature Gombrich posits that the language in the early Upanishads of Hinduism and the late Vedic literature approaches Classical Sanskrit while the archaic Vedic Sanskrit had by the Buddha s time become unintelligible to all except ancient Indian sages 86 The formalization of the Sanskrit language is credited to Paṇini along with Patanjali s Mahabhaṣya and Katyayana s commentary that preceded Patanjali s work 87 Panini composed Aṣṭadhyayi Eight Chapter Grammar The century in which he lived is unclear and debated but his work is generally accepted to be from sometime between the 6th and 4th centuries BCE 88 89 90 The Aṣṭadhyayi was not the first description of Sanskrit grammar but it is the earliest that has survived in full and the culmination of a long grammatical tradition that Fortson says is one of the intellectual wonders of the ancient world 91 Paṇini cites ten scholars on the phonological and grammatical aspects of the Sanskrit language before him as well as the variants in the usage of Sanskrit in different regions of India 92 The ten Vedic scholars he quotes are Apisali Kasyapa Gargya Galava Cakravarmaṇa Bharadvaja Sakaṭayana Sakalya Senaka and Sphoṭayana 93 94 The Aṣṭadhyayi of Panini became the foundation of Vyakaraṇa a Vedanga 92 In the Aṣṭadhyayi language is observed in a manner that has no parallel among Greek or Latin grammarians Paṇini s grammar according to Renou and Filliozat is a classic that defines the linguistic expression and sets the standard for the Sanskrit language 95 Paṇini made use of a technical metalanguage consisting of a syntax morphology and lexicon This metalanguage is organised according to a series of meta rules some of which are explicitly stated while others can be deduced 96 Despite differences in the analysis from that of modern linguistics Paṇini s work has been found valuable and the most advanced analysis of linguistics until the twentieth century 91 Paṇini s comprehensive and scientific theory of grammar is conventionally taken to mark the start of Classical Sanskrit 97 His systematic treatise inspired and made Sanskrit the preeminent Indian language of learning and literature for two millennia 98 It is unclear whether Paṇini himself wrote his treatise or he orally created the detailed and sophisticated treatise then transmitted it through his students Modern scholarship generally accepts that he knew of a form of writing based on references to words such as Lipi script and lipikara scribe in section 3 2 of the Aṣṭadhyayi 99 100 101 k The Classical Sanskrit language formalized by Paṇini states Renou is not an impoverished language rather it is a controlled and a restrained language from which archaisms and unnecessary formal alternatives were excluded 108 The Classical form of the language simplified the sandhi rules but retained various aspects of the Vedic language while adding rigor and flexibilities so that it had sufficient means to express thoughts as well as being capable of responding to the future increasing demands of an infinitely diversified literature according to Renou Paṇini included numerous optional rules beyond the Vedic Sanskrit s bahulam framework to respect liberty and creativity so that individual writers separated by geography or time would have the choice to express facts and their views in their own way where tradition followed competitive forms of the Sanskrit language 109 The phonetic differences between Vedic Sanskrit and Classical Sanskrit as discerned from the current state of the surviving literature 71 are negligible when compared to the intense change that must have occurred in the pre Vedic period between the Proto Indo Aryan language and Vedic Sanskrit 110 The noticeable differences between the Vedic and the Classical Sanskrit include the much expanded grammar and grammatical categories as well as the differences in the accent the semantics and the syntax 111 There are also some differences between how some of the nouns and verbs end as well as the sandhi rules both internal and external 111 Quite many words found in the early Vedic Sanskrit language are never found in late Vedic Sanskrit or Classical Sanskrit literature while some words have different and new meanings in Classical Sanskrit when contextually compared to the early Vedic Sanskrit literature 111 Arthur Macdonell was among the early colonial era scholars who summarized some of the differences between the Vedic and Classical Sanskrit 111 112 Louis Renou published in 1956 in French a more extensive discussion of the similarities the differences and the evolution of the Vedic Sanskrit within the Vedic period and then to the Classical Sanskrit along with his views on the history This work has been translated by Jagbans Balbir 113 Sanskrit and Prakrit languages An early use of the word for Sanskrit in Late Brahmi script also called Gupta script Saṃ skṛ taMandsaur stone inscription of Yashodharman Vishnuvardhana 532 CE 114 The earliest known use of the word Saṃskṛta Sanskrit in the context of a speech or language is found in verses 5 28 17 19 of the Ramayana 16 Outside the learned sphere of written Classical Sanskrit vernacular colloquial dialects Prakrits continued to evolve Sanskrit co existed with numerous other Prakrit languages of ancient India The Prakrit languages of India also have ancient roots and some Sanskrit scholars have called these Apabhramsa literally spoiled 115 116 The Vedic literature includes words whose phonetic equivalent are not found in other Indo European languages but which are found in the regional Prakrit languages which makes it likely that the interaction the sharing of words and ideas began early in the Indian history As the Indian thought diversified and challenged earlier beliefs of Hinduism particularly in the form of Buddhism and Jainism the Prakrit languages such as Pali in Theravada Buddhism and Ardhamagadhi in Jainism competed with Sanskrit in the ancient times 117 118 119 However states Paul Dundas a scholar of Jainism these ancient Prakrit languages had roughly the same relationship to Sanskrit as medieval Italian does to Latin 119 The Indian tradition states that the Buddha and the Mahavira preferred the Prakrit language so that everyone could understand it However scholars such as Dundas have questioned this hypothesis They state that there is no evidence for this and whatever evidence is available suggests that by the start of the common era hardly anybody other than learned monks had the capacity to understand the old Prakrit languages such as Ardhamagadhi 119 l Colonial era scholars questioned whether Sanskrit was ever a spoken language or just a literary language 121 Scholars disagree in their answers A section of Western scholars state that Sanskrit was never a spoken language while others and particularly most Indian scholars state the opposite 122 Those who affirm Sanskrit to have been a vernacular language point to the necessity of Sanskrit being a spoken language for the oral tradition that preserved the vast number of Sanskrit manuscripts from ancient India Secondly they state that the textual evidence in the works of Yaksa Panini and Patanajali affirms that the Classical Sanskrit in their era was a language that is spoken bhasha by the cultured and educated Some sutras expound upon the variant forms of spoken Sanskrit versus written Sanskrit 122 The 7th century Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Xuanzang mentioned in his memoir that official philosophical debates in India were held in Sanskrit not in the vernacular language of that region 122 Sanskrit s link to the Prakrit languages and other Indo European languages According to Sanskrit linguist professor Madhav Deshpande Sanskrit was a spoken language in a colloquial form by the mid 1st millennium BCE which coexisted with a more formal grammatically correct form of literary Sanskrit 123 This states Deshpande is true for modern languages where colloquial incorrect approximations and dialects of a language are spoken and understood along with more refined sophisticated and grammatically accurate forms of the same language being found in the literary works 123 The Indian tradition states Winternitz 1996 has favored the learning and the usage of multiple languages from the ancient times Sanskrit was a spoken language in the educated and the elite classes but it was also a language that must have been understood in a wider circle of society because the widely popular folk epics and stories such as the Ramayana the Mahabharata the Bhagavata Purana the Panchatantra and many other texts are all in the Sanskrit language 124 The Classical Sanskrit with its exacting grammar was thus the language of the Indian scholars and the educated classes while others communicated with approximate or ungrammatical variants of it as well as other natural Indian languages 123 Sanskrit as the learned language of Ancient India thus existed alongside the vernacular Prakrits 123 Many Sanskrit dramas indicate that the language coexisted with the vernacular Prakrits The cities of Varanasi Paithan Pune and Kanchipuram were centers of classical Sanskrit learning and public debates until the arrival of the colonial era 125 According to Lamotte 1976 an Indologist and Buddhism scholar Sanskrit became the dominant literary and inscriptional language because of its precision in communication It was states Lamotte an ideal instrument for presenting ideas and as knowledge in Sanskrit multiplied so did its spread and influence 126 Sanskrit was adopted voluntarily as a vehicle of high culture arts and profound ideas Pollock disagrees with Lamotte but concurs that Sanskrit s influence grew into what he terms a Sanskrit Cosmopolis over a region that included all of South Asia and much of southeast Asia The Sanskrit language cosmopolis thrived beyond India between 300 and 1300 CE 127 Dravidian influence on Sanskrit Reinohl mentions that not only have the Dravidian languages borrowed from Sanskrit vocabulary but they have also impacted Sanskrit on deeper levels of structure for instance in the domain of phonology where Indo Aryan retroflexes have been attributed to Dravidian influence 128 Hock et al quoting George Hart state that there was influence of Old Tamil on Sanskrit 129 Hart compared Old Tamil and Classical Sanskrit to arrive at a conclusion that there was a common language from which these features both derived that both Tamil and Sanskrit derived their shared conventions metres and techniques from a common source for it is clear that neither borrowed directly from the other 130 Reinohl further states that there is a symmetric relationship between Dravidian languages like Kannada or Tamil with Indo Aryan languages like Bengali or Hindi whereas the same relationship is not found for non Indo Aryan languages for example Persian or English A sentence in a Dravidian language like Tamil or Kannada becomes ordinarily good Bengali or Hindi by substituting Bengali or Hindi equivalents for the Dravidian words and forms without modifying the word order but the same thing is not possible in rendering a Persian or English sentence into a non Indo Aryan language Reinohl 128 Shulman mentions that Dravidian nonfinite verbal forms called vinaiyeccam in Tamil shaped the usage of the Sanskrit nonfinite verbs originally derived from inflected forms of action nouns in Vedic This particularly salient case of the possible influence of Dravidian on Sanskrit is only one of many items of syntactic assimilation not least among them the large repertoire of morphological modality and aspect that once one knows to look for it can be found everywhere in classical and postclassical Sanskrit 131 The main influence of Dravidian on Sanskrit is found to have been concentrated in the timespan between the late Vedic period and the crystallization of Classical Sanskrit As in this period the Indo Aryan tribes had not yet made contact with the inhabitants of the South of the subcontinent this suggests a significant presence of Dravidian speakers in North India the central Gangetic plain and the classical Madhyadesa who were instrumental in this substratal influence on Sanskrit 132 InfluenceExtant manuscripts in Sanskrit number over 30 million one hundred times those in Greek and Latin combined constituting the largest cultural heritage that any civilization has produced prior to the invention of the printing press Foreword of Sanskrit Computational Linguistics 2009 Gerard Huet Amba Kulkarni and Peter Scharf 133 134 m Sanskrit has been the predominant language of Hindu texts encompassing a rich tradition of philosophical and religious texts as well as poetry music drama scientific technical and others 136 137 It is the predominant language of one of the largest collection of historic manuscripts The earliest known inscriptions in Sanskrit are from the 1st century BCE such as the Ayodhya Inscription of Dhana and Ghosundi Hathibada Chittorgarh 138 Though developed and nurtured by scholars of orthodox schools of Hinduism Sanskrit has been the language for some of the key literary works and theology of heterodox schools of Indian philosophies such as Buddhism and Jainism 139 140 The structure and capabilities of the Classical Sanskrit language launched ancient Indian speculations about the nature and function of language what is the relationship between words and their meanings in the context of a community of speakers whether this relationship is objective or subjective discovered or is created how individuals learn and relate to the world around them through language and about the limits of language 139 141 They speculated on the role of language the ontological status of painting word images through sound and the need for rules so that it can serve as a means for a community of speakers separated by geography or time to share and understand profound ideas from each other 141 n These speculations became particularly important to the Mimaṃsa and the Nyaya schools of Hindu philosophy and later to Vedanta and Mahayana Buddhism states Frits Staal a scholar of Linguistics with a focus on Indian philosophies and Sanskrit 139 Though written in a number of different scripts the dominant language of Hindu texts has been Sanskrit It or a hybrid form of Sanskrit became the preferred language of Mahayana Buddhism scholarship 144 for example one of the early and influential Buddhist philosophers Nagarjuna 200 CE used Classical Sanskrit as the language for his texts 145 According to Renou Sanskrit had a limited role in the Theravada tradition formerly known as the Hinayana but the Prakrit works that have survived are of doubtful authenticity Some of the canonical fragments of the early Buddhist traditions discovered in the 20th century suggest the early Buddhist traditions used an imperfect and reasonably good Sanskrit sometimes with a Pali syntax states Renou The Mahasaṃghika and Mahavastu in their late Hinayana forms used hybrid Sanskrit for their literature 146 Sanskrit was also the language of some of the oldest surviving authoritative and much followed philosophical works of Jainism such as the Tattvartha Sutra by Umaswati o 148 The Spitzer Manuscript is dated to about the 2nd century CE above folio 383 fragment Discovered in the Kizil Caves near the northern branch of the Central Asian Silk Route in northwest China 149 it is the oldest Sanskrit philosophical manuscript known so far 150 151 The Sanskrit language has been one of the major means for the transmission of knowledge and ideas in Asian history Indian texts in Sanskrit were already in China by 402 CE carried by the influential Buddhist pilgrim Faxian who translated them into Chinese by 418 CE 152 Xuanzang another Chinese Buddhist pilgrim learnt Sanskrit in India and carried 657 Sanskrit texts to China in the 7th century where he established a major center of learning and language translation under the patronage of Emperor Taizong 153 154 By the early 1st millennium CE Sanskrit had spread Buddhist and Hindu ideas to Southeast Asia 155 parts of the East Asia 156 and the Central Asia 157 It was accepted as a language of high culture and the preferred language by some of the local ruling elites in these regions 158 According to the Dalai Lama the Sanskrit language is a parent language that is at the foundation of many modern languages of India and the one that promoted Indian thought to other distant countries In Tibetan Buddhism states the Dalai Lama Sanskrit language has been a revered one and called legjar lhai ka or elegant language of the gods It has been the means of transmitting the profound wisdom of Buddhist philosophy to Tibet 159 A 5th century Sanskrit inscription discovered in Java Indonesia one of the earliest in southeast Asia after the Mulavarman inscription discovered in Kutai eastern Borneo The Ciaruteun inscription combines two writing scripts and compares the king to the Hindu god Vishnu It provides a terminus ad quem to the presence of Hinduism in the Indonesian islands The oldest southeast Asian Sanskrit inscription called the Vo Canh inscription so far discovered is near Nha Trang Vietnam and it is dated to the late 4th century to early 5th century CE 160 161 The Sanskrit language created a pan Indo Aryan accessibility to information and knowledge in the ancient and medieval times in contrast to the Prakrit languages which were understood just regionally 125 162 It created a cultural bond across the subcontinent 162 As local languages and dialects evolved and diversified Sanskrit served as the common language 162 It connected scholars from distant parts of South Asia such as Tamil Nadu and Kashmir states Deshpande as well as those from different fields of studies though there must have been differences in its pronunciation given the first language of the respective speakers The Sanskrit language brought Indo Aryan speaking people together particularly its elite scholars 125 Some of these scholars of Indian history regionally produced vernacularized Sanskrit to reach wider audiences as evidenced by texts discovered in Rajasthan Gujarat and Maharashtra Once the audience became familiar with the easier to understand vernacularized version of Sanskrit those interested could graduate from colloquial Sanskrit to the more advanced Classical Sanskrit Rituals and the rites of passage ceremonies have been and continue to be the other occasions where a wide spectrum of people hear Sanskrit and occasionally join in to speak some Sanskrit words such as namah 125 Classical Sanskrit is the standard register as laid out in the grammar of Paṇini around the fourth century BCE 163 Its position in the cultures of Greater India is akin to that of Latin and Ancient Greek in Europe Sanskrit has significantly influenced most modern languages of the Indian subcontinent particularly the languages of the northern western central and eastern Indian subcontinent 164 165 166 Decline Sanskrit declined starting about and after the 13th century 127 167 This coincides with the beginning of Islamic invasions of South Asia to create and thereafter expand the Muslim rule in the form of Sultanates and later the Mughal Empire 168 Sheldon Pollock characterises the decline of Sanskrit as a long term cultural social and political change He dismisses the idea that Sanskrit declined due to struggle with barbarous invaders and emphasises factors such as the increasing attractiveness of vernacular language for literary expression 169 With the fall of Kashmir around the 13th century a premier center of Sanskrit literary creativity Sanskrit literature there disappeared 170 perhaps in the fires that periodically engulfed the capital of Kashmir or the Mongol invasion of 1320 states Pollock 169 397 398 The Sanskrit literature which was once widely disseminated out of the northwest regions of the subcontinent stopped after the 12th century 169 398 As Hindu kingdoms fell in the eastern and the South India such as the great Vijayanagara Empire so did Sanskrit 170 There were exceptions and short periods of imperial support for Sanskrit mostly concentrated during the reign of the tolerant Mughal emperor Akbar 171 Muslim rulers patronized the Middle Eastern language and scripts found in Persia and Arabia and the Indians linguistically adapted to this Persianization to gain employment with the Muslim rulers 172 Hindu rulers such as Shivaji of the Maratha Empire reversed the process by re adopting Sanskrit and re asserting their socio linguistic identity 172 173 174 After Islamic rule disintegrated in South Asia and the colonial rule era began Sanskrit re emerged but in the form of a ghostly existence in regions such as Bengal This decline was the result of political institutions and civic ethos that did not support the historic Sanskrit literary culture 170 Scholars are divided on whether or when Sanskrit died Western authors such as John Snelling state that Sanskrit and Pali are both dead Indian languages 175 Indian authors such as M Ramakrishnan Nair state that Sanskrit was a dead language by the 1st millennium BCE 176 Sheldon Pollock states that in some crucial way Sanskrit is dead 169 393 After the 12th century the Sanskrit literary works were reduced to reinscription and restatements of ideas already explored and any creativity was restricted to hymns and verses This contrasted with the previous 1 500 years when great experiments in moral and aesthetic imagination marked the Indian scholarship using Classical Sanskrit states Pollock 169 398 Other scholars state that the Sanskrit language did not die only declined Hanneder disagrees with Pollock finding his arguments elegant but often arbitrary According to Hanneder a decline or regional absence of creative and innovative literature constitutes a negative evidence to Pollock s hypothesis but it is not positive evidence A closer look at Sanskrit in the Indian history after the 12th century suggests that Sanskrit survived despite the odds According to Hanneder 177 On a more public level the statement that Sanskrit is a dead language is misleading for Sanskrit is quite obviously not as dead as other dead languages and the fact that it is spoken written and read will probably convince most people that it cannot be a dead language in the most common usage of the term Pollock s notion of the death of Sanskrit remains in this unclear realm between academia and public opinion when he says that most observers would agree that in some crucial way Sanskrit is dead 170 Sanskrit language manuscripts exist in many scripts Above from top Isha Upanishad Devanagari Samaveda Tamil Grantha Bhagavad Gita Gurmukhi Vedanta Sara Telugu Jatakamala early Sharada All are Hindu texts except the last Buddhist text The Sanskrit language scholar Moriz Winternitz states Sanskrit was never a dead language and it is still alive though its prevalence is lesser than ancient and medieval times Sanskrit remains an integral part of Hindu journals festivals Ramlila plays drama rituals and the rites of passage 178 Similarly Brian Hatcher states that the metaphors of historical rupture by Pollock are not valid that there is ample proof that Sanskrit was very much alive in the narrow confines of surviving Hindu kingdoms between the 13th and 18th centuries and its reverence and tradition continues 179 Hanneder states that modern works in Sanskrit are either ignored or their modernity contested 180 According to Robert Goldman and Sally Sutherland Sanskrit is neither dead nor living in the conventional sense It is a special timeless language that lives in the numerous manuscripts daily chants and ceremonial recitations a heritage language that Indians contextually prize and which some practice 181 When the British introduced English to India in the 19th century knowledge of Sanskrit and ancient literature continued to flourish as the study of Sanskrit changed from a more traditional style into a form of analytical and comparative scholarship mirroring that of Europe 182 Modern Indo Aryan languages The relationship of Sanskrit to the Prakrit languages particularly the modern form of Indian languages is complex and spans about 3 500 years states Colin Masica a linguist specializing in South Asian languages A part of the difficulty is the lack of sufficient textual archaeological and epigraphical evidence for the ancient Prakrit languages with rare exceptions such as Pali leading to a tendency of anachronistic errors 183 Sanskrit and Prakrit languages may be divided into Old Indo Aryan 1500 BCE 600 BCE Middle Indo Aryan 600 BCE 1000 CE and New Indo Aryan 1000 CE present each can further be subdivided into early middle or second and late evolutionary substages 183 Vedic Sanskrit belongs to the early Old Indo Aryan stage while Classical Sanskrit to the later Old Indo Aryan stage The evidence for Prakrits such as Pali Theravada Buddhism and Ardhamagadhi Jainism along with Magadhi Maharashtri Sinhala Sauraseni and Niya Gandhari emerge in the Middle Indo Aryan stage in two versions archaic and more formalized that may be placed in early and middle substages of the 600 BCE 1000 CE period 183 Two literary Indo Aryan languages can be traced to the late Middle Indo Aryan stage and these are Apabhramsa and Elu a literary form of Sinhalese Numerous North Central Eastern and Western Indian languages such as Hindi Gujarati Sindhi Punjabi Kashmiri Nepali Braj Awadhi Bengali Assamese Oriya Marathi and others belong to the New Indo Aryan stage 183 There is an extensive overlap in the vocabulary phonetics and other aspects of these New Indo Aryan languages with Sanskrit but it is neither universal nor identical across the languages They likely emerged from a synthesis of the ancient Sanskrit language traditions and an admixture of various regional dialects Each language has some unique and regionally creative aspects with unclear origins Prakrit languages do have a grammatical structure but like Vedic Sanskrit it is far less rigorous than Classical Sanskrit While the roots of all Prakrit languages may be in Vedic Sanskrit and ultimately the Proto Indo Aryan language their structural details vary from Classical Sanskrit 28 183 It is generally accepted by scholars and widely believed in India that the modern Indo Aryan languages such as Bengali Gujarati Hindi and Punjabi are descendants of the Sanskrit language 184 185 186 Sanskrit states Burjor Avari can be described as the mother language of almost all the languages of north India 187 Geographic distributionSee also Sanskrit inscriptions in the Malay world Further information Sanskritisation and Indosphere Sanskrit language s historical presence has been attested in many countries The evidence includes manuscript pages and inscriptions discovered in South Asia Southeast Asia and Central Asia These have been dated between 300 and 1800 CE The Sanskrit language s historic presence is attested across a wide geography beyond South Asia Inscriptions and literary evidence suggests that Sanskrit language was already being adopted in Southeast Asia and Central Asia in the 1st millennium CE through monks religious pilgrims and merchants 188 189 190 South Asia has been the geographic range of the largest collection of the ancient and pre 18th century Sanskrit manuscripts and inscriptions 135 Beyond ancient India significant collections of Sanskrit manuscripts and inscriptions have been found in China particularly the Tibetan monasteries 191 192 Myanmar 193 Indonesia 194 Cambodia 195 Laos 196 Vietnam 197 Thailand 198 and Malaysia 196 Sanskrit inscriptions manuscripts or its remnants including some of the oldest known Sanskrit written texts have been discovered in dry high deserts and mountainous terrains such as in Nepal 199 200 p Tibet 192 201 Afghanistan 202 203 Mongolia 204 Uzbekistan 205 Turkmenistan Tajikistan 205 and Kazakhstan 206 Some Sanskrit texts and inscriptions have also been discovered in Korea and Japan 207 208 209 Official status See also Sanskrit revival and Sanskrit universities in India In India Sanskrit is among the 22 official languages of India in the Eighth Schedule to the Constitution 210 In 2010 Uttarakhand became the first state in India to make Sanskrit its second official language 211 In 2019 Himachal Pradesh made Sanskrit its second official language becoming the second state in India to do so 212 PhonologySanskrit shares many Proto Indo European phonological features although it features a larger inventory of distinct phonemes The consonantal system is the same though it systematically enlarged the inventory of distinct sounds For example Sanskrit added a voiceless aspirated tʰ to the voiceless t voiced d and voiced aspirated dʰ found in PIE languages 213 The most significant and distinctive phonological development in Sanskrit is vowel merger 213 The short e o and a all merge as a अ in Sanskrit while long e ō and a all merge as long a आ Compare Sanskrit naman to Latin nōmen These mergers occurred very early and significantly impacted Sanskrit s morphological system 213 Some phonological developments in it mirror those in other PIE languages For example the labiovelars merged with the plain velars as in other satem languages The secondary palatalization of the resulting segments is more thorough and systematic within Sanskrit 213 A series of retroflex dental stops were innovated in Sanskrit to more thoroughly articulate sounds for clarity For example unlike the loss of the morphological clarity from vowel contraction that is found in early Greek and related southeast European languages Sanskrit deployed y w and s intervocalically to provide morphological clarity 213 Vowels This is one of the oldest surviving and dated palm leaf manuscripts in Sanskrit 828 CE Discovered in Nepal the bottom leaf shows all the vowels and consonants of Sanskrit the first five consonants are highlighted in blue and yellow The cardinal vowels svaras i इ u उ a अ distinguish length in Sanskrit 214 215 The short a अ in Sanskrit is a closer vowel than a equivalent to schwa The mid vowels e ए and ō ओ in Sanskrit are monophthongizations of the Indo Iranian diphthongs ai and au The Old Iranian language preserved ai and au 214 The Sanskrit vowels are inherently long though often transcribed e and o without the diacritic The vocalic liquid r in Sanskrit is a merger of PIE r and l The long r is an innovation and it is used in a few analogically generated morphological categories 214 216 217 Sanskrit vowels in the Devanagari script 218 q Independent form IAST ISO IPA Independent form IAST ISO IPAkaṇṭhya Guttural अ a ɐ आ a ɑː talavya Palatal इ i i ई i iː oṣṭhya Labial उ u u ऊ u uː murdhanya Retroflex ऋ ṛ r r ॠ ṝ r r ː dantya Dental ऌ ḷ l l ॡ ḹ l r l ː kaṇṭhatalavya Palatoguttural ए e e eː ऐ ai ɑj kaṇṭhoṣṭhya Labioguttural ओ o ō oː औ au ɑw consonantal allophones अ aṃ aṁ 220 ɐ अ aḥ 221 ɐh According to Masica Sanskrit has four traditional semivowels with which were classed for morphophonemic reasons the liquids y r l and v that is as y and v were the non syllabics corresponding to i u so were r l in relation to r and l 222 The northwestern the central and the eastern Sanskrit dialects have had a historic confusion between r and l The Paninian system that followed the central dialect preserved the distinction likely out of reverence for the Vedic Sanskrit that distinguished the r and l However the northwestern dialect only had r while the eastern dialect probably only had l states Masica Thus literary works from different parts of ancient India appear inconsistent in their use of r and l resulting in doublets that are occasionally semantically differentiated 222 Consonants Sanskrit possesses a symmetric consonantal phoneme structure based on how the sound is articulated though the actual usage of these sounds conceals the lack of parallelism in the apparent symmetry possibly from historical changes within the language 223 Sanskrit consonants in the Devanagari script 218 q sparsa Plosive anunasika Nasal antastha Approximant uṣman saṃgharṣhi Fricative Voicing aghoṣa ghoṣa aghoṣaAspiration alpapraṇa mahapraṇa alpapraṇa mahapraṇa alpapraṇa mahapraṇakaṇṭhya Guttural क ka k ख kha kʰ ग ga ɡ घ gha ɡʱ ङ ṅa ŋ ह ha ɦ talavya Palatal च ca t ɕ छ cha t ɕʰ ज ja d ʑ झ jha d ʑʱ ञ na ɲ य ya j श sa ɕ murdhanya Retroflex ट ṭa ʈ ठ ṭha ʈʰ ड ḍa ɖ ढ ḍha ɖʱ ण ṇa ɳ र ra ɽ ष ṣa ʂ dantya Dental त ta t थ tha tʰ द da d ध dha dʱ न na n ल la l स sa s oṣṭhya Labial प pa p फ pha pʰ ब ba b भ bha bʱ म ma m व va ʋ Sanskrit had a series of retroflex stops originating as conditioned alternants of dentals albeit by Sanskrit they had become phonemic 223 Regarding the palatal plosives the pronunciation is a matter of debate In contemporary attestation the palatal plosives are a regular series of palatal stops supported by most Sanskrit sandhi rules However the reflexes in descendant languages as well as a few of the sandhi rules regarding ch could suggest an affricate pronunciation jh was a marginal phoneme in Sanskrit hence its phonology is more difficult to reconstruct it was more commonly employed in the Middle Indo Aryan languages as a result of phonological processes resulting in the phoneme The palatal nasal is a conditioned variant of n occurring next to palatal obstruents 223 The anusvara that Sanskrit deploys is a conditioned alternant of postvocalic nasals under certain sandhi conditions 224 Its visarga is a word final or morpheme final conditioned alternant of s and r under certain sandhi conditions 224 The system of Sanskrit Sounds The order of Sanskrit sounds works along three principles it goes from simple to complex it goes from the back to the front of the mouth and it groups similar sounds together Among themselves both the vowels and consonants are ordered according to where in the mouth they are pronounced going from back to front A M Ruppel The Cambridge Introduction to Sanskrit 225 The voiceless aspirated series is also an innovation in Sanskrit but is significantly rarer than the other three series 223 While the Sanskrit language organizes sounds for expression beyond those found in the PIE language it retained many features found in the Iranian and Balto Slavic languages An example of a similar process in all three is the retroflex sibilant ʂ being the automatic product of dental s following i u r and k 224 Phonological alternations sandhi rules See also Sandhi Sanskrit deploys extensive phonological alternations on different linguistic levels through sandhi rules literally the rules of putting together union connection alliance similar to the English alteration of going to as gonna 226 The Sanskrit language accepts such alterations within it but offers formal rules for the sandhi of any two words next to each other in the same sentence or linking two sentences The external sandhi rules state that similar short vowels coalesce into a single long vowel while dissimilar vowels form glides or undergo diphthongization 226 Among the consonants most external sandhi rules recommend regressive assimilation for clarity when they are voiced These rules ordinarily apply at compound seams and morpheme boundaries 226 In Vedic Sanskrit the external sandhi rules are more variable than in Classical Sanskrit 227 The internal sandhi rules are more intricate and account for the root and the canonical structure of the Sanskrit word These rules anticipate what are now known as the Bartholomae s law and Grassmann s law For example states Jamison the voiceless voiced and voiced aspirated obstruents of a positional series regularly alternate with each other p b bʰ t d dʰ etc note however c j h such that for example a morpheme with an underlying voiced aspirate final may show alternants clarification needed with all three stops under differing internal sandhi conditions 228 The velar series k g gʰ alternate with the palatal series c j h while the structural position of the palatal series is modified into a retroflex cluster when followed by dental This rule creates two morphophonemically distinct series from a single palatal series 228 Vocalic alternations in the Sanskrit morphological system is termed strengthening and called guṇa and vr ddhi in the preconsonantal versions There is an equivalence to terms deployed in Indo European descriptive grammars wherein Sanskrit s unstrengthened state is same as the zero grade guṇa corresponds to normal grade while vr ddhi is same as the lengthened state 229 The qualitative ablaut is not found in Sanskrit just like it is absent in Iranian but Sanskrit retains quantitative ablaut through vowel strengthening 229 The transformations between unstrengthened to guṇa is prominent in the morphological system states Jamison while vr ddhi is a particularly significant rule when adjectives of origin and appurtenance are derived The manner in which this is done slightly differs between the Vedic and the Classical Sanskrit 229 230 How Sanskrit chants sound source source track track A recitation of the Sanskrit composition Guru Stotram or the hymn of praise for the teacher guru 4 min 55 s Problems playing this file See media help Sanskrit grants a very flexible syllable structure where they may begin or end with vowels be single consonants or clusters Similarly the syllable may have an internal vowel of any weight Vedic Sanskrit shows traces of following the Sievers Edgerton law but Classical Sanskrit does not citation needed Vedic Sanskrit has a pitch accent system inherited from Proto Indo European which was acknowledged by Paṇini states Jamison but in his Classical Sanskrit the accents disappear 231 Most Vedic Sanskrit words have one accent However this accent is not phonologically predictable states Jamison 231 It can fall anywhere in the word and its position often conveys morphological and syntactic information 231 The presence of an accent system in Vedic Sanskrit is evidenced from the markings in the Vedic texts This is important because of Sanskrit s connection to the PIE languages and comparative Indo European linguistics 232 Sanskrit like most early Indo European languages lost the so called laryngeal consonants cover symbol H present in the Proto Indo European states Jamison 231 This significantly impacted the evolutionary path of the Sanskrit phonology and morphology particularly in the variant forms of roots 233 Pronunciation Because Sanskrit is not anyone s native language it does not have a fixed pronunciation People tend to pronounce it as they do their native language The articles on Hindustani Marathi Nepali Oriya and Bengali phonology will give some indication of the variation that is encountered When Sanskrit was a spoken language its pronunciation varied regionally and also over time Nonetheless Panini described the sound system of Sanskrit well enough that people have a fairly good idea of what he intended Various renditions of Sanskrit pronunciation Transcription Goldman 2002 s Cardona 2003 235 a ɐ ɐa aː aːi ɪ ɪi iː iːu ʊ ʊu uː uːr ɽɪ ɽɪ ᵊɾᵊ or ᵊɽᵊ t r ɽiː ɽiː u u l lɪ v w e eː eː eːai ai ai ɐi or ɛiō oː oː oːau au au ɐu or ɔuaṃ ɐ ɐɴ ɐ ɐɴ x aḥ ɐh ɐhɐ y ɐhk k kkh kʰ kʰg ɡ ɡgh ɡʱ ɡʱṅ ŋ ŋh ɦ ɦ ɦc t ɕ t ɕch t ɕʰ t ɕʰj d ʑ d ʑjh d ʑʱ d ʑʱn n ny j j js ɕ ɕ ɕṭ t t ṭh t ʰ t ʰḍ d d ḍh d ʱ d ʱṇ n n r ɽ ɾ ɾ or ɽṣ s s ʂt t t th t ʰ t ʰd d d dh d ʱ d ʱn n n l l l l s s s s p p pph pʰ pʰb b bbh bʱ bʱm m mv ʋ ʋ ʋstress ante pen ultimate z MorphologyMain article Sanskrit grammar See also Vedic Sanskrit grammar and Sanskrit verbs The basis of Sanskrit morphology is the root states Jamison a morpheme bearing lexical meaning 236 The verbal and nominal stems of Sanskrit words are derived from this root through the phonological vowel gradation processes the addition of affixes verbal and nominal stems It then adds an ending to establish the grammatical and syntactic identity of the stem According to Jamison the three major formal elements of the morphology are i root ii affix and iii ending and they are roughly responsible for i lexical meaning ii derivation and iii inflection respectively 237 A Sanskrit word has the following canonical structure 236 Root Affix0 n Ending0 1The root structure has certain phonological constraints Two of the most important constraints of a root is that it does not end in a short a अ and that it is monosyllabic 236 In contrast the affixes and endings commonly do The affixes in Sanskrit are almost always suffixes with exceptions such as the augment a added as prefix to past tense verb forms and the na n infix in single verbal present class states Jamison 236 Sanskrit verbs have the following canonical structure 238 Root SuffixTense Aspect SuffixMood EndingPersonal Number VoiceAccording to Ruppel verbs in Sanskrit express the same information as other Indo European languages such as English 239 Sanskrit verbs describe an action or occurrence or state its embedded morphology informs as to who is doing it person or persons when it is done tense and how it is done mood voice The Indo European languages differ in the detail For example the Sanskrit language attaches the affixes and ending to the verb root while the English language adds small independent words before the verb In Sanskrit these elements co exist within the word 239 aa Word morphology in Sanskrit A M Ruppel 239 ab Sanskrit word equivalentEnglish expression IAST ISO Devanagariyou carry bharasi भरस they carry bharanti भरन त you will carry bhariṣyasi भर ष यस Both verbs and nouns in Sanskrit are either thematic or athematic states Jamison 241 Guna strengthened forms in the active singular regularly alternate in athematic verbs The finite verbs of Classical Sanskrit have the following grammatical categories person number voice tense aspect and mood According to Jamison a portmanteau morpheme generally expresses the person number voice in Sanskrit and sometimes also the ending or only the ending The mood of the word is embedded in the affix 241 These elements of word architecture are the typical building blocks in Classical Sanskrit but in Vedic Sanskrit these elements fluctuate and are unclear For example in the Rigveda preverbs regularly occur in tmesis states Jamison which means they are separated from the finite verb 236 This indecisiveness is likely linked to Vedic Sanskrit s attempt to incorporate accent With nonfinite forms of the verb and with nominal derivatives thereof states Jamison preverbs show much clearer univerbation in Vedic both by position and by accent and by Classical Sanskrit tmesis is no longer possible even with finite forms 236 While roots are typical in Sanskrit some words do not follow the canonical structure 237 A few forms lack both inflection and root Many words are inflected and can enter into derivation but lack a recognizable root Examples from the basic vocabulary include kinship terms such as matar mother nas nose svan dog According to Jamison pronouns and some words outside the semantic categories also lack roots as do the numerals Similarly the Sanskrit language is flexible enough to not mandate inflection 237 The Sanskrit words can contain more than one affix that interact with each other Affixes in Sanskrit can be athematic as well as thematic according to Jamison 242 Athematic affixes can be alternating Sanskrit deploys eight cases namely nominative accusative instrumental dative ablative genitive locative vocative 242 Stems that is root affix appear in two categories in Sanskrit vowel stems and consonant stems Unlike some Indo European languages such as Latin or Greek according to Jamison Sanskrit has no closed set of conventionally denoted noun declensions Sanskrit includes a fairly large set of stem types 243 The linguistic interaction of the roots the phonological segments lexical items and the grammar for the Classical Sanskrit consist of four Paninian components These states Paul Kiparsky are the Astadhyaayi a comprehensive system of 4 000 grammatical rules of which a small set are frequently used Sivasutras an inventory of anubandhas markers that partition phonological segments for efficient abbreviations through the pratyharas technique Dhatupatha a list of 2 000 verbal roots classified by their morphology and syntactic properties using diacritic markers a structure that guides its writing systems and the Ganapatha an inventory of word groups classes of lexical systems 244 There are peripheral adjuncts to these four such as the Unadisutras which focus on irregularly formed derivatives from the roots 244 Sanskrit morphology is generally studied in two broad fundamental categories the nominal forms and the verbal forms These differ in the types of endings and what these endings mark in the grammatical context 237 Pronouns and nouns share the same grammatical categories though they may differ in inflection Verb based adjectives and participles are not formally distinct from nouns Adverbs are typically frozen case forms of adjectives states Jamison and nonfinite verbal forms such as infinitives and gerunds also clearly show frozen nominal case endings 237 Tense and voice The Sanskrit language includes five tenses present future past imperfect past aorist and past perfect 240 It outlines three types of voices active passive and the middle 240 The middle is also referred to as the mediopassive or more formally in Sanskrit as parasmaipada word for another and atmanepada word for oneself 238 Voice in Sanskrit Stephanie Jamison 238 ac Active Middle Mediopassive Singular Dual Plural Singular Dual Plural1st person mi vas mas e vahe mahe2nd person si thas tha se athe dhve3rd person ti tas anti te ate anteThe paradigm for the tense aspect system in Sanskrit is the three way contrast between the present the aorist and the perfect architecture 245 Vedic Sanskrit is more elaborate and had several additional tenses For example the Rigveda includes perfect and a marginal pluperfect Classical Sanskrit simplifies the present system down to two tenses the perfect and the imperfect while the aorist stems retain the aorist tense and the perfect stems retain the perfect and marginal pluperfect 245 The classical version of the language has elaborate rules for both voice and the tense aspect system to emphasize clarity and this is more elaborate than in other Indo European languages The evolution of these systems can be seen from the earliest layers of the Vedic literature to the late Vedic literature 246 Number person Sanskrit recognizes three numbers singular dual and plural 242 The dual is a fully functioning category used beyond naturally paired objects such as hands or eyes extending to any collection of two The elliptical dual is notable in the Vedic Sanskrit according to Jamison where a noun in the dual signals a paired opposition 242 Illustrations include dyava literally the two heavens for heaven and earth matara literally the two mothers for mother and father 242 A verb may be singular dual or plural while the person recognized in the language are forms of I you he she it we and they 240 There are three persons in Sanskrit first second and third 238 Sanskrit uses the 3 3 grid formed by the three numbers and the three persons parameters as the paradigm and the basic building block of its verbal system 246 Gender mood The Sanskrit language incorporates three genders feminine masculine and neuter 242 All nouns have inherent gender With some exceptions personal pronouns have no gender Exceptions include demonstrative and anaphoric pronouns 242 Derivation of a word is used to express the feminine Two most common derivations come from feminine forming suffixes the a आ Radha and i ई Rukmini The masculine and neuter are much simpler and the difference between them is primarily inflectional 242 247 Similar affixes for the feminine are found in many Indo European languages states Burrow suggesting links of the Sanskrit to its PIE heritage 248 Pronouns in Sanskrit include the personal pronouns of the first and second persons unmarked for gender and a larger number of gender distinguishing pronouns and adjectives 241 Examples of the former include aham first singular vayam first plural and yuyam second plural The latter can be demonstrative deictic or anaphoric 241 Both the Vedic and Classical Sanskrit share the sa tam pronominal stem and this is the closest element to a third person pronoun and an article in the Sanskrit language states Jamison 241 Indicative potential and imperative are the three mood forms in Sanskrit 240 Prosody metre Main articles Sanskrit prosody and Vedic metre The Sanskrit language formally incorporates poetic metres 249 By the late Vedic era this developed into a field of study it was central to the composition of the Hindu literature including the later Vedic texts This study of Sanskrit prosody is called chandas and is considered one of the six Vedangas or limbs of Vedic studies 249 250 Sanskrit prosody includes linear and non linear systems 251 The system started off with seven major metres according to Annette Wilke and Oliver Moebus called the seven birds or seven mouths of Brihaspati and each had its own rhythm movements and aesthetics wherein a non linear structure aperiodicity was mapped into a four verse polymorphic linear sequence 251 A syllable in Sanskrit is classified as either laghu light or guru heavy This classification is based on a matra literally count measure duration and typically a syllable that ends in a short vowel is a light syllable while those that end in consonant anusvara or visarga are heavy The classical Sanskrit found in Hindu scriptures such as the Bhagavad Gita and many texts are so arranged that the light and heavy syllables in them follow a rhythm though not necessarily a rhyme 252 253 ad Sanskrit metres include those based on a fixed number of syllables per verse and those based on fixed number of morae per verse 255 The Vedic Sanskrit employs fifteen metres of which seven are common and the most frequent are three 8 11 and 12 syllable lines 256 The Classical Sanskrit deploys both linear and non linear metres many of which are based on syllables and others based on diligently crafted verses based on repeating numbers of morae matra per foot 256 There is no word without metre nor is there any metre without words Natya Shastra 257 Metre and rhythm is an important part of the Sanskrit language It may have played a role in helping preserve the integrity of the message and Sanskrit texts The verse perfection in the Vedic texts such as the verse Upanishads ae and post Vedic Smṛti texts are rich in prosody This feature of the Sanskrit language led some Indologists from the 19th century onwards to identify suspected portions of texts where a line or sections are off the expected metre 258 259 af The metre feature of the Sanskrit language embeds another layer of communication to the listener or reader A change in metres has been a tool of literary architecture and an embedded code to inform the reciter and audience that it marks the end of a section or chapter 263 Each section or chapter of these texts uses identical metres rhythmically presenting their ideas and making it easier to remember recall and check for accuracy 263 Authors coded a hymn s end by frequently using a verse of a metre different than that used in the hymn s body 263 However Hindu tradition does not use the Gayatri metre to end a hymn or composition possibly because it has enjoyed a special level of reverence in Hinduism 263 Writing systemFurther information Brahmi script and Devanagari One of the oldest surviving Sanskrit manuscript pages in Gupta script c 828 CE discovered in Nepal The early history of writing Sanskrit and other languages in ancient India is a problematic topic despite a century of scholarship states Richard Salomon an epigraphist and Indologist specializing in Sanskrit and Pali literature 264 The earliest possible script from South Asia is from the Indus Valley civilization 3rd 2nd millennium BCE but this script if it is a script remains undeciphered If any scripts existed in the Vedic period they have not survived Scholars generally accept that Sanskrit was spoken in an oral society and that an oral tradition preserved the extensive Vedic and Classical Sanskrit literature 265 Other scholars such as Jack Goody argue that the Vedic Sanskrit texts are not the product of an oral society basing this view by comparing inconsistencies in the transmitted versions of literature from various oral societies such as the Greek Serbian and other cultures This minority of scholars argue that the Vedic literature is too consistent and vast to have been composed and transmitted orally across generations without being written down 266 267 Lipi is the term in Sanskrit which means writing letters alphabet It contextually refers to scripts the art or any manner of writing or drawing 99 The term in the sense of a writing system appears in some of the earliest Buddhist Hindu and Jaina texts Paṇini s Astadhyayi composed sometime around the 5th or 4th century BCE for example mentions lipi in the context of a writing script and education system in his times but he does not name the script 99 100 268 Several early Buddhist and Jaina texts such as the Lalitavistara Sutra and Pannavana Sutta include lists of numerous writing scripts in ancient India ag The Buddhist texts list the sixty four lipi that the Buddha knew as a child with the Brahmi script topping the list The historical value of this list is however limited by several factors states Salomon The list may be a later interpolation 270 ah The Jain canonical texts such as the Pannavana Sutta probably older than the Buddhist texts list eighteen writing systems with the Brahmi topping the list and Kharotthi Kharoshthi listed as fourth The Jaina text elsewhere states that the Brahmi is written in 18 different forms but the details are lacking 272 However the reliability of these lists has been questioned and the empirical evidence of writing systems in the form of Sanskrit or Prakrit inscriptions dated prior to the 3rd century BCE has not been found If the ancient surface for writing Sanskrit was palm leaves tree bark and cloth the same as those in later times these have not survived 273 ai According to Salomon many find it difficult to explain the evidently high level of political organization and cultural complexity of ancient India without a writing system for Sanskrit and other languages 273 aj The oldest datable writing systems for Sanskrit are the Brahmi script the related Kharoṣṭhi script and the Brahmi derivatives 276 277 The Kharosthi was used in the northwestern part of South Asia and it became extinct while the Brahmi was used all over the subcontinent along with regional scripts such as Old Tamil 278 Of these the earliest records in the Sanskrit language are in Brahmi a script that later evolved into numerous related Indic scripts for Sanskrit along with Southeast Asian scripts Burmese Thai Lao Khmer others and many extinct Central Asian scripts such as those discovered along with the Kharosthi in the Tarim Basin of western China and in Uzbekistan 279 The most extensive inscriptions that have survived into the modern era are the rock edicts and pillar inscriptions of the 3rd century BCE Mauryan emperor Ashoka but these are not in Sanskrit 280 ak Scripts Over the centuries and across countries a number of scripts have been used to write Sanskrit Brahmi script Main article Brahmi script One of the oldest Hindu Sanskrit al inscriptions the broken pieces of this early 1st century BCE Hathibada Brahmi Inscription were discovered in Rajasthan It is a dedication to deities Vasudeva Samkarshana Krishna Balarama and mentions a stone temple 138 281 The Brahmi script for writing Sanskrit is a modified consonant syllabic script The graphic syllable is its basic unit and this consists of a consonant with or without diacritic modifications 277 Since the vowel is an integral part of the consonants and given the efficiently compacted fused consonant cluster morphology for Sanskrit words and grammar the Brahmi and its derivative writing systems deploy ligatures diacritics and relative positioning of the vowel to inform the reader how the vowel is related to the consonant and how it is expected to be pronounced for clarity 277 282 am This feature of Brahmi and its modern Indic script derivatives makes it difficult to classify it under the main script types used for the writing systems for most of the world s languages namely logographic syllabic and alphabetic 277 The Brahmi script evolved into a vast number of forms and derivatives states Richard Salomon and in theory Sanskrit can be represented in virtually any of the main Brahmi based scripts and in practice it often is 283 From the ancient times it has been written in numerous regional scripts in South and Southeast Asia Most of these are descendants of the Brahmi script an The earliest datable varnamala Brahmi alphabet system found in later Sanskrit texts is from the 2nd century BCE in the form of a terracotta plaque found in Sughana Haryana It shows a schoolboy s writing lessons states Salomon 285 286 Nagari script Main articles Devanagari Nandinagari and Nagari script Many modern era manuscripts are written and available in the Nagari script whose form is attestable to the 1st millennium CE 287 The Nagari script is the ancestor of Devanagari north India Nandinagari south India and other variants The Nagari script was in regular use by 7th century CE and had fully evolved into Devanagari and Nandinagari 288 scripts by about the end of the first millennium of the common era 289 290 The Devanagari script states Banerji became more popular for Sanskrit in India since about the 18th century 291 However Sanskrit does have special historical connection to the Nagari script as attested by the epigraphical evidence 292 The Nagari script has been thought of as a northern Indic script for Sanskrit as well as the regional languages such as Hindi Marathi and Nepali However it has had a supra local status as evidenced by 1st millennium CE epigraphy and manuscripts discovered all over India and as far as Sri Lanka Burma Indonesia and in its parent form called the Siddhamatrka script found in manuscripts of East Asia 293 The Sanskrit and Balinese languages Sanur inscription on Belanjong pillar of Bali Indonesia dated to about 914 CE is in part in the Nagari script 294 The Nagari script used for Classical Sanskrit has the fullest repertoire of characters consisting of fourteen vowels and thirty three consonants For Vedic Sanskrit it has two more allophonic consonantal characters the intervocalic ळ ḷa and ळ ह ḷha 293 To communicate phonetic accuracy it also includes several modifiers such as the anusvara dot and the visarga double dot punctuation symbols and others such as the halanta sign 293 Other writing systems Sanskrit in modern Indian and other Brahmi scripts May Siva bless those who take delight in the language of the gods Kalidasa Other scripts such as Gujarati Bangla Odia and major south Indian scripts states Salomon have been and often still are used in their proper territories for writing Sanskrit 287 These and many Indian scripts look different to the untrained eye but the differences between Indic scripts is mostly superficial and they share the same phonetic repertoire and systemic features states Salomon 295 They all have essentially the same set of eleven to fourteen vowels and thirty three consonants as established by the Sanskrit language and attestable in the Brahmi script Further a closer examination reveals that they all have the similar basic graphic principles the same varnamala literally garland of letters alphabetic ordering following the same logical phonetic order easing the work of historic skilled scribes writing or reproducing Sanskrit works across South Asia 296 ao The Sanskrit language written in some Indic scripts exaggerate angles or round shapes but this serves only to mask the underlying similarities Nagari script favours symmetry set with squared outlines and right angles In contrast Sanskrit written in the Bangla script emphasizes the acute angles while the neighbouring Odia script emphasizes rounded shapes and uses cosmetically appealing umbrella like curves above the script symbols 298 One of the earliest known Sanskrit inscriptions in Tamil Grantha script at a rock cut Hindu Trimurti temple Mandakapattu c 615 CE In the south where Dravidian languages predominate scripts used for Sanskrit include the Kannada Telugu Malayalam and Grantha alphabets Transliteration schemes Romanisation Main articles Devanagari transliteration and International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration Since the late 18th century Sanskrit has been transliterated using the Latin alphabet The system most commonly used today is the IAST International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration which has been the academic standard since 1888 ASCII based transliteration schemes have also evolved because of difficulties representing Sanskrit characters in computer systems These include Harvard Kyoto and ITRANS a transliteration scheme that is used widely on the Internet especially in Usenet and in email for considerations of speed of entry as well as rendering issues With the wide availability of Unicode aware web browsers IAST has become common online It is also possible to type using an alphanumeric keyboard and transliterate to Devanagari using software like Mac OS X s international support European scholars in the 19th century generally preferred Devanagari for the transcription and reproduction of whole texts and lengthy excerpts However references to individual words and names in texts composed in European Languages were usually represented with Roman transliteration From the 20th century onwards because of production costs textual editions edited by Western scholars have mostly been in Romanised transliteration 299 Epigraphy The earliest known stone inscriptions in Sanskrit are in the Brahmi script from the first century BCE 138 ap aq These include the Ayodhya Uttar Pradesh and Hathibada Ghosuṇḍi near Chittorgarh Rajasthan inscriptions 138 302 Both of these states Salomon are essentially standard and correct Sanskrit with a few exceptions reflecting an informal Sanskrit usage 138 Other important Hindu inscriptions dated to the 1st century BCE in relatively accurate classical Sanskrit and Brahmi script are the Yavanarajya inscription on a red sandstone slab and the long Naneghat inscription on the wall of a cave rest stop in the Western Ghats 303 Besides these few examples from the 1st century BCE the earliest Sanskrit and hybrid dialect inscriptions are found in Mathura Uttar Pradesh 304 These date to the 1st and 2nd century CE states Salomon from the time of the Indo Scythian Northern Satraps and the subsequent Kushan Empire ar These are also in the Brahmi script 306 The earliest of these states Salomon are attributed to Ksatrapa Sodasa from the early years of 1st century CE Of the Mathura inscriptions the most significant is the Mora Well Inscription 306 In a manner similar to the Hathibada inscription the Mora well inscription is a dedicatory inscription and is linked to the cult of the Vrishni heroes it mentions a stone shrine temple pratima murti images and calls the five Vrishnis as bhagavatam 306 307 There are many other Mathura Sanskrit inscriptions in Brahmi script overlapping the era of Indo Scythian Northern Satraps and early Kushanas 306 Other significant 1st century inscriptions in reasonably good classical Sanskrit in the Brahmi script include the Vasu Doorjamb Inscription and the Mountain Temple inscription 308 The early ones are related to the Brahmanical except for the inscription from Kankali Tila which may be Jaina but none are Buddhist 309 310 A few of the later inscriptions from the 2nd century CE include Buddhist Sanskrit while others are in more or less standard Sanskrit and related to the Brahmanical tradition 311 Starting in about the 1st century BCE Sanskrit has been written in many South Asian Southeast Asian and Central Asian scripts In Maharashtra and Gujarat Brahmi script Sanskrit inscriptions from the early centuries of the common era exist at the Nasik Caves site near the Girnar mountain of Junagadh and elsewhere such as at Kanakhera Kanheri and Gunda 312 The Nasik inscription dates to the mid 1st century CE is a fair approximation of standard Sanskrit and has hybrid features 312 The Junagadh rock inscription of Western Satraps ruler Rudradaman I c 150 CE Gujarat is the first long poetic style inscription in more or less standard Sanskrit that has survived into the modern era It represents a turning point in the history of Sanskrit epigraphy states Salomon 313 as Though no similar inscriptions are found for about two hundred years after the Rudradaman reign it is important because its style is the prototype of the eulogy style Sanskrit inscriptions found in the Gupta Empire era 313 These inscriptions are also in the Brahmi script 314 The Nagarjunakonda inscriptions are the earliest known substantial South Indian Sanskrit inscriptions probably from the late 3rd century or early 4th century CE or both 315 These inscriptions are related to Buddhism and the Shaivism tradition of Hinduism 316 A few of these inscriptions from both traditions are verse style in the classical Sanskrit language while some such as the pillar inscription is written in prose and a hybridized Sanskrit language 315 An earlier hybrid Sanskrit inscription found on Amaravati slab is dated to the late 2nd century while a few later ones include Sanskrit inscriptions along with Prakrit inscriptions related to Hinduism and Buddhism 317 After the 3rd century CE Sanskrit inscriptions dominate and many have survived 318 Between the 4th and 7th centuries CE south Indian inscriptions are exclusively in the Sanskrit language at In the eastern regions of South Asia scholars report minor Sanskrit inscriptions from the 2nd century these being fragments and scattered The earliest substantial true Sanskrit language inscription of Susuniya West Bengal is dated to the 4th century 319 Elsewhere such as Dehradun Uttarakhand inscriptions in more or less correct classical Sanskrit inscriptions are dated to the 3rd century 319 According to Salomon the 4th century reign of Samudragupta was the turning point when the classical Sanskrit language became established as the epigraphic language par excellence of the Indian world 320 These Sanskrit language inscriptions are either donative or panegyric records Generally in accurate classical Sanskrit they deploy a wide range of regional Indic writing systems extant at the time 321 They record the donation of a temple or stupa images land monasteries pilgrim s travel record public infrastructure such as water reservoir and irrigation measures to prevent famine Others praise the king or the donor in lofty poetic terms 322 The Sanskrit language of these inscriptions is written on stone various metals terracotta wood crystal ivory shell and cloth 323 au The evidence of the use of the Sanskrit language in Indic writing systems appears in southeast Asia in the first half of the 1st millennium CE 326 A few of these in Vietnam are bilingual where both the Sanskrit and the local language is written in the Indian alphabet Early Sanskrit language inscriptions in Indic writing systems are dated to the 4th century in Malaysia 5th to 6th centuries in Thailand near Si Thep and the Sak River early 5th century in Kutai known as the Mulavarman inscription discovered in eastern Borneo and mid 5th century in west Java Indonesia 327 Both major writing systems for Sanskrit the North Indian and South Indian scripts have been discovered in southeast Asia but the Southern variety with its rounded shapes are far more common 328 The Indic scripts particularly the Pallava script prototype 329 spread and ultimately evolved into Mon Burmese Khmer Thai Lao Sumatran Celebes Javanese and Balinese scripts 330 From about the 5th century Sanskrit inscriptions become common in many parts of South Asia and Southeast Asia with significant discoveries in Nepal Vietnam and Cambodia 320 LiteratureMain articles Sanskrit literature and Sanskrit Buddhist literature Literature in Sanskrit av can be broadly divided into texts composed in Vedic Sanskrit and the later Classical Sanskrit 332 Vedic Sanskrit is the language of the extensive liturgical works of the Vedic religion aw which aside from the four Vedas include the Brahmaṇas and the Sutras 334 335 336 The Vedic literature that survives is entirely of a religious form whereas works in Classical Sanskrit exist in a wide variety of fields including epics lyric drama romance fairytale fables grammar civil and religious law the science of politics and practical life the science of love and sex philosophy medicine astronomy astrology and mathematics and is largely secular in subject matter 337 338 While Vedic literature is essentially optimistic in spirit portraying man as strong and powerful capable of finding fulfilment both here and in the afterworld the later literature is pessimistic portraying humans as controlled by the forces of fate with worldly pleasures deemed the cause of misery These fundamental differences in psychology are attributed to the absence of the doctrines of Karma and reincarnation in the Vedic period notions which are very prevalent in later times 339 Works See also Hindu texts Buddhist texts and Jain literature Sanskrit has been written in various scripts on a variety of media such as palm leaves cloth paper rock and metal sheets from ancient times 340 Sanskrit literature by tradition Tradition Sanskrit texts genre or collection Example ReferencesHinduism Scriptures Vedas Upaniṣads Agamas the Bhagavad Gita 341 342 Language Grammar Aṣṭadhyayi Gaṇa paṭha Pada paṭha Varttikas Mahabhaṣya Vakya padiya Phiṭ sutra 343 344 345 Civil and Religious Law Dharma sutras Dharma sastras ax Manu smṛti 346 347 Statecraft political science Artha sastra 348 Timekeeping Mathematics Logic Kalpa Jyotiṣa Gaṇita sastra Sulba sutras Siddhantas Aryabhaṭiya Dasa gitika sutra Siddhanta siromaṇi Gaṇita sara saṅgraha Bija gaṇita ay 349 350 Life sciences health Ayurveda Susruta saṃhita Caraka saṃhita 351 352 Sex emotions az Kama sutra Panca sayaka Rati rahasya Rati manjari Anaṅga ranga 353 354 Epics Ramayaṇa Mahabharata 355 356 Court Epic Kavya Raghu vaṃsa Kumara sambhava 357 Gnomic and didactic literature Subhaṣitas Niti sataka Bodhicary avatara Sṛṅgara jnana nirṇaya Kala vilasa Catur varga saṅgraha Niti manjari Mugdh opadesa Subhaṣita ratna sandoha Yoga sastra Sṛṅgara vairagya taraṅgiṇi 358 Drama dance and the performance arts Naṭya sastra 359 360 361 Music Sangita sastra 362 363 Poetics Kavya sastra 364 Mythology Puraṇas 365 Mystical speculations Philosophy Darsana Saṅkhya Yoga philosophy Nyaya Vaiseṣika Mimaṅsa Vedanta Vaishnavism Shaivism Shaktism Smarta Tradition and others 366 Agriculture and food Kṛṣi sastra 367 Design architecture Vastu Silpa Silpa sastra 368 369 Temples Sculpture Bṛhat saṃhita 370 Saṃskara rites of passage Gṛhya sutras 371 Buddhism Sutras Vinaya Kavya Medicine Buddhist philosophy Tripiṭaka ba Mahayana sutras and shastras tantras grammar texts Buddhist poetry drama Buddhist medical texts 372 373 374 Jainism Theology philosophy Tattvartha Sutra Mahapuraṇa and others 375 376 LexiconSee also Indo European vocabulary and Sanskrit compound As an Indo European language Sanskrit s core lexicon is inherited from Proto Indo European Over time however the language exhibits a tendency to shed many of these inherited words and borrow others in their place from other sources In the oldest Vedic literature there are few such non Indo European words but these progressively grow in volume 377 The following are some of the old Indo European words that eventually fade out of use in Sanskrit 378 apas work c f Latin opuskravis raw flesh c f Latin crudusdama house c f Latin domusda nu moistureharas heatDravidian lexical influence The sources of these new loanwords are many and vary across the different regions of the Indian subcontinent But of all influences on the lexicon of Sanskrit the most important is Dravidian The following is a list of Dravidian entrants into Sanskrit lexicon although some may have been contested 379 380 phalam ripe fruit Proto Dravidian paḷammukham mouth Proto Dravidian mukamkajjala soot lampblack kaṭu sharp pungentkaṭhina hard firmkuṭi hut housekuṭṭ to poundkuṇḍala loop ring earring coil of ropekhala a roguemayu ra peacockmallika jasminemina fishvalli creeperheramba buffaloNominal form preference While Vedic and epic form of speech is largely cognate to that of other Indo European languages such as Greek and Latin later Sanskrit shows a tendency to move away from using verbal forms to nominal ones Examples of nominal forms taking the place of conventional conjugation are past participle with the instrumental nareṇa gataḥ the man went lit by the man it was gone active past participle in vant kṛta van he did However the most notable development is the prolific use of word compounding to express ideas normally conveyed by verbal forms and subclauses introduced by conjunctions 381 Classical Sanskrit s pre eminent playwright Kalidasa uses vicikṣobhastanitavihagasreṇikanciguṇa whose girdle string is a row of birds loquacious through the agitation of the wavesInfluence on other languagesSee also Indosphere and Greater India For nearly 2 000 years Sanskrit was the language of a cultural order that exerted influence across South Asia Inner Asia Southeast Asia and to a certain extent East Asia 169 A significant form of post Vedic Sanskrit is found in the Sanskrit of Indian epic poetry the Ramayana and Mahabharata The deviations from Paṇini in the epics are generally considered to be on account of interference from Prakrits or innovations and not because they are pre Paninian 382 Traditional Sanskrit scholars call such deviations arṣa आर ष meaning of the ṛṣis the traditional title for the ancient authors In some contexts there are also more prakritisms borrowings from common speech than in Classical Sanskrit proper Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit is a literary language heavily influenced by the Middle Indo Aryan languages based on early Buddhist Prakrit texts which subsequently assimilated to the Classical Sanskrit standard in varying degrees 383 Indian subcontinent Sanskrit has greatly influenced the languages of India that grew from its vocabulary and grammatical base for instance Hindi is a Sanskritised register of Hindustani All modern Indo Aryan languages as well as Munda and Dravidian languages have borrowed many words either directly from Sanskrit tatsama words or indirectly via middle Indo Aryan languages tadbhava words Words originating in Sanskrit are estimated at roughly fifty percent of the vocabulary of modern Indo Aryan languages as well as the literary forms of Malayalam and Kannada 384 Literary texts in Telugu are lexically Sanskrit or Sanskritised to an enormous extent perhaps seventy percent or more 385 Marathi is another prominent language in Western India that derives most of its words and Marathi grammar from Sanskrit 386 Sanskrit words are often preferred in the literary texts in Marathi over corresponding colloquial Marathi word 387 There has been a profound influence of Sanskrit on the lexical and grammatical systems of Dravidian languages As per Dalby India has been a single cultural area for about two millennia which has helped Sanskrit influence on all the Indic languages 388 Emeneau and Burrow mention the tendency for all four of the Dravidian literary languages in South to make literary use of total Sanskrit lexicon indiscriminately 389 There are a large number of loanwords found in the vocabulary of the three major Dravidian languages Malayalam Kannada and Telugu 388 Tamil also has significant loanwords from Sanskrit 390 Krishnamurthi mentions that although it is not clear when the Sanskrit influence happened on the Dravidian languages it might have been around the 5th century BCE at the time of separation of Tamil and Kannada from a common ancestral stage 391 The borrowed words are classified into two types based on phonological integration tadbhava those words derived from Prakrit and tatsama unassimilated loanwords from Sanskrit 392 Strazny mentions that so massive has been the influence that it is hard to utter Sanskrit words have influenced Kannada from the early times 393 The first document in Kannada the Halmidi inscription has a large number of Sanskrit words As per Kachru the influence has not only been on single lexical items in Kannada but also on long nominal compounds and complicated syntactic expressions New words have been created in Kannada using Sanskrit derivational prefixes and suffixes like vike ndri karaṇa anili karaṇa bahi skruTa Similar stratification is found in verb morphology Sanskrit words readily undergo verbalization in Kannada verbalizing suffixes as in cha pisu dowDa yisu rava nisu 394 George mentions that No other Dravidian language has been so deeply influenced by Sanskrit as Malayalam 395 According to Lambert Malayalam is so immensely Sanskritised that every Sanskrit word can be used in Malayalam by integrating prosodic phonological changes as per Grant 396 Loanwords have been integrated into Malayalam by prosodic phonological changes as per Grant These phonological changes are either by replacement of a vowel as in sant am coming from Sanskrit santa sagar am from sagara or addition of prothetic vowel as in aracan from raja uruvam from rupa codyam from sodhya 392 Hans Henrich et al note that the language of the pre modern Telugu literature was also highly influenced by Sanskrit and was standardized between 11th and 14th centuries 397 Aiyar has shown that in a class of tadbhavas in Telugu the first and second letters are often replaced by the third and fourth letters and fourth again replaced often by h Examples of the same are Sanskrit artha becomes ardhama vithi becomes vidhi putra becomes bidda mukham becomes muhamu 398 Tamil also has been influenced from Sanskrit Hans Henrich et al mention that propagation of Jainism and Buddhism into south India had its influence 397 Shulman mentions that although contrary to the views held by Tamil purists modern Tamil has been significantly influenced from Sanskrit further states that Indeed there may well be more Sanskrit in Tamil than in the Sanskrit derived north Indian vernaculars Sanskrit words have been Tamilized through the Tamil phonematic grid 390 Beyond the Indian subcontinent Sanskrit has had a historical presence and influence in many parts of Asia Above top clockwise i a Sanskrit manuscript from Turkestan ii another from Miran China Sanskrit was a language for religious purposes and for the political elite in parts of medieval era Southeast Asia Central Asia and East Asia having been introduced in these regions mainly along with the spread of Buddhism In some cases it has competed with Pali for prominence 158 399 East Asia i a bell with Sanskrit engravings in South Korea ii the Kukai calligraphy of Siddham Sanskrit in Japan Buddhist Sanskrit has had a considerable influence on Sino Tibetan languages such as Chinese state William Wang and Chaofen Sun 400 Many words have been adopted from Sanskrit into the Chinese both in its historic religious discourse and everyday use 400 bb This process likely started about 200 CE and continued through about 1400 CE with the efforts of monks such as Yuezhi Anxi Kangju Tianzhu Yan Fodiao Faxian Xuanzang and Yijing 400 Further as the Chinese languages and culture influenced the rest of East Asia the ideas in Sanskrit texts and some of its linguistic elements migrated further 156 401 Many terms were transliterated directly and added to the Chinese vocabulary Chinese words like 剎那 chana Devanagari क षण kṣaṇa instantaneous period were borrowed from Sanskrit Many Sanskrit texts survive only in Tibetan collections of commentaries to the Buddhist teachings the Tengyur Sanskrit has also influenced the religious register of Japanese mostly through transliterations These were borrowed from Chinese transliterations 402 In particular the Shingon lit True Words sect of esoteric Buddhism has been relying on Sanskrit and original Sanskrit mantras and writings as a means of realizing Buddhahood 403 Southeast Asia Further information Sanskrit inscriptions in the Malay world i the Thai script ii a Sanskrit inscription in Cambodia A large number of inscriptions in Sanskrit across Southeast Asia testify the influence the language held in these regions 404 Languages such as Indonesian Thai and Lao contain many loanwords from Sanskrit as does Khmer Many Sanskrit loanwords are also found in Austronesian languages such as Javanese particularly the older form in which nearly half the vocabulary is borrowed 405 Other Austronesian languages such as Malay descended into modern Malaysian and Indonesian standards also derive much of their vocabulary from Sanskrit Similarly Philippine languages such as Tagalog have some Sanskrit loanwords although more are derived from Spanish A Sanskrit loanword encountered in many Southeast Asian languages is the word bhaṣa or spoken language which is used to refer to the names of many languages 406 To this day Southeast Asian languages such as Thai are known to draw upon Sanskrit for technical vocabulary 407 Indonesia The ancient Yupa inscription one of the earliest and oldest Sanskrit texts written in ancient Indonesia dating back to the 4th century CE written by Brahmins under the rule of King Mulavarman of the Kutai Martadipura Kingdom located in eastern Borneo Further information List of Indic loanwords in Indonesian See also List of institutions with Sanskrit mottos Indonesia The earliest Sanskrit text which was founded in the Indonesian archipelago was at Eastern Borneo dating back to 400 CE known as the Mulavarman inscription 408 This is one of the reason of strong influence of Indian culture that entered the Malay archipelago during the Indianization era and since then Indian culture has been absorbed towards Indonesian culture and language Thus the Sanskrit culture in Indonesia exists not as a religious aspect but more towards a cultural aspect that has been present for generations resulting in a more cultural rather than Hinduistic value of the Indonesian people As a result it is common to find Muslim or Christian Indonesians with names that have Indian or Sanskrit nuances Unlike names derived from Sanskrit in Thai and Khmer the pronunciation of Sanskrit names in Indonesia is more similar to the original Indian pronunciation except that v is changed to w for example Vishnu in India will be spelled Wisnu in Indonesia Sanskrit has influenced Indonesian to a great extent 409 Many words in Indonesian are taken from Sanskrit for example from the word language bhaṣa itself comes from Sanskrit which means talking accent In fact names of cities such as Jayapura the capital city of Papua province including terms and mottoes of government educational and military institutions use Sanskrit such as the rank of general for example in the Indonesian Navy is Laksamana taken from the Ramayana The name of the environmental award given to cities throughout Indonesia by the central government is also taken from Sanskrit known as the Adipura award namely from the words Adi which means role model and Pura which means city literally A role model city or a city worthy of being an example Sanskrit terms are also widely used in numerous government institutions such as the armed forces and national police for example the motto of the Indonesian National Police which reads Rashtra Sevakottama the motto of the Indonesian Military Academy which reads Adhitakarya Mahatvavirya Nagarabhakti अध क ऱ य व र य नगरभक त and the motto of the Indonesian Naval Academy which reads Hree Dharma Shanti are one of the small examples Other Sanskrit terms such as Adhi Makayasa Chandradimuka Tri Dharma Eka Karma Taruna etc are also used intensively in the Indonesian security and defence forces 410 Rest of the world In ancient and medieval times several Sanskrit words in the field of food and spices made their way into European languages including Greek Latin and later English Some of these are pepper ginger and sugar English today has several words of Sanskrit origin most of them borrowed 411 better source needed during the British Raj or later Some of these words have in turn been borrowed by other European or world languages Modern eraLiturgy ceremonies and meditation Sanskrit is the sacred language of various Hindu Buddhist and Jain traditions It is used during worship in Hindu temples In Newar Buddhism it is used in all monasteries while Mahayana and Tibetan Buddhist religious texts and sutras are in Sanskrit as well as vernacular languages Some of the revered texts of Jainism including the Tattvartha sutra Ratnakaranda sravakacara the Bhaktamara Stotra and later versions of the Agamas are in Sanskrit Further states Paul Dundas Sanskrit mantras and Sanskrit as a ritual language was commonplace among Jains throughout their medieval history 412 Many Hindu rituals and rites of passage such as the giving away the bride and mutual vows at weddings a baby s naming or first solid food ceremony and the goodbye during a cremation invoke and chant Sanskrit hymns 413 Major festivals such as the Durga Puja ritually recite entire Sanskrit texts such as the Devi Mahatmya every year particularly amongst the numerous communities of eastern India 414 415 In the south Sanskrit texts are recited at many major Hindu temples such as the Meenakshi Temple 416 According to Richard H Davis a scholar of Religion and South Asian studies the breadth and variety of oral recitations of the Sanskrit text Bhagavad Gita is remarkable In India and beyond its recitations include simple private household readings to family and neighborhood recitation sessions to holy men reciting in temples or at pilgrimage places for passersby to public Gita discourses held almost nightly at halls and auditoriums in every Indian city 417 Literature and arts See also List of Sahitya Akademi Award winners for Sanskrit More than 3 000 Sanskrit works have been composed since India s independence in 1947 418 Much of this work has been judged of high quality in comparison to both classical Sanskrit literature and modern literature in other Indian languages 419 420 The Sahitya Akademi has given an award for the best creative work in Sanskrit every year since 1967 In 2009 Satya Vrat Shastri became the first Sanskrit author to win the Jnanpith Award India s highest literary award 421 Sanskrit is used extensively in the Carnatic and Hindustani branches of classical music Kirtanas bhajans stotras and shlokas of Sanskrit are popular throughout India The Samaveda uses musical notations in several of its recessions 422 In Mainland China musicians such as Sa Dingding have written pop songs in Sanskrit 423 Numerous loan Sanskrit words are found in other major Asian languages For example Filipino 424 Cebuano 425 Lao Khmer 426 Thai and its alphabets Malay including Malaysian and Indonesian Javanese old Javanese English dictionary by P J Zoetmulder contains over 25 500 entries and even in English Media Since 1974 there has been a short daily news broadcast on state run All India Radio 427 These broadcasts are also made available on the internet on AIR s website 428 429 Sanskrit news is broadcast on TV and on the internet through the DD National channel at 6 55 AM IST 430 Over 90 weeklies fortnightlies and quarterlies are published in Sanskrit Sudharma a daily printed newspaper in Sanskrit has been published out of Mysore India since 1970 It was started by K N Varadaraja Iyengar a Sanskrit scholar from Mysore Sanskrit Vartman Patram and Vishwasya Vrittantam started in Gujarat during the last five years 427 Schools and contemporary status See also Sanskrit revival Sanskrit festival at Pramati Hillview Academy Mysore India Sanskrit has been taught in schools from time immemorial in India In modern times the first Sanskrit University was Sampurnanand Sanskrit University established in 1791 in the Indian city of Varanasi Sanskrit is taught in 5 000 traditional schools Pathashalas and 14 000 schools 431 in India where there are also 22 colleges and universities dedicated to the exclusive study of the language citation needed Sanskrit is one of the 22 scheduled languages of India 275 Despite it being a studied school subject in contemporary India Sanskrit has not been spoken as a native language in centuries 432 433 434 The Central Board of Secondary Education of India CBSE along with several other state education boards has made Sanskrit an alternative option to the state s own official language as a second or third language choice in the schools it governs In such schools learning Sanskrit is an option for grades 5 to 8 Classes V to VIII This is true of most schools affiliated with the Indian Certificate of Secondary Education ICSE board especially in states where the official language is Hindi Sanskrit is also taught in traditional gurukulas throughout India 435 A number of colleges and universities in India have dedicated departments for Sanskrit studies In March 2020 the Indian Parliament passed the Central Sanskrit Universities Act 2020 which upgraded three universities National Sanskrit University Central Sanskrit University and Shri Lal Bahadur Shastri National Sanskrit University from the deemed to be university status to a central university status 436 Dmitri Mendeleev used the Sanskrit numbers of one two and three eka dvi or dwi and tri respectively to give provisional names to his predicted elements like eka boron being Gallium or eka Radium being Ununennium In the province of Bali in Indonesia a number of educational and scholarly institutions have also been conducting Sanskrit lessons for Hindu locals 437 In the West See also Academic teaching of Sanskrit outside India St James Junior School and Avanti Schools Trust in London England offer Sanskrit as part of the curriculum 438 439 Since September 2009 US high school students have been able to receive credits as Independent Study or toward Foreign Language requirements by studying Sanskrit as part of the SAFL Samskritam as a Foreign Language program coordinated by Samskrita Bharati 440 In Australia the private boys high school Sydney Grammar School offers Sanskrit from years 7 through to 12 including for the Higher School Certificate 441 Other schools that offer Sanskrit include the Ficino School in Auckland New Zealand St James Preparatory Schools in Cape Town Durban and Johannesburg South Africa John Colet School Sydney Australia Erasmus School Melbourne Australia 442 443 444 European studies and discourse See also Sanskrit studies European scholarship in Sanskrit begun by Heinrich Roth 1620 1668 and Johann Ernst Hanxleden 1681 1731 is considered responsible for the discovery of an Indo European language family by Sir William Jones 1746 1794 This research played an important role in the development of Western philology or historical linguistics 445 The 18th and 19th century speculations about the possible links of Sanskrit to ancient Egyptian language were later proven to be wrong but it fed an orientalist discourse both in the form Indophobia and Indophilia states Trautmann 446 Sanskrit writings when first discovered were imagined by Indophiles to potentially be repositories of the primitive experiences and religion of the human race and as such confirmatory of the truth of Christian scripture as well as a key to universal ethnological narrative 447 96 97 The Indophobes imagined the opposite making the counterclaim that there is little of any value in Sanskrit portraying it as a language fabricated by artful Brahmin priests with little original thought possibly copied from the Greeks who came with Alexander or perhaps the Persians 447 124 126 Scholars such as William Jones and his colleagues felt the need for systematic studies of Sanskrit language and literature This launched the Asiatic Society an idea that was soon transplanted to Europe starting with the efforts of Henry Thomas Colebrooke in Britain then Alexander Hamilton who helped expand its studies to Paris and thereafter his student Friedrich Schlegel who introduced Sanskrit to the universities of Germany Schlegel nurtured his own students into influential European Sanskrit scholars particularly through Franz Bopp and Friedrich Max Muller As these scholars translated the Sanskrit manuscripts the enthusiasm for Sanskrit grew rapidly among European scholars states Trautmann and chairs for Sanskrit were established in the universities of nearly every German statelet creating a competition for Sanskrit experts 447 133 142 Symbolic usage See also Educational institutions with Sanskrit mottos Non educational institutions which Sanskrit mottos Sanskrit honorifics in Southeast Asia Sanskritised naming of people across the world and Sanskritised naming of places across the world In India Indonesia Nepal Bangladesh Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia Sanskrit phrases are widely used as mottoes for various national educational and social organisations India Satyameva Jayate सत यम व जयत meaning truth alone triumphs 448 Nepal Janani Janmabhumischa Swargadapi Gariyasi जनन जन मभ म श च स वर ग दप गर यस meaning mother and motherland are superior to heaven citation needed Indonesia In Indonesia Sanskrit is widely used as terms and mottoes of the armed forces and other national organizations See Indonesian Armed Forces mottoes Rastra Sewakottama र ष ट र स वक त तम transl people s main servants is the official motto of the Indonesian National Police Tri Dharma Eka Karma त र धर म एक कर म is the official motto of the Indonesian Military Kartika Eka Paksi क र त क एक पक ष transl unmatchable bird with noble goals is the official motto of the Indonesian Army 449 Adhitakarya Mahatvavirya Nagarabhakti अध तक र य महत वव र य नगरभक त transl hard working knights serving bravery as nations hero is the official motto of the Indonesian Military Academy 450 Upakriya Labdha Prayojana Balottama उपक र य लब ध प रय जन ब ल त तम transl purpose of the unit is to give the best service to the nation by finding the perfect soldier is the official motto of the Army Psychological Corps Karmanye Vadikaraste Mafalesu Kadatjana कर मण य व ध क रस त म फल ष कद चन transl working without counting the profit and loss is the official motto of the Air Force Special Forces Paskhas 451 Jalesu Bhumyamca Jayamahe जल ष भ म यम च जयमह transl on the sea and land we are glorious is the official motto of the Indonesian Marine Corps 452 and there are more units and organizations in Indonesia either Armed Forces or civil which use the Sanskrit language respectively as their mottoes and other purposes Many of India s and Nepal s scientific and administrative terms use Sanskrit The Indian guided missile program that was commenced in 1983 by the Defence Research and Development Organisation has named the five missiles ballistic and others that it developed Prithvi Agni Akash Nag and the Trishul missile system India s first modern fighter aircraft is named HAL Tejas citation needed In November 2020 Gaurav Sharma a New Zealand politician of Indian origin swore into parliament using Sanskrit alongside Maori the decision was made as a homage to all Indian languages compromising between his native Pahari and Punjabi 453 In popular culture The song My Sweet Lord by George Harrison includes The Hare Krishna mantra also referred to reverentially as the Maha Mantra a 16 word Vaishnava mantra which is mentioned in the Kali Santarana Upanishad Satyagraha an opera by Philip Glass uses texts from the Bhagavad Gita sung in Sanskrit 454 455 In 1996 English psychedelic rock band Kula Shaker released Govinda a song entirely sung in Sanskrit The closing credits of The Matrix Revolutions has a prayer from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad The song Cyber raga from Madonna s album Music includes Sanskrit chants 456 and Shanti Ashtangi from her 1998 album Ray of Light which won a Grammy is the ashtanga vinyasa yoga chant 457 The lyrics include the mantra Om shanti 458 Composer John Williams featured choirs singing in Sanskrit for Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and in Star Wars Episode I The Phantom Menace 459 460 better source needed The theme song of Battlestar Galactica 2004 is the Gayatri Mantra taken from the Rigveda 461 The lyrics of The Child in Us by Enigma also contain Sanskrit verses 462 better source needed In 2006 Mexican singer Paulina Rubio was influenced in Sanskrit for her concept album Ananda 463 See alsoArsha prayoga Aryabhaṭa numeration List of Sanskrit related topics Spitzer Manuscript Proto Indo Aryan Proto Indo Iranian Proto Indo EuropeanNotes a b In conclusion there are strong systemic and paleographic indications that the Brahmi script derived from a Semitic prototype which mainly on historical grounds is most likely to have been Aramaic However the details of this problem remain to be worked out and in any case it is unlikely that a complete letter by letter derivation will ever be possible for Brahmi may have been more of an adaptation and remodeling rather than a direct derivation of the presumptive Semitic prototype perhaps under the influence of a preexisting Indian tradition of phonetic analysis However the Semitic hypothesis is not so strong as to rule out the remote possibility that further discoveries could drastically change the picture In particular a relationship of some kind probably partial or indirect with the protohistoric Indus Valley script should not be considered entirely out of the question Salomon 1998 p 30 It is one of 22 Eighth Schedule languages for which the Constitution mandates development Sanskrit is Protected Language Under Constitution Chapter 1 6 5 b 14 dharayan brahmaṇam rupam ilvalaḥ saṃskṛtam vadan The Ramayaṇa 3 10 54 said to be the first known use of saṃskṛta with reference to the language 18 All these achievements are dwarfed though by the Sanskrit linguistic tradition culminating in the famous grammar by Paṇini known as the Aṣṭhadhyayi The elegance and comprehensiveness of its architecture have yet to be surpassed by any grammar of any language and its ingenious methods of stratifying out use and mention language and metalanguage and theorem and metatheorem predate key discoveries in western philosophy by millennia 32 The Sanskrit grammatical tradition is also the ultimate source of the notion of zero which once adopted in the Arabic system of numerals allowed us to transcend the cumbersome notations of Roman arithmetic 32 6 106 Indians in 1981 49 736 in 1991 14 135 in 2001 and 24 821 in 2011 have reported Sanskrit to be their mother tongue 8 William Jones 1786 quoted by Thomas Burrow in The Sanskrit Language 62 The Sanscrit language whatever be its antiquity is of a wonderful structure more perfect than the Greek more copious than the Latin and more exquisitely refined than either yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar than could possibly have been produced by accident so strong indeed that no philologer could examine them all three without believing them to have sprung from some common source which perhaps no longer exists There is a similar reason though not quite so forcible for supposing that both the Gothick and the Celtick sic though blended with a very different idiom had the same origin with the Sanscrit and the Old Persian might be added to the same family The Mitanni treaty is generally dated to the 16th century BCE but this date and its significance remains much debated 79 An example of the shared phrasal equations is the dyauṣ pitṛ in Vedic Sanskrit from Proto Indo European dyḗws ph tḗr meaning sky father The Mycenaean Greek equivalent is Zeus Pater which evolved to Jupiter in Latin Equivalent paternal Heaven phrasal equation is found in many Indo European languages 84 Paṇini s use of the term lipi has been a source of scholarly disagreements Harry Falk in his 1993 overview states that ancient Indians neither knew nor used writing script and Paṇini s mention is likely a reference to Semitic and Greek scripts 102 In his 1995 review Salomon questions Falk s arguments and writes it is speculative at best and hardly constitutes firm grounds for a late date for Kharoṣṭhi The stronger argument for this position is that we have no specimen of the script before the time of Ashoka nor any direct evidence of intermediate stages in its development but of course this does not mean that such earlier forms did not exist only that if they did exist they have not survived presumably because they were not employed for monumental purposes before Ashoka 103 According to Hartmut Scharfe lipi of Paṇini may be borrowed from the Old Persian dipi in turn derived from Sumerian dup Scharfe adds that the best evidence at the time of his review is that no script was used in India aside from the Northwest Indian subcontinent before around 300 BCE because Indian tradition at every occasion stresses the orality of the cultural and literary heritage 104 Kenneth Norman states writing scripts in ancient India evolved over the long period of time like other cultures that it is unlikely that ancient Indians developed a single complete writing system at one and the same time in the Maurya era It is even less likely states Norman that a writing script was invented during Ashoka s rule starting from nothing for the specific purpose of writing his inscriptions and then it was understood all over South Asia where the Ashoka pillars are found 105 Goody 1987 states that ancient India likely had a very old culture of writing along with its oral tradition of composing and transmitting knowledge because the Vedic literature is too vast consistent and complex to have been entirely created memorized accurately preserved and spread without a written system 106 Falk disagrees with Goody and suggests that it is a Western presumption and inability to imagine that remarkably early scientific achievements such as Paṇini s grammar 5th to 4th century BCE and the creation preservation and wide distribution of the large corpus of the Brahmanic Vedic literature and the Buddhist canonical literature without any writing scripts Bronkhorst 2002 disagrees with Falk and states Falk goes too far It is fair to expect that we believe that Vedic memorisation though without parallel in any other human society has been able to preserve very long texts for many centuries without losing a syllable However the oral composition of a work as complex as Paṇini s grammar is not only without parallel in other human cultures it is without parallel in India itself It just will not do to state that our difficulty in conceiving any such thing is our problem 107 Pali is also an extinct language 120 The Indian Mission for Manuscripts initiative has already counted over 5 million manuscripts The thirty million estimate is of David Pingree a manuscriptologist and historian Peter M Scharf 135 A celebrated work on the philosophy of language is the Vakyapadiya by the 5th century Hindu scholar Bhartrhari 139 142 143 That Which Is known as the Tattvartha Sutra to Jains is recognized by all four Jain traditions as the earliest most authoritative and comprehensive summary of their religion 147 The oldest surviving Sanskrit inscription in the Kathmandu valley is dated to 464 CE 200 a b Sanskrit is written in many scripts Sounds in grey are not phonemic ḹ is not an actual sound of Sanskrit but rather a graphic convention included among the written vowels to maintain the symmetry of short long pairs of letters 219 Correspondences are approximate 234 Consonant described as either at the roots of the teeth alveolar and retroflex Vowels are very short may be equivalent to short a e or i a b Like the preceding but longer Pronounced somewhat like the lur in English slurp Only found in the verb kl p to be fit arrange As a nasal vowel or if followed by a stop consonant plosive affricate or nasal it is realized as the nasal in the same series as the following consonant Voiceless h followed by a short echo vowel If the preceding vowel is ai or au the echo vowel will be i or u respectively Use depends on whether penultimate is light or heavy The root affix is called the stem 240 Other equivalents bharami I carry bharati he carries bharamas we carry 61 Similar morphology is found in some other Indo European languages for example in the Gothic language baira I carry bairis you carry bairith he carries Ruppel gives the following endings for the present indicative active in the Sanskrit language 1st dual vaḥ 1st plural maḥ 2nd dual thaḥ 2nd plural tha and so on 111 The Sanskrit in the Indian epics such as the Mahabharata and the Ramayana are all in meter and the structure of the metrics has attracted scholarly studies since the 19th century 254 Kena Katha Isha Shvetashvatara and Mundaka Upanishads are examples of verse style ancient Upanishads Sudden or significant changes in metre wherein the metre of succeeding sections return to earlier sections suggest a corruption of the message interpolations and insertion of text into a Sanskrit manuscript It may also reflect that the text is a compilation of works of different authors and time periods 260 261 262 The Buddhist text Lalitavistara Sutra describes the young Siddhartha the future Buddha to have mastered philology and scripts at a school from Brahmin Lipikara and Deva Vidyasinha 269 A version of this list of sixty four ancient Indian scripts is found in the Chinese translation of an Indian Buddhist text and this translation has been dated to 308 CE 271 The Greek Nearchos who visited ancient India with the army of Alexander the Great in the 4th century BCE mentions that Indians wrote on cloth but Nearchos could have confused Aramaic writers with the Indians 274 Salomon writes in The World s Writing Systems edited by Peter Daniels that many scholars feel that the origins of these scripts must have gone back further than this mid 3rd century BCE Ashoka inscriptions but there is no conclusive proof 275 Minor inscriptions discovered in the 20th century may be older but their dating is uncertain 280 Salomon states that the inscription has a few scribal errors but is essentially standard Sanskrit 138 Salomon illustrates this for the consonant ka which is written as in the Brahmi script and क in the Devanagari script the vowel is marked together with the consonant before as in क after क above क or below क 277 Sanskrit and the Prakrits at different times and places were written in a vast number of forms and derivatives of Brahmi In the premodern period in other words these languages would be written by a given scribe in whatever happened to be the current local script Richard Salomon p 70 284 Salomon states that these shared graphic principles that combine syllabic and alphabetic writing are distinctive for Indic scripts when contrasted with other major world languages The only known similarity is found in the Ethiopic scripts but Ethiopic system lacks clusters and the Indic set of full vowels signs 297 Some scholars date these to the 2nd century BCE 300 301 Prakrit inscriptions of ancient India such as those of Ashoka are older Louis Renou called it the great linguistical paradox of India that the Sanskrit inscriptions appear later than Prakrit inscriptions although Prakrit is considered as a descendant of the Sanskrit language 138 According to Salomon towards the end of pre Christian era a smattering of standard or nearly standard Sanskrit inscriptions came into vogue and we may assume that these are isolated survivals of what must have been then an increasingly common practice He adds that the Scythian rulers of northern and western India while not the originators were promoters of the use of Sanskrit language for inscriptions and their motivation in promoting Sanskrit was presumably a desire to establish themselves as legitimate Indian or at least Indianized rulers and to curry the favor of the educated Brahmanical elite 305 The Rudradaman inscription is not pure classical Sanskrit but with few epic vernacular Sanskrit exceptions it approaches high classical Sanskrit 313 Finally after this transitional period in the fourth and early fifth centuries CE Prakrit fell out of use completely in southern Indian inscriptions For the next few centuries Sanskrit was the sole epigraphic language until the regional Dravidian languages began to come into use around the seventh century 319 The use of the Sanskrit language in epigraphy gradually dropped after the arrival and the consolidation of Islamic Delhi Sultanate rule in the late 12th century but it remained in active epigraphical use in the south and central regions of India By about the 14th century with the Islamic armies conquering more of South Asia the use of Sanskrit language for inscriptions became rarer and it was replaced with Persian Arabic Dravidian and North Indo Aryan languages states Salomon 324 The Sanskrit language particularly in bilingual form re emerged in the epigraphy of Hindu kingdoms such as the Vijayanagara Yadavas Hoysalas Pandyas and others that re established themselves 325 Some Muslim rulers such as Adil Shah also issued Sanskrit language inscriptions recording the donation of a mosque 325 Since the Renaissance there has been no event of such worldwide significance in the history of culture as the discovery of Sanskrit literature in the latter part of the eighteenth century Macdonell 331 The style of the Vedic works is more simple and spontaneous while that of the later works abounds in puns conceits and long compounds Rhetorical ornaments are more and more copious and complex and the rules of Poetic and Grammar more and more rigidly observed as time advances Iyengar 333 These are just generic names for works of law an account of Indian algebra Kama sastra the science of love Most Tripiṭaka historic texts in the Pali language but Sanskrit Tripiṭaka texts have been discovered 372 Examples of phonetically imported Sanskrit words in Chinese include samgha Chinese seng bhiksuni ni kasaya jiasha namo or namas namo and nirvana niepan The list of phonetically transcribed and semantically translated words from Sanskrit into Chinese is substantial states Xiangdong Shi 400 References Mascaro Juan 2003 The Bhagavad Gita Penguin pp 13 ff ISBN 978 0 14 044918 1 The Bhagawad Gita an intensely spiritual work that forms one of the cornerstones of the Hindu faith and is also one of the masterpieces of Sanskrit poetry from the backcover Besant Annie trans 1922 Discourse 1 The Bhagavad gita or The Lord s Song with text in Devanagari and English translation Madras G E Natesan amp Co प रव त त शस त रसम प त धन र द यम य प ण डव २० Then beholding the sons of Dhritarashtra standing arrayed and flight of missiles about to begin the son of Pandu took up his bow 20 ह ष क श तद व क यम दम ह मह पत अर ज न उव च २१ And spake this word to Hrishikesha O Lord of Earth Arjuna said Radhakrishnan S 1948 The Bhagavadgita With an introductory essay Sanskrit text English translation and notes London UK George Allen and Unwin Ltd p 86 pravyite Sastrasampate dhanur udyamya pandavah 20 Then Arjuna looked at the sons of Dhrtarastra drawn up in battle order and as the flight of missiles almost started he took up his bow hystkesam tada vakyam idam aha mahipate 21 And O Lord of earth he spoke this word to Hrsikesha Krsna Uta Reinohl 2016 Grammaticalization and the Rise of Configurationality in Indo Aryan Oxford University Press pp xiv 1 16 ISBN 978 0 19 873666 0 Colin P Masica 1993 p 55 Thus Classical Sanskrit fixed by Panini s grammar in probably the fourth century BC on the basis of a class dialect and preceding grammatical tradition of probably the seventh century BC had its greatest literary flowering in the first millennium AD and even later much of it therefore a full thousand years after the stage of the language it ostensibly represents a b McCartney Patrick 10 May 2020 Searching for Sanskrit Speakers in the Indian Census The Wire retrieved 24 November 2020 Quote What this data tells us is that it is very difficult to believe the notion that Jhiri is a Sanskrit village where everyone only speaks fluent Sanskrit at a mother tongue level It is also difficult to accept that the lingua franca of the rural masses is Sanskrit when most the majority of L1 L2 and L3 Sanskrit tokens are linked to urban areas The predominance of Sanskrit across the Hindi belt also shows a particular cultural geographic affection that does not spread equally across the rest of the country In addition the clustering with Hindi and English in the majority of variations possible also suggests that a certain class element is involved Essentially people who identify as speakers of Sanskrit appear to be urban and educated which possibly implies that the affiliation with Sanskrit is related in some way to at least some sort of Indian if not Hindu nationalism a b McCartney Patrick 11 May 2020 The Myth of Sanskrit Villages and the Realm of Soft Power The Wire retrieved 24 November 2020 Quote Consider the example of this faith based development narrative that has evolved over the past decade in the state of Uttarakhand In 2010 Sanskrit became the state s second official language Recently an updated policy has increased this top down imposition of language shift toward Sanskrit The new policy aims to create a Sanskrit village in every block administrative division of Uttarakhand The state of Uttarakhand consists of two divisions 13 districts 79 sub districts and 97 blocks There is hardly a Sanskrit village in even one block in Uttarakhand The curious thing is that while 70 of the state s total population live in rural areas 100pc of the total 246 L1 Sanskrit tokens returned at the 2011 census are from Urban areas No L1 Sanskrit token comes from any villager who identifies as an L1 Sanskrit speaker in Uttarakhand a b c d e Sreevastan Ajai 10 August 2014 Where are the Sanskrit speakers The Hindu Chennai Retrieved 11 October 2020 Sanskrit is also the only scheduled language that shows wide fluctuations rising from 6 106 speakers in 1981 to 49 736 in 1991 and then falling dramatically to 14 135 speakers in 2001 This fluctuation is not necessarily an error of the Census method People often switch language loyalties depending on the immediate political climate says Prof Ganesh Devy of the People s Linguistic Survey of India Because some people fictitiously indicate Sanskrit as their mother tongue owing to its high prestige and Constitutional mandate the Census captures the persisting memory of an ancient language that is no longer anyone s real mother tongue says B Mallikarjun of the Center for Classical Language Hence the numbers fluctuate in each Census Sanskrit has influence without presence says Devy We all feel in some corner of the country Sanskrit is spoken But even in Karnataka s Mattur which is often referred to as India s Sanskrit village hardly a handful indicated Sanskrit as their mother tongue a b Lowe John J 2017 Transitive Nouns and Adjectives Evidence from Early Indo Aryan Oxford University Press p 53 ISBN 978 0 19 879357 1 The desire to preserve understanding and knowledge of Sanskrit in the face of ongoing linguistic change drove the development of an indigenous grammatical tradition which culminated in the composition of the Aṣṭadhyayi attributed to the grammarian Paṇini no later than the early fourth century BCE In subsequent centuries Sanskrit ceased to be learnt as a native language and eventually ceased to develop as living languages do becoming increasingly fixed according to the prescriptions of the grammatical tradition a b Ruppel A M 2017 The Cambridge Introduction to Sanskrit Cambridge University Press p 2 ISBN 978 1 107 08828 3 The study of any ancient or dead language is faced with one main challenge ancient languages have no native speakers who could provide us with examples of simple everyday speech Annamalai E 2008 Contexts of multilingualism In Braj B Kachru Yamuna Kachru S N Sridhar eds Language in South Asia Cambridge University Press pp 223 ISBN 978 1 139 46550 2 Some of the migrated languages such as Sanskrit and English remained primarily as a second language even though their native speakers were lost Some native languages like the language of the Indus valley were lost with their speakers while some linguistic communities shifted their language to one or other of the migrants languages a b Jain Dhanesh 2007 Sociolinguistics of the Indo Aryan languages In George Cardona Dhanesh Jain eds The Indo Aryan Languages Routledge pp 47 66 51 ISBN 978 1 135 79711 9 In the history of Indo Aryan writing was a later development and its adoption has been slow even in modern times The first written word comes to us through Asokan inscriptions dating back to the third century BC Originally Brahmi was used to write Prakrit MIA for Sanskrit OIA it was used only four centuries later Masica 1991 135 The MIA traditions of Buddhist and Jain texts show greater regard for the written word than the OIA Brahminical tradition though writing was available to Old Indo Aryans a b Salomon Richard 2007 The Writing Systems of the Indo Aryan Languages In George Cardona Dhanesh Jain eds The Indo Aryan Languages Routledge pp 67 102 ISBN 978 1 135 79711 9 Although in modern usage Sanskrit is most commonly written or printed in Nagari in theory it can be represented by virtually any of the main Brahmi based scripts and in practice it often is Thus scripts such as Gujarati Bangla and Oriya as well as the major south Indian scripts traditionally have been and often still are used in their proper territories for writing Sanskrit Sanskrit in other words is not inherently linked to any particular script although it does have a special historical connection with Nagari Constitution of the Republic of South Africa 1996 Chapter 1 Founding Provisions gov za Retrieved 6 December 2014 Cardona George Luraghi Silvia 2018 Sanskrit In Bernard Comrie ed The World s Major Languages Taylor amp Francis pp 497 ISBN 978 1 317 29049 0 Sanskrit samskrita adorned purified It is in the Ramayana that the term saṃskṛta is encountered probably for the first time with reference to the language a b Wright J C 1990 Reviewed Works Paṇini His Work and Its Traditions Vol I Background and Introduction by George Cardona Grammaire sanskrite panineenne by Pierre Sylvain Filliozat Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies University of London Cambridge University Press 53 1 152 154 doi 10 1017 S0041977X0002156X JSTOR 618999 The first reference to Sanskrit in the context of language is in the Ramayana Book 5 Sundarkanda Canto 28 Verse 17 अह ह यत तन श च व वनरश च व श षत व च च द हर ष य म म न ष म ह स स क त म १७ Hanuman says First my body is very subtle second I am a monkey Especially as a monkey I will use here the human appropriate Sanskrit speech language Apte Vaman Shivaram 1957 Revised and enlarged edition of Prin V S Apte sThe practical Sanskrit English Dictionary Poona Prasad Prakashan p 1596 from स स क त saṃskṛite past passive participle Made perfect refined polished cultivated त tah A word formed regularly according to the rules of grammar a regular derivative तम tam Refined or highly polished speech the Sanskṛit language स स क त न म द व व गन व ख य त महर ष भ named sanskritam the divine language elaborated by the sages from Kavyadarsa 1 33 of Daṇḍin Cardona 1997 p 557 a b Roger D Woodard 2008 The Ancient Languages of Asia and the Americas Cambridge University Press pp 1 2 ISBN 978 0 521 68494 1 The earliest form of this oldest language Sanskrit is the one found in the ancient Brahmanic text called the Rigveda composed c 1500 BCE The date makes Sanskrit one of the three earliest of the well documented languages of the Indo European family the other two being Old Hittite and Myceanaean Greek and in keeping with its early appearance Sanskrit has been a cornerstone in the reconstruction of the parent language of the Indo European family Proto Indo European a b c Bauer Brigitte L M 2017 Nominal Apposition in Indo European Its forms and functions and its evolution in Latin romance De Gruyter pp 90 92 ISBN 978 3 11 046175 6 For detailed comparison of the languages see pp 90 126 a b c d Ramat Anna Giacalone Ramat Paolo 2015 The Indo European Languages Routledge pp 26 31 ISBN 978 1 134 92187 4 Dyson Tim 2018 A Population History of India From the First Modern People to the Present Day Oxford University Press pp 14 15 ISBN 978 0 19 882905 8 Although the collapse of the Indus valley civilization is no longer believed to have been due to an Aryan invasion it is widely thought that at roughly the same time or perhaps a few centuries later new Indo Aryan speaking people and influences began to enter the subcontinent from the north west Detailed evidence is lacking Nevertheless a predecessor of the language that would eventually be called Sanskrit was probably introduced into the north west sometime between 3 900 and 3 000 years ago This language was related to one then spoken in eastern Iran and both of these languages belonged to the Indo European language family Pinkney Andrea Marion 2014 Revealing the Vedas in Hinduism Foundations and issues of interpretation of religions in South Asian Hindu traditions In Bryan S Turner Oscar Salemink eds Routledge Handbook of Religions in Asia Routledge pp 38 ISBN 978 1 317 63646 5 According to Asko Parpola the Proto Indo Aryan civilization was influenced by two external waves of migrations The first group originated from the southern Urals c 2100 BCE and mixed with the peoples of the Bactria Margiana Archaeological Complex BMAC this group then proceeded to South Asia arriving around 1900 BCE The second wave arrived in northern South Asia around 1750 BCE and mixed with the formerly arrived group producing the Mitanni Aryans c 1500 BCE a precursor to the peoples of the Ṛgveda Michael Witzel has assigned an approximate chronology to the strata of Vedic languages arguing that the language of the Ṛgveda changed through the beginning of the Iron Age in South Asia which started in the Northwest Punjab around 1000 BCE On the basis of comparative philological evidence Witzel has suggested a five stage periodization of Vedic civilization beginning with the Ṛgveda On the basis of internal evidence the Ṛgveda is dated as a late Bronze Age text composed by pastoral migrants with limited settlements probably between 1350 and 1150 BCE in the Punjab region Michael C Howard 2012 p 21 Pollock Sheldon 2006 The Language of the Gods in the World of Men Sanskrit Culture and Power in Premodern India University of California Press p 14 ISBN 978 0 520 24500 6 Once Sanskrit emerged from the sacerdotal environment it became the sole medium by which ruling elites expressed their power Sanskrit probably never functioned as an everyday medium of communication anywhere in the cosmopolis not in South Asia itself let alone Southeast Asia The work Sanskrit did do was directed above all toward articulating a form of politics as celebration of aesthetic power Burrow 1973 pp 62 64 Cardona George Luraghi Silvia 2018 Sanskrit In Bernard Comrie ed The World s Major Languages Taylor amp Francis pp 497 ISBN 978 1 317 29049 0 Sanskrit samskrita adorned purified refers to several varieties of Old Indo Aryan whose most archaic forms are found in Vedic texts the Rigveda Ṛgveda Yajurveda Samveda Atharvaveda with various branches a b Alfred C Woolner 1986 Introduction to Prakrit Motilal Banarsidass pp 3 4 ISBN 978 81 208 0189 9 If in Sanskrit we include the Vedic language and all dialects of the Old Indian period then it is true to say that all the Prakrits are derived from Sanskrit If on the other hand Sanskrit is used more strictly of the Panini Patanjali language or Classical Sanskrit then it is untrue to say that any Prakrit is derived from Sanskrit except that Sauraseni the Midland Prakrit is derived from the Old Indian dialect of the Madhyadesa on which Classical Sanskrit was mainly based Lowe John J 2015 Participles in Rigvedic Sanskrit The syntax and semantics of adjectival verb forms Oxford University Press pp 1 2 ISBN 978 0 19 100505 3 It consists of 1 028 hymns suktas highly crafted poetic compositions originally intended for recital during rituals and for the invocation of and communication with the Indo Aryan gods Modern scholarly opinion largely agrees that these hymns were composed between around 1500 BCE and 1200 BCE during the eastward migration of the Indo Aryan tribes from the mountains of what is today northern Afghanistan across the Punjab into north India Witzel Michael 2006 Early Loan Words in Western Central Asia Indicators of Substrate Populations Migrations and Trade Relations In Victor H Mair ed Contact And Exchange in the Ancient World University of Hawaii Press pp 158 190 160 ISBN 978 0 8248 2884 4 The Vedas were composed roughly between 1500 1200 and 500 BCE in parts of present day Afghanistan northern Pakistan and northern India The oldest text at our disposal is the Rgveda RV it is composed in archaic Indo Aryan Vedic Sanskrit Shulman David 2016 Tamil Harvard University Press pp 17 19 ISBN 978 0 674 97465 4 p 17 Similarly we find a large number of other items relating to flora and fauna grains pulses and spices that is words that we might expect to have made their way into Sanskrit from the linguistic environment of prehistoric or early historic India p 18 Dravidian certainly influenced Sanskrit phonology and syntax from early on p 19 Vedic Sanskrit was in contact from very ancient times with speakers of Dravidian languages and that the two language families profoundly influenced one another a b c Evans Nicholas 2009 Dying Words Endangered languages and what they have to tell us John Wiley amp Sons pp 27 ISBN 978 0 631 23305 3 Glenn Van Brummelen 2014 Arithmetic In Thomas F Glick Steven Livesey Faith Wallis eds Medieval Science Technology and Medicine An Encyclopedia Routledge pp 46 48 ISBN 978 1 135 45932 1 The story of the growth of arithmetic from the ancient inheritance to the wealth passed on to the Renaissance is dramatic and passes through several cultures The most groundbreaking achievement was the evolution of a positional number system in which the position of a digit within a number determines its value according to powers usually of ten e g in 3 285 the 2 refers to hundreds Its extension to include decimal fractions and the procedures that were made possible by its adoption transformed the abilities of all who calculated with an effect comparable to the modern invention of the electronic computer Roughly speaking this began in India was transmitted to Islam and then to the Latin West Lowe John J 2017 Transitive Nouns and Adjectives Evidence from Early Indo Aryan Oxford University Press p 58 ISBN 978 0 19 879357 1 The term Epic Sanskrit refers to the language of the two great Sanskrit epics the Mahabharata and the Ramayaṇa It is likely therefore that the epic like elements found in Vedic sources and the two epics that we have are not directly related but that both drew on the same source an oral tradition of storytelling that existed before throughout and after the Vedic period a b Lowe John J 2015 Participles in Rigvedic Sanskrit The Syntax and Semantics of Adjectival Verb Forms Oxford University Press pp 2 ISBN 978 0 19 100505 3 The importance of the Rigveda for the study of early Indo Aryan historical linguistics cannot be underestimated its language is notably similar in many respects to the most archaic poetic texts of related language families the Old Avestan Gathas and Homer s Iliad and Odyssey respectively the earliest poetic representatives of the Iranian and Greek language families Moreover its manner of preservation by a system of oral transmission which has preserved the hymns almost without change for 3 000 years makes it a very trustworthy witness to the Indo Aryan language of North India in the second millennium BC Its importance for the reconstruction of Proto Indo European particularly in respect of the archaic morphology and syntax it preserves is considerable Any linguistic investigation into Old Indo Aryan Indo Iranian or Proto Indo European cannot avoid treating the evidence of the Rigveda as of vital importance Staal 1986 Filliozat 2004 pp 360 375 Filliozat 2004 p 139 Gazzola Michele Wickstrom Bengt Arne 2016 The Economics of Language Policy MIT Press pp 469 ISBN 978 0 262 03470 8 The Eighth Schedule recognizes India s national languages as including the major regional languages as well as others such as Sanskrit and Urdu which contribute to India s cultural heritage The original list of fourteen languages in the Eighth Schedule at the time of the adoption of the Constitution in 1949 has now grown to twenty two Groff Cynthia 2017 The Ecology of Language in Multilingual India Voices of Women and Educators in the Himalayan Foothills Palgrave Macmillan UK pp 58 ISBN 978 1 137 51961 0 As Mahapatra says It is generally believed that the significance for the Eighth Schedule lies in providing a list of languages from which Hindi is directed to draw the appropriate forms style and expressions for its enrichment Being recognized in the Constitution however has had significant relevance for a language s status and functions Indian village where people speak in Sanskrit BBC News 22 December 2014 Retrieved 30 September 2020 Annamalai E 2008 Contexts of multilingualism In Braj B Kachru Yamuna Kachru S N Sridhar eds Language in South Asia Cambridge University Press pp 223 ISBN 978 1 139 46550 2 Some of the migrated languages such as Sanskrit and English remained primarily as a second language even though their native speakers were lost Some native languages like the language of the Indus valley were lost with their speakers while some linguistic communities shifted their language to one or other of the migrants languages Distribution of the 22 Scheduled Languages India States Union Territories Sanskrit PDF Census of India 2011 p 30 retrieved 4 October 2020 Seth Sanjay 2007 Subject Lessons The Western Education of Colonial India Duke University Press pp 171 ISBN 978 0 8223 4105 5 Angus Stevenson amp Maurice Waite 2011 p 1275 a b Shlomo Biderman 2008 p 90 Will Durant 1963 p 406 Sir Monier Monier Williams 2005 A Sanskrit English Dictionary Etymologically and Philologically Arranged with Special Reference to Cognate Indo European Languages Motilal Banarsidass p 1120 ISBN 978 81 208 3105 6 Louis Renou amp Jagbans Kishore Balbir 2004 pp 1 2 Annette Wilke amp Oliver Moebus 2011 pp 62 66 with footnotes Guy L Beck 2006 pp 117 123 Southworth Franklin 2004 Linguistic Archaeology of South Asia Routledge p 45 ISBN 978 1 134 31777 6 Jared Klein Brian Joseph Matthias Fritz 2017 Handbook of Comparative and Historical Indo European Linguistics An International Handbook Walter De Gruyter pp 318 320 ISBN 978 3 11 026128 8 Ancient tablet found Oldest readable writing in Europe National Geographic 1 April 2011 Rose Jenny 18 August 2011 Zoroastrianism A guide for the perplexed Bloomsbury Publishing pp 75 76 ISBN 978 1 4411 2236 0 Dani Ahmad Hasan Masson Vadim Mikhaĭlovich 1999 History of Civilizations of Central Asia Motilal Banarsidass pp 357 358 ISBN 978 81 208 1407 3 Colin P Masica 1993 p 34 Levin Saul 24 October 2002 Semitic and Indo European Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 226 Vol II Comparative morphology syntax and phonetics John Benjamins Publishing Company p 431 ISBN 9781588112224 OCLC 32590410 ISBN 1588112225 Bryant Edwin Francis Patton Laurie L The Indo Aryan Controversy Evidence and inference in Indian history Psychology Press p 208 Robins R H 2014 General Linguistics Routledge pp 346 347 ISBN 978 1 317 88763 8 a b J P Mallory amp D Q Adams 2006 p 6 Burrow 1973 p 6 Colin P Masica 1993 pp 36 38 Burrow 1973 pp 30 32 Burrow 1973 pp 30 34 a b Meier Brugger Michael 2003 Indo European Linguistics Walter de Gruyter p 20 ISBN 978 3 11 017433 5 MacDonell 2004 Keith 1996 pp 3 4 Deshpande 1993 p 165 Bloomfield amp Edgerton 1932 163 170 a b Deshpande 1993 pp 130 196 Barbara A Holdrege 2012 pp 229 230 Bryant 2001 pp 66 67 Louis Renou amp Jagbans Kishore Balbir 2004 pp 5 6 Cardona George 2012 Sanskrit Language Encyclopaedia Britannica a b Witzel M 1997 Inside the Texts Beyond the Texts New approaches to the study of the Vedas PDF Cambridge Massachusetts Harvard University Press Retrieved 17 July 2018 Harold G Coward 1990 pp 3 12 36 47 111 112 Note Sanskrit was both a literary and spoken language in ancient India a b Cohen Signe 2017 The Upanisads A complete guide Taylor amp Francis pp 11 17 ISBN 978 1 317 63696 0 Bryant 2001 p 249 Robinson Andrew 2014 India A Short History Thames amp Hudson pp 56 57 ISBN 978 0 500 77195 2 Woodard Roger D 2008 The Ancient Languages of Asia and the Americas Cambridge University Press p 1 ISBN 978 0 521 68494 1 Lowe John Jeffrey 2015 Participles in Rigvedic Sanskrit The syntax and semantics of adjectival verb forms Oxford University Press pp 2 3 ISBN 978 0 19 870136 1 Stephanie W Jamison amp Joel P Brereton 2014 pp 10 11 72 Stephanie W Jamison amp Joel P Brereton 2014 p 50 Stephanie W Jamison amp Joel P Brereton 2014 pp 66 67 Richard Gombrich 2006 Theravada Buddhism A Social History from Ancient Benares to Modern Colombo Routledge pp 24 25 ISBN 978 1 134 90352 8 Gerard Huet Amba Kulkarni Peter Scharf 2009 Sanskrit Computational Linguistics First and Second International Symposia Rocquencourt France October 29 31 2007 Providence RI USA May 15 17 2008 Revised Selected Papers Springer pp v vi ISBN 978 3 642 00154 3 Cardona George 1998 Paṇini A Survey of Research Motilal Banarsidass p 268 ISBN 978 81 208 1494 3 Ashtadhyayi Work by Panini Encyclopaedia Britannica 2013 Retrieved 23 October 2017 Ashtadhyayi Sanskrit Aṣṭadhyayi Eight Chapters Sanskrit treatise on grammar written in the 6th to 5th century BCE by the Indian grammarian Panini Staal Frits April 1965 Euclid and Paṇini Philosophy East and West 15 2 99 116 doi 10 2307 1397332 JSTOR 1397332 a b Fortson 10 26 a b Harold G Coward 1990 pp 13 14 111 Paṇini Sumitra Mangesh Katre 1989 Aṣṭadhyayi of Paṇini Motilal Banarsidass pp xix xxi ISBN 978 81 208 0521 7 Cardona 1997 p 2 Louis Renou amp Jean Filliozat L Inde Classique manuel des etudes indiennes vol II pp 86 90 Ecole francaise d Extreme Orient 1953 reprinted 2000 ISBN 2 85539 903 3 Angot Michel L Inde Classique pp 213 215 Les Belles Lettres Paris 2001 ISBN 2 251 41015 5 Yuji Kawaguchi Makoto Minegishi Wolfgang Viereck 2011 Corpus based Analysis and Diachronic Linguistics John Benjamins Publishing Company pp 223 224 ISBN 978 90 272 7215 7 John Bowman 2005 Columbia Chronologies of Asian History and Culture Columbia University Press p 728 ISBN 978 0 231 50004 3 a b c Salomon 1998 p 11 a b Juhyung Rhi 2009 On the Peripheries of Civilizations The Evolution of a Visual Tradition in Gandhara Journal of Central Eurasian Studies 1 5 1 13 Rita Sherma Arvind Sharma 2008 Hermeneutics and Hindu Thought Toward a Fusion of Horizons Springer p 235 ISBN 978 1 4020 8192 7 Falk Harry 1993 Schrift im alten Indien ein Forschungsbericht mit Anmerkungen in German Gunter Narr Verlag pp 109 167 Salomon Richard 1995 Review On the Origin of the Early Indian Scripts Journal of the American Oriental Society 115 2 271 278 doi 10 2307 604670 JSTOR 604670 Scharfe Hartmut 2002 Education in Ancient India Handbook of Oriental Studies Leiden Netherlands Brill pp 10 12 Oskar von Hinuber 1989 Der Beginn der Schrift und fruhe Schriftlichkeit in Indien Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur pp 241 245 ISBN 9783515056274 OCLC 22195130 Goody Jack 1987 The Interface between the Written and the Oral Cambridge University Press pp 110 124 ISBN 978 0 521 33794 6 via Archive org Bronkhorst Johannes 2002 Literacy and rationality in ancient India Asiatische Studien 56 4 803 804 797 831 Louis Renou amp Jagbans Kishore Balbir 2004 p 53 Louis Renou amp Jagbans Kishore Balbir 2004 pp 53 54 Burrow 1973 pp 33 34 a b c d e A M Ruppel 2017 pp 378 383 Arthur Anthony Macdonell 1997 A Sanskrit Grammar for Students Motilal Banarsidass pp 236 244 ISBN 978 81 208 0505 7 Louis Renou amp Jagbans Kishore Balbir 2004 pp 1 59 Fleet John Faithfull 1907 Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum Vol 3 1970 ac 4616 p 153 line 14 of the inscription Alfred C Woolner 1986 Introduction to Prakrit Motilal Banarsidass p 6 context 1 10 ISBN 978 81 208 0189 9 Clarence Maloney 1978 Language and Civilization Change in South Asia Brill Academic pp 111 114 ISBN 978 90 04 05741 8 Shastri Gaurinath Bhattacharyya 1987 A Concise History of Classical Sanskrit Literature Motilal Banarsidass pp 18 19 ISBN 978 81 208 0027 4 Johansson Rune Edvin Anders 1981 Pali Buddhist Texts Explained to the beginner Psychology Press p 7 ISBN 978 0 7007 1068 3 Pali is known mainly as the language of Theravada Buddhism very little is known about its origin We do not know where it was spoken or if it originally was a spoken language at all The ancient Ceylonese tradition says that the Buddha himself spoke Magadhi and that this language was identical to Pali a b c Dundas Paul 2003 The Jains Routledge pp 69 70 ISBN 978 0 415 26606 2 Ethnologue report for language code pli Ethnologue Retrieved 20 July 2018 P S Krishnavarma 1881 Sanskrit as a living language in India Journal of the National Indian Association Henry S King amp Company pp 737 745 a b c Gaurinath Bhattacharyya Shastri 1987 A Concise History of Classical Sanskrit Literature Motilal Banarsidass pp 20 23 ISBN 978 81 208 0027 4 a b c d Deshpande 2011 pp 218 220 Winternitz Moriz 1996 A History of Indian Literature Motilal Banarsidass pp 42 46 ISBN 978 81 208 0264 3 a b c d Deshpande 2011 pp 222 223 Lamotte Etinne 1976 Histoire du buddhisme indien des origines a l ere saka Institut orientaliste Tijdschrift voor Filosofie Louvain la Neuve FR Universite de Louvain 21 3 539 541 a b Sheldon Pollock 1996 The Sanskrit cosmopolis A D 300 1300 transculturation vernacularization and the question of ideology In Jan Houben ed Ideology and Status of Sanskrit Contributions to the history of the Sanskrit language Leiden New York E J Brill pp 197 199 pp 197 239 for context and details ISBN 978 90 04 10613 0 a b Reinohl Uta 2016 Grammaticalization and the Rise of Configurationality in Indo Aryan Oxford University Press pp 120 121 Hock Hans Henrich Bashir E Subbarao K V 2016 The languages and linguistics of South Asia a comprehensive guide Berlin de Gruyter Mouton pp 94 95 Hart George 1976 The relation between Tamil and classical Sanskrit literature Wiesbaden O Harrassowitz pp 317 320 ISBN 3447017856 Shulman David Dean 2016 Tamil a biography London UK The Belknap Press Of Harvard University Press pp 12 14 20 Burrow 1973 p 386 Gerard Huet Amba Kulkarni Peter Scharf 2009 Sanskrit Computational Linguistics Springer pp v vi ISBN 978 3 642 00155 0 P M Scharf M Hyman 2009 V Govindaraju and S Setlur ed Guide to OCR for Indic Scripts Document Recognition and Retrieval Springer p 238 ISBN 978 1 84800 330 9 a b Justin McDaniel Lynn Ransom 2015 From Mulberry Leaves to Silk Scrolls New Approaches to the Study of Asian Manuscript Traditions University of Pennsylvania Press pp 233 234 ISBN 978 0 8122 4736 7 Gaurinath Bhattacharyya Shastri 1987 A Concise History of Classical Sanskrit Literature Motilal Banarsidass ISBN 978 81 208 0027 4 Banerji 1989 pp 618 632 see also the extended list of Sanskrit texts in Part II a b c d e f g Salomon 1998 pp 86 87 a b c d J F Staal 1976 Herman Parret ed History of Linguistic Thought and Contemporary Linguistics Walter de Gruyter pp 102 130 ISBN 978 3 11 005818 5 Burrow 1973 pp 57 64 289 319 a b Madhav Deshpande 2010 Language and Testimony in Classical Indian Philosophy Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Source Link Stephanie Theodorou 2011 Bhartrihari c 450 510 CE IEP Source link J F Staal 1976 Herman Parret ed History of Linguistic Thought and Contemporary Linguistics Walter de Gruyter pp 121 125 ISBN 978 3 11 005818 5 Wayman 1965 pp 111 115 John Kelly 1996 Jan E M Houben ed Ideology and Status of Sanskrit Contributions to the History of the Sanskrit Language BRILL Academic pp 87 102 ISBN 978 90 04 10613 0 Louis Renou amp Jagbans Kishore Balbir 2004 pp 177 180 Umasvati 1994 pp xi xiii Paul Dundas 2006 Patrick Olivelle ed Between the Empires Society in India 300 BCE to 400 CE Oxford University Press pp 395 396 ISBN 978 0 19 977507 1 K Preisendanz 2018 Florence Bretelle Establet Stephane Schmitt eds Pieces and Parts in Scientific Texts Springer pp 175 178 with footnotes ISBN 978 3 319 78467 0 Eli Franco 2004 The Spitzer Manuscript The Oldest Philosophical Manuscript in Sanskrit Volume 1 amp 2 Verlag Der Osterreichischen Akademie Der Wissenschaften Austrian Academy of Sciences Press ISBN 978 37001 3 3018 pp 461 465 Eli Franco 2003 The Oldest Philosophical Manuscript in Sanskrit Journal of Indian Philosophy 31 1 3 21 31 doi 10 1023 A 1024690001755 JSTOR 23497034 S2CID 169685693 Robert E Buswell Jr amp Donald S Lopez Jr 2013 p 504 Stephen K Stein 2017 The Sea in World History Exploration Travel and Trade 2 volumes ABC CLIO p 147 ISBN 978 1 4408 3551 3 Charles Taliaferro 2010 A Dictionary of Philosophy of Religion Bloomsbury Publishing pp 245 246 ISBN 978 1 4411 8504 4 Ramesh Chandra Majumdar 1974 pp 1 4 a b Charles Orzech Henrik Sorensen Richard Payne 2011 Esoteric Buddhism and the Tantras in East Asia BRILL Academic pp 985 996 ISBN 978 90 04 18491 6 Banerji 1989 pp 595 596 a b Michael C Howard 2012 p 21 Dalai Lama 1979 pp 3 5 Colin P Masica 1993 pp 55 56 Keat Gin Ooi 2004 Southeast Asia A Historical Encyclopedia from Angkor Wat to East Timor ABC CLIO p 643 ISBN 978 1 57607 770 2 a b c Burrow 1973 p 60 Houben Jan 1996 Ideology and status of Sanskrit contributions to the history of the Sanskrit language Leiden New York E J Brill p 11 ISBN 978 90 04 10613 0 William Bright 2014 American Indian Linguistics and Literature Walter De Gruyter pp 16 17 ISBN 978 3 11 086311 6 span, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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