Sanskrit (; attributively , ;
nominally , ,
) is a
classical language
A classical language is any language with an independent literary tradition and a large and ancient body of written literature. Classical languages are typically dead languages, or show a high degree of diglossia, as the spoken varieties of the ...
belonging to the
Indo-Aryan branch of the
Indo-European languages
The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Dutc ...
.
It arose in
South Asia
South Asia is the southern subregion of Asia, which is defined in both geographical and ethno-cultural terms. The region consists of the countries of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka.;;;;;;;; ...
after its predecessor languages had
diffused
Molecular diffusion, often simply called diffusion, is the thermal motion of all (liquid or gas) particles at temperatures above absolute zero. The rate of this movement is a function of temperature, viscosity of the fluid and the size (mass) of ...
there from the northwest in the late
Bronze Age
The Bronze Age is a historic period, lasting approximately from 3300 BC to 1200 BC, characterized by the use of bronze, the presence of writing in some areas, and other early features of urban civilization. The Bronze Age is the second prin ...
.
Sanskrit is the
sacred language
A sacred language, holy language or liturgical language is any language that is cultivated and used primarily in church service or for other religious reasons by people who speak another, primary language in their daily lives.
Concept
A sacr ...
of
Hinduism
Hinduism () is an Indian religion or '' dharma'', a religious and universal order or way of life by which followers abide. As a religion, it is the world's third-largest, with over 1.2–1.35 billion followers, or 15–16% of the global p ...
, the language of classical
Hindu philosophy
Hindu philosophy encompasses the philosophies, world views and teachings of Hinduism that emerged in Ancient India which include six systems ('' shad-darśana'') – Samkhya, Yoga, Nyaya, Vaisheshika, Mimamsa and Vedanta.Andrew Nicholson ( ...
, and of historical texts of
Buddhism
Buddhism ( , ), also known as Buddha Dharma and Dharmavinaya (), is an Indian religion or philosophical tradition based on teachings attributed to the Buddha. It originated in northern India as a -movement in the 5th century BCE, and gra ...
and
Jainism
Jainism ( ), also known as Jain Dharma, is an Indian religion. Jainism traces its spiritual ideas and history through the succession of twenty-four tirthankaras (supreme preachers of ''Dharma''), with the first in the current time cycle bein ...
. It was a
link language in ancient and medieval South Asia, and upon transmission of Hindu and Buddhist culture to
Southeast Asia
Southeast Asia, also spelled South East Asia and South-East Asia, and also known as Southeastern Asia, South-eastern Asia or SEA, is the geographical south-eastern region of Asia, consisting of the regions that are situated south of mainlan ...
,
East Asia
East Asia is the eastern region of Asia, which is defined in both Geography, geographical and culture, ethno-cultural terms. The modern State (polity), states of East Asia include China, Japan, Mongolia, North Korea, South Korea, and Taiwan. ...
and
Central Asia
Central Asia, also known as Middle Asia, is a subregion, region of Asia that stretches from the Caspian Sea in the west to western China and Mongolia in the east, and from Afghanistan and Iran in the south to Russia in the north. It includes t ...
in the early medieval era, it became a language of religion and
high culture
High culture is a subculture that emphasizes and encompasses the cultural objects of aesthetic value, which a society collectively esteem as exemplary art, and the intellectual works of philosophy, history, art, and literature that a society con ...
, and of the political elites in some of these regions.
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.
Sanskrit generally connotes several
Old Indo-Aryan
The Indo-Aryan languages (or sometimes Indic languages) are a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages in the Indo-European language family. As of the early 21st century, they have more than 800 million speakers, primarily concentrated in India, Pa ...
language varieties.
The most archaic of these is the
Vedic Sanskrit
Vedic Sanskrit was an ancient language of the Indo-Aryan subgroup of the Indo-European language family. It is attested in the Vedas and related literature compiled over the period of the mid- 2nd to mid-1st millennium BCE. It was orally preser ...
found in the
Rig Veda, 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
Pakistan ( ur, ), officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan ( ur, , label=none), is a country in South Asia. It is the world's List of countries and dependencies by population, fifth-most populous country, with a population of almost 24 ...
and into northwestern
India
India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...
.
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.
''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, the ''
Aṣṭādhyāyī
The (Devanagari अष्टाध्यायी) is a grammar that describes a form of an early Indo-Aryan language: Sanskrit.
Authored by Sanskrit philologist and scholar Pāṇini and dated to around 500 BCE, it describes the language as cu ...
'' ('Eight chapters') of
Pāṇini
, era = ;;6th–5th century BCE
, region = Indian philosophy
, main_interests = Grammar, linguistics
, notable_works = ' ( Classical Sanskrit)
, influenced=
, notable_ideas=Descriptive linguistics
(Devanaga ...
.
[ The greatest dramatist in Sanskrit, Kālidāsa, wrote in classical Sanskrit, and the foundations of modern arithmetic were first described in classical Sanskrit.] The two major Sanskrit epics, the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa
The ''Rāmāyana'' (; sa, रामायणम्, ) is a Sanskrit epic composed over a period of nearly a millennium, with scholars' estimates for the earliest stage of the text ranging from the 8th to 4th centuries BCE, and later stages ...
, however, were composed in a range of oral storytelling registers called Epic Sanskrit
Indian epic poetry is the epic poetry written in the Indian subcontinent, traditionally called ''Kavya'' (or ''Kāvya''; Sanskrit: काव्य, IAST: ''kāvyá''). The ''Ramayana'' and the ''Mahabharata'', which were originally composed in ...
which was used in northern India between 400 BCE and 300 CE, and roughly contemporary with classical Sanskrit. In the following centuries, Sanskrit became tradition-bound, stopped being learned as a first language, and ultimately stopped developing as a living language.
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
The ''Iliad'' (; grc, Ἰλιάς, Iliás, ; "a poem about Ilium") is one of two major ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer. It is one of the oldest extant works of literature still widely read by modern audiences. As with the '' Odys ...
'' of Homer
Homer (; grc, Ὅμηρος , ''Hómēros'') (born ) was a Greek poet who is credited as the author of the ''Iliad'' and the ''Odyssey'', two epic poems that are foundational works of ancient Greek literature. Homer is considered one of the ...
. As the Rigveda was orally transmitted by methods of memorisation of exceptional complexity, rigour and fidelity, as a single text without variant readings, its preserved archaic syntax and morphology are of vital importance in the reconstruction of the common ancestor language Proto-Indo-European
Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family. Its proposed features have been derived by linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-European languages. No direct record of Proto-Indo- ...
. 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
The Brahmic scripts, also known as Indic scripts, are a family of abugida writing systems. They are used throughout the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia and parts of East Asia. They are descended from the Brahmi script of ancient Ind ...
, and in the modern era most commonly in Devanagari
Devanagari ( ; , , Sanskrit pronunciation: ), also called Nagari (),Kathleen Kuiper (2010), The Culture of India, New York: The Rosen Publishing Group, , page 83 is a left-to-right abugida (a type of segmental writing system), based on the ...
.
Sanskrit's status, function, and place in India's cultural heritage are recognized by its inclusion in the Constitution of India
The Constitution of India ( IAST: ) is the supreme law of India. The document lays down the framework that demarcates fundamental political code, structure, procedures, powers, and duties of government institutions and sets out fundamental ...
's Eighth Schedule languages. However, despite attempts at revival,[ there are no first language speakers of Sanskrit in India.] In each of India's recent decennial censuses, several thousand citizens have reported Sanskrit to be their mother tongue, but the numbers are thought to signify a wish to be aligned with the prestige of the language.[ 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."][ 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."] Sanskrit has been taught in traditional gurukulas
Education in India is primarily managed by state-run public education system, which fall under the command of the government at three levels: central, state and local. Under various articles of the Indian Constitution and the Right of Child ...
since ancient times; it is widely taught today at the secondary school level. The oldest Sanskrit college is the Benares Sanskrit College
Sampurnanand Sanskrit Vishwavidyalaya ( IAST: ; formerly Varanaseya Sanskrit Vishwavidyalaya and Government Sanskrit College, Varanasi) is an Indian university and institution of higher learning located in Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, specializing ...
founded in 1791 during East India Company rule. Sanskrit continues to be widely used as a ceremonial and ritual language in Hindu and Buddhist hymns
A hymn is a type of song, and partially synonymous with devotional song, specifically written for the purpose of adoration or prayer, and typically addressed to a deity or deities, or to a prominent figure or personification. The word ''hymn'' ...
and chants
A chant (from French ', from Latin ', "to sing") is the iterative speaking or singing of words or sounds, often primarily on one or two main pitches called reciting tones. Chants may range from a simple melody involving a limited set of notes ...
.
Etymology and nomenclature
In Sanskrit, the verbal adjective ' is a compound word consisting of ('together, good, well, perfected') and ''-'' ('made, formed, work'). It connotes a work that has been "well prepared, pure and perfect, polished, sacred". 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''. From the late Vedic period
The Vedic period, or the Vedic age (), is the period in the late Bronze Age and early Iron Age of the history of India when the Vedic literature, including the Vedas (ca. 1300–900 BCE), was composed in the northern Indian subcontinent, betwe ...
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.
Sanskrit as a language competed with numerous, less exact vernacular Indian languages called ''Prakritic languages'' ('). The term literally means "original, natural, normal, artless", states Franklin Southworth
Franklin C. Southworth (born 1929) is an American linguist and Professor Emeritus of South Asian linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania
The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a Private university, private r ...
. 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 ('came before, origin') and that it came naturally to children, while Sanskrit was a refinement of Prakrit through "purification by grammar".
History
Origin and development
Sanskrit belongs to the Indo-European family of languages
The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the languages of Europe, overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family, English language, Englis ...
. 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
Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family. Its proposed features have been derived by linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-European languages. No direct record of Proto-Indo-E ...
:
* Vedic Sanskrit
Vedic Sanskrit was an ancient language of the Indo-Aryan subgroup of the Indo-European language family. It is attested in the Vedas and related literature compiled over the period of the mid- 2nd to mid-1st millennium BCE. It was orally preser ...
( 1500–500 BCE).
* Mycenaean Greek
Mycenaean Greek is the most ancient attested form of the Greek language, on the Greek mainland and Crete in Mycenaean Greece (16th to 12th centuries BC), before the hypothesised Dorian invasion, often cited as the '' terminus ad quem'' for th ...
( 1450 BCE) and Ancient Greek
Ancient Greek includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Dark Ages (), the Archaic peri ...
( 750–400 BCE).
* Hittite ( 1750–1200 BCE).
Other Indo-European languages distantly related to Sanskrit include archaic and Classical Latin
Classical Latin is the form of Literary Latin recognized as a literary standard by writers of the late Roman Republic and early Roman Empire. It was used from 75 BC to the 3rd century AD, when it developed into Late Latin. In some later period ...
( 600 BCE–100 CE, Italic languages
The Italic languages form a branch of the Indo-European language family, whose earliest known members were spoken on the Italian Peninsula in the first millennium BC. The most important of the ancient languages was Latin, the official languag ...
), Gothic
Gothic or Gothics may refer to:
People and languages
*Goths or Gothic people, the ethnonym of a group of East Germanic tribes
**Gothic language, an extinct East Germanic language spoken by the Goths
**Crimean Gothic, the Gothic language spoken b ...
(archaic Germanic language
The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 515 million people mainly in Europe, North America, Oceania and Southern Africa. The most widely spoken Germanic language, E ...
, c. 350 CE), Old Norse
Old Norse, Old Nordic, or Old Scandinavian, is a stage of development of North Germanic languages, North Germanic dialects before their final divergence into separate Nordic languages. Old Norse was spoken by inhabitants of Scandinavia and t ...
( 200 CE and after), Old Avestan
Avestan (), or historically Zend, is an umbrella term for two Old Iranian languages: Old Avestan (spoken in the 2nd millennium BCE) and Younger Avestan (spoken in the 1st millennium BCE). They are known only from their conjoined use as the scrip ...
(c. late 2nd millennium BCE) and Younger Avestan ( 900 BCE).[ For detailed comparison of the languages, see pp. 90–126.] The closest ancient relatives of Vedic Sanskrit in the Indo-European languages are the Nuristani language
The Nuristani languages, formerly known as Kafiri languages, are one of the three groups within the Indo-Iranian languages, Indo-Iranian language family, alongside the much larger Indo-Aryan languages, Indo-Aryan and Iranian languages, Iranian g ...
s found in the remote Hindu Kush
The Hindu Kush is an mountain range in Central and South Asia to the west of the Himalayas. It stretches from central and western Afghanistan, Quote: "The Hindu Kush mountains run along the Afghan border with the North-West Frontier Province ...
region of northeastern Afghanistan and northwestern Himalayas, as well as the extinct Avestan and Old Persian – both are Iranian languages
The Iranian languages or Iranic languages are a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages in the Indo-European language family that are spoken natively by the Iranian peoples, predominantly in the Iranian Plateau.
The Iranian languages are groupe ...
. Sanskrit belongs to the satem
Languages of the Indo-European family are classified as either centum languages or satem languages according to how the dorsal consonants (sounds of "K", "G" and "Y" type) of the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) developed. An ...
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 (with the addition of Old English for further comparison):
The correspondences suggest some common root, and historical links between some of the distant major ancient languages of the world.
The Indo-Aryan migrations
The Indo-Aryan migrations were the migrations into the Indian subcontinent of Indo-Aryan peoples, an ethnolinguistic group that spoke Indo-Aryan languages, the predominant languages of today's North India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lank ...
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
The Indus ( ) is a transboundary river of Asia and a trans-Himalayan river of South and Central Asia. The river rises in mountain springs northeast of Mount Kailash in Western Tibet, flows northwest through the disputed region of Kashmir, ...
, during the early 2nd millennium BCE. Evidence for such a theory includes the close relationship between the Indo-Iranian tongues and the Baltic
Baltic may refer to:
Peoples and languages
* Baltic languages, a subfamily of Indo-European languages, including Lithuanian, Latvian and extinct Old Prussian
*Balts (or Baltic peoples), ethnic groups speaking the Baltic languages and/or originati ...
and Slavic languages
The Slavic languages, also known as the Slavonic languages, are Indo-European languages spoken primarily by the Slavic peoples and their descendants. They are thought to descend from a proto-language called Proto-Slavic, spoken during the ...
, vocabulary exchange with the non-Indo-European Uralic languages
The Uralic languages (; sometimes called Uralian languages ) form a language family of 38 languages spoken by approximately 25million people, predominantly in Northern Eurasia. The Uralic languages with the most native speakers are Hungarian (w ...
, and the nature of the attested Indo-European words for flora and fauna.
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. 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.
Vedic Sanskrit
The pre-Classical form of Sanskrit is known as ''Vedic Sanskrit
Vedic Sanskrit was an ancient language of the Indo-Aryan subgroup of the Indo-European language family. It is attested in the Vedas and related literature compiled over the period of the mid- 2nd to mid-1st millennium BCE. It was orally preser ...
''. The earliest attested Sanskrit text is the Rigveda
The ''Rigveda'' or ''Rig Veda'' ( ', from ' "praise" and ' "knowledge") is an ancient Indian collection of Vedic Sanskrit hymns (''sūktas''). It is one of the four sacred canonical Hindu texts ('' śruti'') known as the Vedas. Only one ...
, 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.[
]
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, 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. 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.
The Ṛg-veda is a collection of books, created by multiple authors from distant parts of ancient India. These authors represented different generations, and the mandalas 2 to 7 are the oldest while the mandalas 1 and 10 are relatively the youngest. Yet, the Vedic Sanskrit in these books of the Ṛg-veda "hardly presents any dialectical diversity", states Louis Renou Louis Renou (; 26 October 1896 – 18 August 1966) was the pre-eminent French Indologist of the twentieth century.
Education and Career
After passing the ''agrégation'' examination in 1920, Louis Renou taught for a year at the ''lycée'' in Rouen ...
– 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. 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, Aranyaka
The Aranyakas (; sa, आरण्यक; IAST: ' ) are the part of the ancient Indian Vedas concerned with the meaning of ritual sacrifice. They typically represent the later sections of the Vedas, and are one of many layers of the Vedic texts ...
s, and the early Upanishad
The Upanishads (; sa, उपनिषद् ) are late Vedic Sanskrit texts that supplied the basis of later Hindu philosophy.Wendy Doniger (1990), ''Textual Sources for the Study of Hinduism'', 1st Edition, University of Chicago Press, , ...
s. These Vedic documents reflect the dialects of Sanskrit found in the various parts of the northwestern, northern, and eastern Indian subcontinent.[
][
]
Vedic Sanskrit was both a spoken and literary language of ancient India. 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 .[ The Vedic Sanskrit language or a closely related Indo-European variant was recognized beyond ancient India as evidenced by the "]Mitanni
Mitanni (; Hittite cuneiform ; ''Mittani'' '), c. 1550–1260 BC, earlier called Ḫabigalbat in old Babylonian texts, c. 1600 BC; Hanigalbat or Hani-Rabbat (''Hanikalbat'', ''Khanigalbat'', cuneiform ') in Assyrian records, or ''Naharin'' in ...
Treaty" between the ancient Hittite and Mitanni people, carved into a rock, in a region that now includes parts of Syria and Turkey.[
] 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
The Ashvins ( sa, अश्विन्, Aśvin, horse possessors), also known as Ashwini Kumara and Asvinau,, §1.42. are Hindu twin gods associated with medicine, health, dawn and sciences. In the ''Rigveda'', they are described as youthful div ...
found in the earliest layers of the Vedic literature.
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
Zoroastrianism is an Iranian religion and one of the world's oldest organized faiths, based on the teachings of the Iranian-speaking prophet Zoroaster. It has a dualistic cosmology of good and evil within the framework of a monotheistic ...
''Gathas'' and Homer's ''Iliad'' and ''Odyssey''.[
] 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. 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 simile
A simile () is a figure of speech that directly ''compares'' two things. Similes differ from other metaphors by highlighting the similarities between two things using comparison words such as "like", "as", "so", or "than", while other metaphors c ...
s 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.
Classical Sanskrit
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
Siddhartha Gautama, most commonly referred to as the Buddha, was a wandering ascetic and religious teacher who lived in South Asia during the 6th or 5th century BCE and founded Buddhism.
According to Buddhist tradition, he was born in L ...
's time become unintelligible to all except ancient Indian sages.
The formalization of the Sanskrit language is credited to , along with Patanjali's and Katyayana's commentary that preceded Patañjali's work. Panini composed ' ('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.
The 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."[Fortson, §10.26.] 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. The ten Vedic scholars he quotes are Āpiśali, Kaśyapa, Gārgya, Gālava, Cakravarmaṇa, Bhāradvāja, Śākaṭāyana, Śākalya, Senaka and Sphoṭāyana. The of Panini became the foundation of Vyākaraṇa, a Vedānga.
In the , 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. 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. 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.
Pāṇini's comprehensive and scientific theory of grammar is conventionally taken to mark the start of Classical Sanskrit. His systematic treatise inspired and made Sanskrit the preeminent Indian language of learning and literature for two millennia. 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 ('scribe') in section 3.2 of the .
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". 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 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.
The phonetic differences between Vedic Sanskrit and Classical Sanskrit, as discerned from the current state of the surviving literature, 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. 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. There are also some differences between how some of the nouns and verbs end, as well as the ''sandhi'' rules, both internal and external. 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.
Arthur Macdonell
Arthur Anthony Macdonell, FBA (11 May 1854 – 28 December 1930) was a noted Sanskrit scholar.
Biography
Macdonell was born at Muzaffarpur in the Tirhut region of the state of Bihar in British India, the son of Charles Alexander Macdonell ...
was among the early colonial era scholars who summarized some of the differences between the Vedic and Classical Sanskrit. 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.
Sanskrit and Prakrit languages
The earliest known use of the word (Sanskrit), in the context of a speech or language, is found in verses 5.28.17–19 of the ''Ramayana''.[ Outside the learned sphere of written Classical Sanskrit, vernacular colloquial dialects (]Prakrit
The Prakrits (; sa, prākṛta; psu, 𑀧𑀸𑀉𑀤, ; pka, ) are a group of vernacular Middle Indo-Aryan languages that were used in the Indian subcontinent from around the 3rd century BCE to the 8th century CE. The term Prakrit is usu ...
s) 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 , literally 'spoiled'. The Vedic literature includes words whose phonetic equivalent are not found in other Indo-European languages
The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Dutc ...
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
Buddhism ( , ), also known as Buddha Dharma and Dharmavinaya (), is an Indian religion or philosophical tradition based on teachings attributed to the Buddha. It originated in northern India as a -movement in the 5th century BCE, and gra ...
and Jainism
Jainism ( ), also known as Jain Dharma, is an Indian religion. Jainism traces its spiritual ideas and history through the succession of twenty-four tirthankaras (supreme preachers of ''Dharma''), with the first in the current time cycle bein ...
, the Prakrit languages such as Pali
Pali () is a Middle Indo-Aryan liturgical language native to the Indian subcontinent. It is widely studied because it is the language of the Buddhist ''Pāli Canon'' or '' Tipiṭaka'' as well as the sacred language of '' Theravāda'' Buddh ...
in Theravada
''Theravāda'' () ( si, ථේරවාදය, my, ထေရဝါဒ, th, เถรวาท, km, ថេរវាទ, lo, ເຖຣະວາດ, pi, , ) is the most commonly accepted name of Buddhism's oldest existing school. The school' ...
Buddhism and Ardhamagadhi in Jainism competed with Sanskrit in the ancient times. However, states Paul Dundas
Paul Dundas (born 1952) is a scholar and a senior lecturer in Sanskrit language and head of Asian Studies in the University of Edinburgh. His main areas of academic and research interest include Jainism, Buddhism, classical Sanskrit literature ...
, a scholar of Jainism, these ancient Prakrit languages had "roughly the same relationship to Sanskrit as medieval Italian does to Latin."[ The Indian tradition states that the ]Buddha
Siddhartha Gautama, most commonly referred to as the Buddha, was a wandering ascetic and religious teacher who lived in South Asia during the 6th or 5th century BCE and founded Buddhism.
According to Buddhist tradition, he was born in L ...
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
Ardhamagadhi Prakrit was a Middle Indo-Aryan language and a Dramatic Prakrit thought to have been spoken in modern-day Bihar and Uttar Pradesh and used in some early Buddhist and Jain drama. It was likely a Central Indo-Aryan language, related to ...
.[
Colonial era scholars questioned whether Sanskrit was ever a spoken language, or just a literary language. 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.] Those who affirm Sanskrit to have been a vernacular language point to the necessity of Sanskrit being a spoken language for the oral tradition
Oral tradition, or oral lore, is a form of human communication wherein knowledge, art, ideas and cultural material is received, preserved, and transmitted orally from one generation to another. Vansina, Jan: ''Oral Tradition as History'' (1985) ...
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 () by the cultured and educated. Some '' sutras'' expound upon the variant forms of spoken Sanskrit versus written Sanskrit.[ The 7th-century Chinese Buddhist pilgrim ]Xuanzang
Xuanzang (, ; 602–664), born Chen Hui / Chen Yi (), also known as Hiuen Tsang, was a 7th-century Chinese Buddhist monk, scholar, traveler, and translator. He is known for the epoch-making contributions to Chinese Buddhism, the travelogue of ...
mentioned in his memoir that official philosophical debates in India were held in Sanskrit, not in the vernacular language of that region.[
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. 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. 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 ''Rāmāyana'' (; sa, रामायणम्, ) is a Sanskrit literature, Sanskrit Indian epic poetry, epic composed over a period of nearly a millennium, with scholars' estimates for the earliest stage of the text ranging from the 8th ...
'', the ''Mahabharata
The ''Mahābhārata'' ( ; sa, महाभारतम्, ', ) is one of the two major Sanskrit literature, Sanskrit Indian epic poetry, epics of ancient India in Hinduism, the other being the ''Ramayana, Rāmāyaṇa''. It narrates the s ...
'', the ''Bhagavata Purana
The ''Bhagavata Purana'' ( sa, भागवतपुराण; ), also known as the ''Srimad Bhagavatam'', ''Srimad Bhagavata Mahapurana'' or simply ''Bhagavata'', is one of Hinduism's eighteen great Puranas (''Mahapuranas''). Composed in S ...
'', the '' Panchatantra'' and many other texts are all in the Sanskrit language. 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. Sanskrit, as the learned language of Ancient India, thus existed alongside the vernacular Prakrits. Many Sanskrit drama
The term Indian classical drama refers to the tradition of dramatic literature and performance in ancient India. The roots of drama in the Indian subcontinent can be traced back to the Rigveda (1200-1500 BCE), which contains a number of hymns in ...
s indicate that the language coexisted with the vernacular Prakrits. The cities of Varanasi
Varanasi (; ; also Banaras or Benares (; ), and Kashi.) is a city on the Ganges river in northern India that has a central place in the traditions of pilgrimage, death, and mourning in the Hindu world.
*
*
*
* The city has a syncretic t ...
, Paithan
Paithan pəɪ.ʈʰaɳ(), historically Pratiṣṭhāna ɾə'tɪʂʈʰana is a town with municipal council in Aurangabad district, Maharashtra, India. Paithan is located south of present-day Aurangabad on the Godavari River.
It was the cap ...
, Pune
Pune (; ; also known as Poona, ( the official name from 1818 until 1978) is one of the most important industrial and educational hubs of India, with an estimated population of 7.4 million As of 2021, Pune Metropolitan Region is the largest i ...
and Kanchipuram were centers of classical Sanskrit learning and public debates until the arrival of the colonial era.
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. 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.
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". Hock et al. quoting George Hart state that there was influence of Old Tamil
Old Tamil is the period of the Tamil language spanning from 300 BCE to 700 CE. Prior to Old Tamil, the period of Tamil linguistic development is termed as Pre Tamil. After the Old Tamil period, Tamil becomes Middle Tamil. The earliest records i ...
on Sanskrit. 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."
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
Shulman mentions that "Dravidian nonfinite verbal forms (called 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".
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.
Influence
Sanskrit has been the predominant language of Hindu texts encompassing a rich tradition of philosophical
Philosophy (from , ) is the systematized study of general and fundamental questions, such as those about existence, reason, knowledge, values, mind, and language. Such questions are often posed as problems to be studied or resolved. Some ...
and religious
Religion is usually defined as a social- cultural system of designated behaviors and practices, morals, beliefs, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that generally relates humanity to supernatur ...
texts, as well as poetry, music, drama
Drama is the specific mode of fiction represented in performance: a play, opera, mime, ballet, etc., performed in a theatre, or on radio or television.Elam (1980, 98). Considered as a genre of poetry in general, the dramatic mode has b ...
, scientific
Science is a systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.
Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earliest archeological evidence for ...
, technical and others. 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
__NOTOC__
Ayodhya Inscription of Dhana is a stone inscription related to a Hindu Deva king named Dhana or Dhana–deva of the 1st-century BCE or 1st century CE. He ruled from the city of Ayodhya, Kosala, in India. His name is found in ancient co ...
and Ghosundi-Hathibada (Chittorgarh).
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. 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?[ 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.][Madhav Deshpande (2010), ''Language and Testimony in Classical Indian Philosophy'', Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy]
Source Link
/ref> 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
Johan Frederik "Frits" Staal (3 November 1930 – 19 February 2012) was the department founder and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and South/Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Staal specialized in the study of V ...
—a scholar of Linguistics with a focus on Indian philosophies and Sanskrit. 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; for example, one of the early and influential Buddhist philosophers, Nagarjuna
Nāgārjuna . 150 – c. 250 CE (disputed)was an Indian Mahāyāna Buddhist thinker, scholar-saint and philosopher. He is widely considered one of the most important Buddhist philosophers.Garfield, Jay L. (1995), ''The Fundamental Wisdom of ...
(~200 CE), used Classical Sanskrit as the language for his texts. 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
The Mahāsāṃghika ( Brahmi: 𑀫𑀳𑀸𑀲𑀸𑀁𑀖𑀺𑀓, "of the Great Sangha", ) was one of the early Buddhist schools. Interest in the origins of the Mahāsāṃghika school lies in the fact that their Vinaya recension appears in ...
and Mahavastu, in their late Hinayana forms, used hybrid Sanskrit for their literature. 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
Umaswati, also spelled as Umasvati and known as Umaswami, was an Indian scholar, possibly between 2nd-century and 5th-century CE, known for his foundational writings on Jainism. He authored the Jain text ''Tattvartha Sutra'' (literally '"All Tha ...
.
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
Faxian (法顯 ; 337 CE – c. 422 CE), also referred to as Fa-Hien, Fa-hsien and Sehi, was a Chinese Buddhist monk and translator who traveled by foot from China to India to acquire Buddhist texts. Starting his arduous journey about age 60, h ...
who translated them into Chinese by 418 CE. Xuanzang
Xuanzang (, ; 602–664), born Chen Hui / Chen Yi (), also known as Hiuen Tsang, was a 7th-century Chinese Buddhist monk, scholar, traveler, and translator. He is known for the epoch-making contributions to Chinese Buddhism, the travelogue of ...
, 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. By the early 1st millennium CE, Sanskrit had spread Buddhist and Hindu ideas to Southeast Asia
Southeast Asia, also spelled South East Asia and South-East Asia, and also known as Southeastern Asia, South-eastern Asia or SEA, is the geographical south-eastern region of Asia, consisting of the regions that are situated south of mainlan ...
, parts of the East Asia
East Asia is the eastern region of Asia, which is defined in both Geography, geographical and culture, ethno-cultural terms. The modern State (polity), states of East Asia include China, Japan, Mongolia, North Korea, South Korea, and Taiwan. ...
and the Central Asia
Central Asia, also known as Middle Asia, is a subregion, region of Asia that stretches from the Caspian Sea in the west to western China and Mongolia in the east, and from Afghanistan and Iran in the south to Russia in the north. It includes t ...
. It was accepted as a language of high culture and the preferred language by some of the local ruling elites in these regions. According to the Dalai Lama
Dalai Lama (, ; ) is a title given by the Tibetan people to the foremost spiritual leader of the Gelug or "Yellow Hat" school of Tibetan Buddhism, the newest and most dominant of the four major schools of Tibetan Buddhism. The 14th and current D ...
, 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.
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. It created a cultural bond across the subcontinent. As local languages and dialects evolved and diversified, Sanskrit served as the common language. 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. 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 .
Classical Sanskrit is the standard register
Register or registration may refer to:
Arts entertainment, and media Music
* Register (music), the relative "height" or range of a note, melody, part, instrument, etc.
* ''Register'', a 2017 album by Travis Miller
* Registration (organ), th ...
as laid out in the grammar of , around the fourth century BCE. Its position in the cultures of Greater India is akin to that of Latin
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...
and Ancient Greek
Ancient Greek includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Dark Ages (), the Archaic peri ...
in Europe. Sanskrit has significantly influenced most modern languages of the Indian subcontinent
The Indian subcontinent is a list of the physiographic regions of the world, physiographical region in United Nations geoscheme for Asia#Southern Asia, Southern Asia. It is situated on the Indian Plate, projecting southwards into the Indian O ...
, particularly the languages of the northern, western, central and eastern Indian subcontinent.
Decline
Sanskrit declined starting about and after the 13th century.[ 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
The Mughal Empire was an early-modern empire that controlled much of South Asia between the 16th and 19th centuries. Quote: "Although the first two Timurid emperors and many of their noblemen were recent migrants to the subcontinent, the d ...
. 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.
With the fall of Kashmir around the 13th century, a premier center of Sanskrit literary creativity, Sanskrit literature there disappeared, perhaps in the "fires that periodically engulfed the capital of Kashmir" or the "Mongol invasion of 1320" states Pollock. The Sanskrit literature which was once widely disseminated out of the northwest regions of the subcontinent, stopped after the 12th century. As Hindu kingdoms fell in the eastern and the South India, such as the great Vijayanagara Empire
The Vijayanagara Empire, also called the Karnata Kingdom, was a Hindu empire based in the region of South India, which consisted the modern states of Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Goa and some parts of Telangana and Mahar ...
, so did Sanskrit. There were exceptions and short periods of imperial support for Sanskrit, mostly concentrated during the reign of the tolerant Mughal emperor Akbar
Abu'l-Fath Jalal-ud-din Muhammad Akbar (25 October 1542 – 27 October 1605), popularly known as Akbar the Great ( fa, ), and also as Akbar I (), was the third Mughal emperor, who reigned from 1556 to 1605. Akbar succeeded his father, Hum ...
. 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. Hindu rulers such as Shivaji of the Maratha Empire
The Maratha Empire, also referred to as the Maratha Confederacy, was an early modern Indian confederation that came to dominate much of the Indian subcontinent in the 18th century. Maratha rule formally began in 1674 with the coronation of Sh ...
, reversed the process, by re-adopting Sanskrit and re-asserting their socio-linguistic identity. 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.
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. Indian authors such as M Ramakrishnan Nair state that Sanskrit was a dead language by the 1st millennium BCE. Sheldon Pollock
Sheldon I. Pollock (born 1948) is an American scholar of Sanskrit, the intellectual and literary history of India, and comparative intellectual history. He is the Arvind Raghunathan Professor of South Asian Studies at Columbia University. He was ...
states that in some crucial way, "Sanskrit is dead
Death is the irreversible cessation of all biological functions that sustain an organism. For organisms with a brain, death can also be defined as the irreversible cessation of functioning of the whole brain, including brainstem, and brain ...
". 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.
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,
The Sanskrit language scholar Moriz Winternitz
Moriz Winternitz ( Horn, December 23, 1863 – Prague, January 9, 1937) was a scholar from Austria who began his Indology contributions working with Max Müller at the Oxford University. An eminent Sanskrit scholar, he worked as a professor i ...
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. 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.
Hanneder states that modern works in Sanskrit are either ignored or their "modernity" contested.
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.
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.
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
Colin Paul Masica (June 13, 1931 – February 23, 2022) was an American linguist who was professor emeritus in thDepartment of South Asian Languages and Civilizationsand the Department of Linguistics at the University of Chicago. Besides being a s ...
—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
An anachronism (from the Greek , 'against' and , 'time') is a chronological inconsistency in some arrangement, especially a juxtaposition of people, events, objects, language terms and customs from different time periods. The most common type ...
errors. 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.
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. 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
Sinhala may refer to:
* Something of or related to the Sinhalese people of Sri Lanka
* Sinhalese people
* Sinhala language, one of the three official languages used in Sri Lanka
* Sinhala script, a writing system for the Sinhala language
** Sinha ...
). 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.
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. It is generally accepted by scholars and widely believed in India that the modern Indo-Aryan languages
The Indo-Aryan languages (or sometimes Indic languages) are a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages in the Indo-European languages, Indo-European language family. As of the early 21st century, they have more than 800 million speakers, primarily ...
– such as Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, and Punjabi – are descendants of the Sanskrit language. Sanskrit, states Burjor Avari, can be described as "the mother language of almost all the languages of north India".
Geographic distribution
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.
South Asia has been the geographic range of the largest collection of the ancient and pre-18th-century Sanskrit manuscripts and inscriptions.[ Beyond ancient India, significant collections of Sanskrit manuscripts and inscriptions have been found in China (particularly the Tibetan monasteries),] Myanmar
Myanmar, ; UK pronunciations: US pronunciations incl. . Note: Wikipedia's IPA conventions require indicating /r/ even in British English although only some British English speakers pronounce r at the end of syllables. As John Wells explai ...
, Indonesia
Indonesia, officially the Republic of Indonesia, is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania between the Indian and Pacific oceans. It consists of over 17,000 islands, including Sumatra, Java, Sulawesi, and parts of Borneo and New Guine ...
, Cambodia
Cambodia (; also Kampuchea ; km, កម្ពុជា, UNGEGN: ), officially the Kingdom of Cambodia, is a country located in the southern portion of the Indochinese Peninsula in Southeast Asia, spanning an area of , bordered by Thailan ...
, Laos, Vietnam
Vietnam or Viet Nam ( vi, Việt Nam, ), officially the Socialist Republic of Vietnam,., group="n" is a country in Southeast Asia, at the eastern edge of mainland Southeast Asia, with an area of and population of 96 million, making i ...
, Thailand
Thailand ( ), historically known as Siam () and officially the Kingdom of Thailand, is a country in Southeast Asia, located at the centre of the Indochinese Peninsula, spanning , with a population of almost 70 million. The country is bo ...
, and Malaysia
Malaysia ( ; ) is a country in Southeast Asia. The federation, federal constitutional monarchy consists of States and federal territories of Malaysia, thirteen states and three federal territories, separated by the South China Sea into two r ...
. 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, Tibet,[ Afghanistan, Mongolia, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Kazakhstan. Some Sanskrit texts and inscriptions have also been discovered in Korea and Japan.
]
Official status
In India
India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...
, Sanskrit is among the 22 official languages of India in the Eighth Schedule to the Constitution. In 2010, Uttarakhand
Uttarakhand ( , or ; , ), also known as Uttaranchal ( ; the official name until 2007), is a state in the northern part of India. It is often referred to as the "Devbhumi" (literally 'Land of the Gods') due to its religious significance and ...
became the first state in India to make Sanskrit its second official language. In 2019, Himachal Pradesh
Himachal Pradesh (; ; "Snow-laden Mountain Province") is a state in the northern part of India. Situated in the Western Himalayas, it is one of the thirteen mountain states and is characterized by an extreme landscape featuring several peaks ...
made Sanskrit its second official language, becoming the second state in India to do so.
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.
The most significant and distinctive phonological development in Sanskrit is vowel merger. The short ''*e'', ''*o'' and ''*a'', all merge as ''a'' (अ) in Sanskrit, while long ''*ē'', ''*ō'' and ''*ā'', all merge as long ''ā'' (आ). Compare Sanskrit ''nāman'' to Latin ''nōmen''. These mergers occurred very early and significantly impacted Sanskrit's morphological system. 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. 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.
Vowels
The cardinal vowels (''svaras'') ''i'' (इ), ''u'' (उ), ''a'' (अ) distinguish length in Sanskrit. 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''. The Sanskrit vowels are inherently long, though often transcribed ''e'' and ''o'' without the diacritic. The vocalic liquid ''r̥'' in Sanskrit is a merger of PIE ''*r̥'' and ''*l̥''. The long ''r̥'' is an innovation and it is used in a few analogically generated morphological categories.
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". 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.
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.
Sanskrit had a series of retroflex stops originating as conditioned alternants of dentals, albeit by Sanskrit they had become phonemic.
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. The ''anusvara'' that Sanskrit deploys is a conditioned alternant of postvocalic nasals, under certain sandhi conditions. Its ''visarga'' is a word-final or morpheme-final conditioned alternant of s and r under certain sandhi conditions.
The voiceless aspirated series is also an innovation in Sanskrit but is significantly rarer than the other three series.
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.
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''. 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. 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. In Vedic Sanskrit, the external ''sandhi'' rules are more variable than in Classical Sanskrit.
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 with all three stops under differing internal sandhi conditions". 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.
Vocalic alternations in the Sanskrit morphological system is termed "strengthening", and called ''guṇa'' and 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 is same as the lengthened-state. The qualitative ablaut is not found in Sanskrit just like it is absent in Iranian, but Sanskrit retains quantitative ablaut through vowel strengthening. The transformations between unstrengthened to ''guṇa'' is prominent in the morphological system, states Jamison, while 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.
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. 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. Most Vedic Sanskrit words have one accent. However, this accent is not phonologically predictable, states Jamison. It can fall anywhere in the word and its position often conveys morphological and syntactic information. 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.
Sanskrit, like most early Indo-European languages, lost the so-called "laryngeal consonants (cover-symbol ''*H'') present in the Proto-Indo-European", states Jamison. This significantly impacted the evolutionary path of the Sanskrit phonology and morphology, particularly in the variant forms of roots.
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
Marathi may refer to:
*Marathi people, an Indo-Aryan ethnolinguistic group of Maharashtra, India
*Marathi language, the Indo-Aryan language spoken by the Marathi people
*Palaiosouda, also known as Marathi, a small island in Greece
See also
*
* ...
, Nepali, Oriya and Bengali phonology
The phonology of Bengali, like that of its neighbouring Eastern Indo-Aryan languages, is characterised by a wide variety of diphthongs and inherent back vowels (both and ).
Phonemic inventory
Phonemically, Bengali features 29 consonants and ...
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.
Morphology
The basis of Sanskrit morphology is the root, states Jamison, "a morpheme bearing lexical meaning". 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".
A Sanskrit word has the following canonical structure:
:''Root'' + ''Affix'' + ''Ending''
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. 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.
Sanskrit verbs
Sanskrit has inherited from its parent, the Proto-Indo-European language, an elaborate system of verbal morphology, much of which has been preserved in Sanskrit as a whole, unlike in other kindred languages, such as Ancient Greek or Latin. Sanskri ...
have the following canonical structure:
:''Root'' + ''Suffix'' + ''Suffix'' + ''Ending''
According to Ruppel, verbs in Sanskrit express the same information as other Indo-European languages such as English. 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.
Both verbs and nouns in Sanskrit are either thematic or athematic, states Jamison. ''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.
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'' preverb
Although not widely accepted in linguistics, the term preverb is used in Caucasian (including all three families: Northwest Caucasian, Northeast Caucasian and Kartvelian), Caddoan, Athabaskan, and Algonquian linguistics to describe certain elem ...
s regularly occur in tmesis
In its strictest sense, tmesis (; plural tmeses ; Ancient Greek: ''tmēsis'' "a cutting" < ''temnō'', "I cut") is a word compound that ...
, states Jamison, which means they are "separated from the finite verb". 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".
While roots are typical in Sanskrit, some words do not follow the canonical structure. 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.
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. Athematic affixes can be alternating. Sanskrit deploys eight cases, namely nominative, accusative, instrumental, dative, ablative, genitive, locative, vocative.
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. 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. There are peripheral adjuncts to these four, such as the ''Unadisutras'', which focus on irregularly formed derivatives from the roots.[
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. 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".
]
Tense and voice
The Sanskrit language includes five tenses: present, future, past imperfect, past aorist and past perfect. It outlines three types of voices: active, passive and the middle. The middle is also referred to as the mediopassive, or more formally in Sanskrit as (word for another) and (word for oneself).
The paradigm for the tense-aspect system in Sanskrit is the three-way contrast between the "present", the "aorist" and the "perfect" architecture. 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. 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.
Number, person
Sanskrit recognizes three numbers—singular, dual, and plural. 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. Illustrations include ''dyāvā'' (literally, "the two heavens" for heaven-and-earth), ''mātarā'' (literally, "the two mothers" for mother-and-father). 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".
There are three persons in Sanskrit: first, second and third. 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.
Gender, mood
The Sanskrit language incorporates three genders: feminine, masculine and neuter. All nouns have inherent gender. With some exceptions, personal pronouns have no gender. Exceptions include demonstrative and anaphoric pronouns. 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. Similar affixes for the feminine are found in many Indo-European languages, states Burrow, suggesting links of the Sanskrit to its PIE heritage.
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. Examples of the former include ''ahám'' (first singular), ''vayám'' (first plural) and ''yūyám'' (second plural). The latter can be demonstrative, deictic or anaphoric. 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.
Indicative, potential and imperative are the three mood forms in Sanskrit.
Prosody, metre
The Sanskrit language formally incorporates poetic metres.[ 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
Sanskrit prosody or Chandas refers to one of the six Vedangas, or limbs of Vedic studies.James Lochtefeld (2002), "Chandas" in The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Hinduism, Vol. 1: A-M, Rosen Publishing, , page 140 It is the study of poetic metr ...
'', and is considered one of the six Vedanga
The Vedanga ( sa, वेदाङ्ग ', "limbs of the Veda") are six auxiliary disciplines of Hinduism that developed in ancient times and have been connected with the study of the Vedas:James Lochtefeld (2002), "Vedanga" in The Illustrated Enc ...
s, or limbs of Vedic studies.[James Lochtefeld (2002), "Chandas" in The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Hinduism, Vol. 1: A-M, Rosen Publishing, , p. 140]
Sanskrit prosody includes linear and non-linear systems. 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. 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.
Sanskrit metres include those based on a fixed number of syllables per verse, and those based on fixed number of morae
A mora (plural ''morae'' or ''moras''; often symbolized μ) is a basic timing unit in the phonology of some spoken languages, equal to or shorter than a syllable. For example, a short syllable such as ''ba'' consists of one mora (''monomoraic'') ...
per verse. The Vedic Sanskrit employs fifteen metres, of which seven are common, and the most frequent are three (8-, 11- and 12-syllable lines). 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).
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
The Upanishads (; sa, उपनिषद् ) are late Vedic Sanskrit texts that supplied the basis of later Hindu philosophy.Wendy Doniger (1990), ''Textual Sources for the Study of Hinduism'', 1st Edition, University of Chicago Press, , ...
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.
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. 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. Authors coded a hymn's end by frequently using a verse of a metre different than that used in the hymn's body. 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.
Writing system
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. 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
Oral tradition, or oral lore, is a form of human communication wherein knowledge, art, ideas and cultural material is received, preserved, and transmitted orally from one generation to another. Vansina, Jan: ''Oral Tradition as History'' (1985) ...
preserved the extensive Vedic and Classical Sanskrit literature. 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.
'' 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. The term, in the sense of a writing system, appears in some of the earliest Buddhist, Hindu, and Jaina texts. Pāṇini
, era = ;;6th–5th century BCE
, region = Indian philosophy
, main_interests = Grammar, linguistics
, notable_works = ' ( Classical Sanskrit)
, influenced=
, notable_ideas=Descriptive linguistics
(Devanaga ...
'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. Several early Buddhist and Jaina texts, such as the '' Lalitavistara Sūtra'' and ''Pannavana Sutta'' include lists of numerous writing scripts in ancient India. 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. The Jain
Jainism ( ), also known as Jain Dharma, is an Indian religion. Jainism traces its spiritual ideas and history through the succession of twenty-four tirthankaras (supreme preachers of ''Dharma''), with the first in the current time cycle being ...
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. 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. 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.
The oldest datable writing systems for Sanskrit are the Brāhmī script, the related Kharoṣṭhī script and the Brahmi derivatives. 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. 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
Uzbekistan (, ; uz, Ozbekiston, italic=yes / , ; russian: Узбекистан), officially the Republic of Uzbekistan ( uz, Ozbekiston Respublikasi, italic=yes / ; russian: Республика Узбекистан), is a doubly landlocked cou ...
. 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
Ashoka (, ; also ''Asoka''; 304 – 232 BCE), popularly known as Ashoka the Great, was the third emperor of the Maurya Empire of Indian subcontinent during to 232 BCE. His empire covered a large part of the Indian subcontinent, s ...
, but these are not in Sanskrit.
Scripts
Over the centuries, and across countries, a number of scripts have been used to write Sanskrit.
Brahmi script
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. 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. 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.
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". 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. 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
Haryana (; ) is an Indian state located in the northern part of the country. It was carved out of the former state of East Punjab on 1 Nov 1966 on a linguistic basis. It is ranked 21st in terms of area, with less than 1.4% () of India's land a ...
. It shows a "schoolboy's writing lessons", states Salomon.
Nagari script
Many modern era manuscripts are written and available in the Nagari script, whose form is attestable to the 1st millennium CE. The Nagari script is the ancestor of Devanagari
Devanagari ( ; , , Sanskrit pronunciation: ), also called Nagari (),Kathleen Kuiper (2010), The Culture of India, New York: The Rosen Publishing Group, , page 83 is a left-to-right abugida (a type of segmental writing system), based on the ...
(north India), Nandinagari
Nandinagari is a Brahmic script derived from the Nāgarī script which appeared in the 7th century AD.George Cardona and Danesh Jain (2003), The Indo-Aryan Languages, Routledge, , page 75 This script and its variants were used in the central Dec ...
(south India) and other variants. The Nāgarī script was in regular use by 7th century CE, and had fully evolved into Devanagari and Nandinagari scripts by about the end of the first millennium of the common era. The Devanagari script, states Banerji, became more popular for Sanskrit in India since about the 18th century. However, Sanskrit does have special historical connection to the Nagari script as attested by the epigraphical evidence.
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. The Sanskrit and Balinese languages Sanur inscription on Belanjong pillar
The Belanjong pillar, also Blanjong pillar or Blanjong inscription ( Indonesian: ''Prasasti Blanjong''), is a pillar established in 914 CE in the harbour of Belanjong, in the southern area of Sanur in Bali.
The pillar was established by king Sri ...
of Bali (Indonesia), dated to about 914 CE, is in part in the Nagari script.
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''). 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.
Other writing systems
Other scripts such as Gujarati
Gujarati may refer to:
* something of, from, or related to Gujarat, a state of India
* Gujarati people, the major ethnic group of Gujarat
* Gujarati language, the Indo-Aryan language spoken by them
* Gujarati languages, the Western Indo-Aryan sub ...
, Bangla, Odia and major south Indian scripts, states Salomon, "have been and often still are used in their proper territories for writing Sanskrit". 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. 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. 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.
In the south, where Dravidian languages
The Dravidian languages (or sometimes Dravidic) are a family of languages spoken by 250 million people, mainly in southern India, north-east Sri Lanka, and south-west Pakistan. Since the colonial era, there have been small but significant ...
predominate, scripts used for Sanskrit include the Kannada
Kannada (; ಕನ್ನಡ, ), originally romanised Canarese, is a Dravidian language spoken predominantly by the people of Karnataka in southwestern India, with minorities in all neighbouring states. It has around 47 million native s ...
, Telugu
Telugu may refer to:
* Telugu language, a major Dravidian language of India
*Telugu people, an ethno-linguistic group of India
* Telugu script, used to write the Telugu language
** Telugu (Unicode block), a block of Telugu characters in Unicode
S ...
, Malayalam
Malayalam (; , ) is a Dravidian languages, Dravidian language spoken in the Indian state of Kerala and the union territories of Lakshadweep and Puducherry (union territory), Puducherry (Mahé district) by the Malayali people. It is one of 2 ...
and Grantha alphabet
The Grantha script ( ta, கிரந்த எழுத்து, Granta eḻuttu; ml, ഗ്രന്ഥലിപി, granthalipi) is a South Indian script, found particularly in Tamil Nadu and Kerala. Originating from the Pallava script, th ...
s.
Transliteration schemes, Romanisation
Since the late 18th century, Sanskrit has been transliterated
Transliteration is a type of conversion of a text from one script to another that involves swapping letters (thus ''trans-'' + '' liter-'') in predictable ways, such as Greek → , Cyrillic → , Greek → the digraph , Armenian → or L ...
using the Latin alphabet
The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and th ...
. The system most commonly used today is the IAST (International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration
The International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (IAST) is a transliteration scheme that allows the lossless romanisation of Indic scripts as employed by Sanskrit and related Indic languages. It is based on a scheme that emerged during ...
), which has been the academic standard since 1888. ASCII
ASCII ( ), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because ...
-based transliteration schemes have also evolved because of difficulties representing Sanskrit characters in computer systems. These include Harvard-Kyoto
The Harvard-Kyoto Convention is a system for transliterating Sanskrit and other languages that use the Devanāgarī script into ASCII. It is predominantly used informally in e-mail, and for electronic texts.
Harvard-Kyoto system
Prior to the ...
and ITRANS
The "Indian languages TRANSliteration" (ITRANS) is an ASCII transliteration scheme for Indic scripts, particularly for the Devanagari script.
The need for a simple encoding scheme that used only keys available on an ordinary keyboard was felt i ...
, 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
Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, wh ...
-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
Romanization or romanisation, in linguistics, is the conversion of text from a different writing system to the Roman (Latin) script, or a system for doing so. Methods of romanization include transliteration, for representing written text, and ...
transliteration.
Epigraphy
The earliest known stone inscriptions in Sanskrit are in the Brahmi script from the first century BCE. These include the Ayodhyā (Uttar Pradesh) and Hāthībādā-Ghosuṇḍī (near Chittorgarh
Chittorgarh (also Chittor or Chittaurgarh) is a major city in Rajasthan state of western India. It lies on the Berach River, a tributary of the Banas, and is the administrative headquarters of Chittorgarh District. It was a major stronghol ...
, Rajasthan) inscriptions. Both of these, states Salomon, are "essentially standard" and "correct Sanskrit", with a few exceptions reflecting an "informal Sanskrit usage". Other important Hindu inscriptions dated to the 1st century BCE, in relatively accurate classical Sanskrit and Brahmi script are the Yavanarajya inscription
The Yavanarajya inscription, also called the Maghera Well Stone Inscription, was discovered in the village of Maghera, 17 kilometers north of Mathura, India in 1988. The Sanskrit inscription, carved on a block of red sandstone, is dated to the 1 ...
on a red sandstone slab and the long Naneghat inscription on the wall of a cave rest stop in the Western Ghats.
Besides these few examples from the 1st century BCE, the earliest Sanskrit and hybrid dialect inscriptions are found in Mathura (Uttar Pradesh
Uttar Pradesh (; , 'Northern Province') is a state in northern India. With over 200 million inhabitants, it is the most populated state in India as well as the most populous country subdivision in the world. It was established in 1950 ...
). These date to the 1st and 2nd century CE, states Salomon, from the time of the Indo-Scythian
Indo-Scythians (also called Indo-Sakas) were a group of nomadic Iranian peoples of Scythian origin who migrated from Central Asia southward into modern day Pakistan and Northwestern India from the middle of the 2nd century BCE to the 4th centur ...
Northern Satraps
The Northern Satraps (Brahmi: , ''Kṣatrapa'', "Satraps" or , ''Mahakṣatrapa'', "Great Satraps"), or sometimes Satraps of Mathura, or Northern Sakas, are a dynasty of Indo-Scythian rulers who held sway over the area of Eastern Punjab and Math ...
and the subsequent Kushan Empire. These are also in the Brahmi script
Brahmi (; ; ISO: ''Brāhmī'') is a writing system of ancient South Asia. "Until the late nineteenth century, the script of the Aśokan (non-Kharosthi) inscriptions and its immediate derivatives was referred to by various names such as 'lath' ...
. The earliest of these, states Salomon, are attributed to Ksatrapa Sodasa
Sodasa ( Kharosthi: , ; Middle Brahmi script: , , also , ) was an Indo-Scythian Northern Satrap and ruler of Mathura during the later part of the 1st century BCE or the early part of 1st century CE. He was the son of Rajuvula, the Great Sat ...
from the early years of 1st century CE. Of the Mathura inscriptions, the most significant is the Mora Well Inscription
The Mora Well inscription is an ancient Sanskrit inscription found in the village of Mora about from Mathura, India.Heinrich Lüders and Klaus Ludwig Janert (1961), Mathurā inscriptions, Göttingen : Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, , page 154, image o ...
. 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
The Vrishni heroes ( IAST: Vṛṣṇi Viras), also referred to as ''Pancha-viras'' ( IAST: Pañca vīras, "Five heroes"), are a group of five legendary, deified heroes who are found in the literature and archaeological sites of ancient India. T ...
: it mentions a stone shrine (temple), pratima (murti
In the Hindu tradition, a ''murti'' ( sa, मूर्ति, mūrti, ) is a devotional image such as a statue, or "idol" (a common and non-pejorative term in Indian English), of a deity or saint. In Hindu temples, it is a symbolic icon. T ...
, images) and calls the five Vrishnis as ''bhagavatam''. There are many other Mathura Sanskrit inscriptions in Brahmi script overlapping the era of Indo-Scythian Northern Satraps and early Kushanas. Other significant 1st-century inscriptions in reasonably good classical Sanskrit in the Brahmi script include the Vasu Doorjamb Inscription
__NOTOC__
The Vasu Doorjamb Inscription is an early 1st-century CE Sanskrit inscription in Brahmi script dedicated to the deity Vāsudeva, related to the Vaishnavism tradition of Hinduism. It is also one of the several dedicatory inscriptions fr ...
and the Mountain Temple inscription
__NOTOC__
The Mountain Temple inscription was found near Mathura, India. It is on a broken slab, and now housed at the Indian Museum, Kolkata.
Heinrich Lüders and Klaus Ludwig Janert
(1961), Mathurā inscriptions, Göttingen : Vandenhoeck & Rup ...
. The early ones are related to the Brahmanical, except for the inscription from Kankali Tila
''Kankali Tila'' (also Kankali mound or Jaini mound) is a mound located at Mathura in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. The name of the mound is derived from a modern temple of Hindu goddess Kankali. The famous Jain stupa was excavated here ...
which may be Jaina, but none are Buddhist. 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.
In Maharashtra
Maharashtra (; , abbr. MH or Maha) is a states and union territories of India, state in the western India, western peninsular region of India occupying a substantial portion of the Deccan Plateau. Maharashtra is the List of states and union te ...
and Gujarat
Gujarat (, ) is a state along the western coast of India. Its coastline of about is the longest in the country, most of which lies on the Kathiawar peninsula. Gujarat is the fifth-largest Indian state by area, covering some ; and the ninth ...
, Brahmi script Sanskrit inscriptions from the early centuries of the common era exist at the Nasik Caves
The Nasik Caves, or Trirashmi Leni (''Trirashmi'' being the name of the hills in which the caves are located, ''Leni'' being a Marathi word for caves), are a group of 23 caves carved between the 1st century BCE and the 3rd century CE, though ...
site, near the Girnar mountain of Junagadh and elsewhere such as at Kanakhera, Kanheri
The Kanheri Caves (''Kānherī-guhā'' aːnʱeɾiː ɡuɦaː are a group of caves and rock-cut monuments cut into a massive basalt outcrop in the forests of the Sanjay Gandhi National Park, on the former island of Salsette in the western out ...
, and Gunda. The Nasik inscription dates to the mid-1st century CE, is a fair approximation of standard Sanskrit and has hybrid features. The Junagadh rock inscription of Western Satraps
The Western Satraps, or Western Kshatrapas (Brahmi:, ''Mahakṣatrapa'', "Great Satraps") were Indo-Scythian (Saka) rulers of the western and central part of India ( Saurashtra and Malwa: modern Gujarat, Maharashtra, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh ...
ruler Rudradaman I
Rudradāman I (r. 130–150) was a Śaka ruler from the Western Kshatrapas dynasty. He was the grandson of the king Caṣṭana. Rudradāman I was instrumental in the decline of the Sātavāhana Empire. Rudradāman I took up the title of ''Mah ...
(, 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. 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
The Gupta Empire was an ancient Indian empire which existed from the early 4th century CE to late 6th century CE. At its zenith, from approximately 319 to 467 CE, it covered much of the Indian subcontinent. This period is considered as the Gold ...
era. These inscriptions are also in the Brahmi script.
The Nagarjunakonda
Nagarjunakonda (IAST: Nāgārjunikoṇḍa, meaning Nagarjuna Hill) is a historical town, now an island located near Nagarjuna Sagar in Palnadu district of the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, near the state border with Telangana. It is one o ...
inscriptions are the earliest known substantial South Indian Sanskrit inscriptions, probably from the late 3rd century or early 4th century CE, or both. These inscriptions are related to Buddhism and the Shaivism
Shaivism (; sa, शैवसम्प्रदायः, Śaivasampradāyaḥ) is one of the major Hindu traditions, which worships Shiva as the Supreme Being. One of the largest Hindu denominations, it incorporates many sub-traditions rangi ...
tradition of Hinduism. 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. 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. After the 3rd century CE, Sanskrit inscriptions dominate and many have survived. Between the 4th and 7th centuries CE, south Indian inscriptions are exclusively in the Sanskrit language. 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
West Bengal (, Bengali: ''Poshchim Bongo'', , abbr. WB) is a state in the eastern portion of India. It is situated along the Bay of Bengal, along with a population of over 91 million inhabitants within an area of . West Bengal is the fou ...
) is dated to the 4th century. Elsewhere, such as Dehradun (Uttarakhand
Uttarakhand ( , or ; , ), also known as Uttaranchal ( ; the official name until 2007), is a state in the northern part of India. It is often referred to as the "Devbhumi" (literally 'Land of the Gods') due to its religious significance and ...
), inscriptions in more or less correct classical Sanskrit inscriptions are dated to the 3rd century.
According to Salomon, the 4th-century reign of Samudragupta
Samudragupta (Gupta script: ''Sa-mu-dra-gu-pta'', (c. 335–375 CE) was the second emperor of the Gupta Empire of ancient India, and is regarded among the greatest rulers of the dynasty. As a son of the Gupta emperor Chandragupta I and the ...
was the turning point when the classical Sanskrit language became established as the "epigraphic language par excellence" of the Indian world. 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. 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. The Sanskrit language of these inscriptions is written on stone, various metals, terracotta, wood, crystal, ivory, shell, and cloth.
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. 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
Kutai is a historical region in what is now known as East Kalimantan, Indonesia on the island of Borneo and is also the name of the native ethnic group of the region (known as ''Urang Kutai'' or "the Kutai people"), numbering around 300,000 w ...
(known as the Mulavarman inscription discovered in eastern Borneo), and mid-5th century in west Java
Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mos ...
(Indonesia). 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. The Indic scripts, particularly the Pallava script prototype, spread and ultimately evolved into Mon-Burmese, Khmer, Thai, Lao, Sumatran, Celebes, Javanese and Balinese scripts. 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.
Literature
Literature in Sanskrit can be broadly divided into texts composed in Vedic Sanskrit and the later Classical Sanskrit. Vedic Sanskrit is the language of the extensive liturgical works of the Vedic religion, which aside from the four Vedas, include the Brāhmaṇas and the Sūtras.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The following are some of the old Indo-European words that eventually fade out of use in Sanskrit:
:
Dravidian lexical influence
The sources of these new loanwords are many, and vary across the different regions of the Indian subcontinent
The Indian subcontinent is a list of the physiographic regions of the world, physiographical region in United Nations geoscheme for Asia#Southern Asia, Southern Asia. It is situated on the Indian Plate, projecting southwards into the Indian O ...
. 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:
:
Nominal-form preference
While Vedic and epic form of speech is largely cognate to that of other Indo-European languages
The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Dutc ...
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:
:
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.
Classical Sanskrit's pre-eminent playwright Kālidāsa uses:
:
Influence on other languages
For nearly 2,000 years, Sanskrit was the language of a cultural order that exerted influence across South Asia
South Asia is the southern subregion of Asia, which is defined in both geographical and ethno-cultural terms. The region consists of the countries of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka.;;;;;;;; ...
, Inner Asia
Inner Asia refers to the northern and landlocked regions spanning North, Central and East Asia. It includes parts of western and northeast China, as well as southern Siberia. The area overlaps with some definitions of 'Central Asia', mostly the ...
, Southeast Asia
Southeast Asia, also spelled South East Asia and South-East Asia, and also known as Southeastern Asia, South-eastern Asia or SEA, is the geographical south-eastern region of Asia, consisting of the regions that are situated south of mainlan ...
, and to a certain extent East Asia
East Asia is the eastern region of Asia, which is defined in both Geography, geographical and culture, ethno-cultural terms. The modern State (polity), states of East Asia include China, Japan, Mongolia, North Korea, South Korea, and Taiwan. ...
. A significant form of post-Vedic Sanskrit is found in the Sanskrit of Indian epic poetry
Indian epic poetry is the epic poetry written in the Indian subcontinent, traditionally called ''Kavya'' (or ''Kāvya''; Sanskrit: काव्य, IAST: ''kāvyá''). The ''Ramayana'' and the ''Mahabharata'', which were originally composed in ...
—the ''Ramayana
The ''Rāmāyana'' (; sa, रामायणम्, ) is a Sanskrit literature, Sanskrit Indian epic poetry, epic composed over a period of nearly a millennium, with scholars' estimates for the earliest stage of the text ranging from the 8th ...
'' and ''Mahabharata
The ''Mahābhārata'' ( ; sa, महाभारतम्, ', ) is one of the two major Sanskrit literature, Sanskrit Indian epic poetry, epics of ancient India in Hinduism, the other being the ''Ramayana, Rāmāyaṇa''. It narrates the s ...
''. The deviations from in the epics are generally considered to be on account of interference from Prakrit
The Prakrits (; sa, prākṛta; psu, 𑀧𑀸𑀉𑀤, ; pka, ) are a group of vernacular Middle Indo-Aryan languages that were used in the Indian subcontinent from around the 3rd century BCE to the 8th century CE. The term Prakrit is usu ...
s, or innovations, and not because they are pre-Paninian. 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
Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit (BHS) is a modern linguistic category applied to the language used in a class of Indian Buddhist texts, such as the Perfection of Wisdom sutras. BHS is classified as a Middle Indo-Aryan language. It is sometimes called "B ...
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.
Indian subcontinent
Sanskrit has greatly influenced the languages of India that grew from its vocabulary and grammatical base; for instance, Hindi
Hindi (Devanāgarī: or , ), or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi (Devanagari: ), is an Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in the Hindi Belt region encompassing parts of northern, central, eastern, and western India. Hindi has been de ...
is a "Sanskritised register" of Hindustani. All modern Indo-Aryan languages
The Indo-Aryan languages (or sometimes Indic languages) are a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages in the Indo-European languages, Indo-European language family. As of the early 21st century, they have more than 800 million speakers, primarily ...
, as well as Munda and Dravidian languages
The Dravidian languages (or sometimes Dravidic) are a family of languages spoken by 250 million people, mainly in southern India, north-east Sri Lanka, and south-west Pakistan. Since the colonial era, there have been small but significant ...
have borrowed many words either directly from Sanskrit (''tatsama
Tatsama ( sa, तत्सम , lit. 'same as that') are Sanskrit loanwords in modern Indo-Aryan languages like Assamese, Bengali, Marathi, Nepali, Odia, Hindi, Gujarati, and Sinhala and in Dravidian languages like Malayalam and Telugu. They ...
'' words), or indirectly via middle Indo-Aryan languages (''tadbhava
(Sanskrit: तद्भव, , lit. "arising from that") is the Sanskrit word for one of three etymological classes defined by native grammarians of Middle Indo-Aryan languages, alongside tatsama and deśi words. at pp. 67-69. A "tadbhava" is a w ...
'' 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
Malayalam (; , ) is a Dravidian languages, Dravidian language spoken in the Indian state of Kerala and the union territories of Lakshadweep and Puducherry (union territory), Puducherry (Mahé district) by the Malayali people. It is one of 2 ...
and Kannada
Kannada (; ಕನ್ನಡ, ), originally romanised Canarese, is a Dravidian language spoken predominantly by the people of Karnataka in southwestern India, with minorities in all neighbouring states. It has around 47 million native s ...
. Literary texts in Telugu
Telugu may refer to:
* Telugu language, a major Dravidian language of India
*Telugu people, an ethno-linguistic group of India
* Telugu script, used to write the Telugu language
** Telugu (Unicode block), a block of Telugu characters in Unicode
S ...
are lexically Sanskrit or Sanskritised to an enormous extent, perhaps seventy percent or more. Marathi
Marathi may refer to:
*Marathi people, an Indo-Aryan ethnolinguistic group of Maharashtra, India
*Marathi language, the Indo-Aryan language spoken by the Marathi people
*Palaiosouda, also known as Marathi, a small island in Greece
See also
*
* ...
is another prominent language in Western India, that derives most of its words and Marathi grammar
The grammar of the Marathi language shares similarities with other modern Indo-Aryan languages such as Odia language, Odia, Gujarati language, Gujarati or Punjabi language, Punjabi. The first modern book exclusively about the grammar of Marathi la ...
from Sanskrit. Sanskrit words are often preferred in the literary texts in Marathi over corresponding colloquial Marathi word.
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. 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". There are a large number of loanwords found in the vocabulary of the three major Dravidian languages Malayalam, Kannada and Telugu. Tamil also has significant loanwords from Sanskrit. 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. The borrowed words are classified into two types based on phonological integration – ''tadbhava'' – those words derived from Prakrit and ''tatsama'' – unassimilated loanwords from Sanskrit.
Strazny mentions that "so massive has been the influence that it is hard to utter Sanskrit words have influenced Kannada from the early times". 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.''
George mentions that "No other Dravidian language has been so deeply influenced by Sanskrit as Malayalam". 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. 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''.
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. 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''.
Tamil
Tamil may refer to:
* Tamils, an ethnic group native to India and some other parts of Asia
**Sri Lankan Tamils, Tamil people native to Sri Lanka also called ilankai tamils
**Tamil Malaysians, Tamil people native to Malaysia
* Tamil language, nativ ...
also has been influenced from Sanskrit. Hans Henrich et al. mention that propagation of Jainism and Buddhism into south India had its influence. 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".
Beyond the Indian subcontinent
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.
East Asia
Buddhist Sanskrit has had a considerable influence on Sino-Tibetan languages
Sino-Tibetan, also cited as Trans-Himalayan in a few sources, is a family of more than 400 languages, second only to Indo-European in number of native speakers. The vast majority of these are the 1.3 billion native speakers of Chinese languages. ...
such as Chinese, state William Wang and Chaofen Sun. Many words have been adopted from Sanskrit into the Chinese, both in its historic religious discourse and everyday use. 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
The ''I Ching'' or ''Yi Jing'' (, ), usually translated ''Book of Changes'' or ''Classic of Changes'', is an ancient Chinese divination text that is among the oldest of the Chinese classics. Originally a divination manual in the Western Zho ...
.
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.
Many terms were transliterated directly and added to the Chinese vocabulary. Chinese words like ''chànà'' (Devanagari
Devanagari ( ; , , Sanskrit pronunciation: ), also called Nagari (),Kathleen Kuiper (2010), The Culture of India, New York: The Rosen Publishing Group, , page 83 is a left-to-right abugida (a type of segmental writing system), based on the ...
: क्षण ' 'instantaneous period') were borrowed from Sanskrit. Many Sanskrit texts survive only in Tibetan collections of commentaries to the Buddhist teachings, the Tengyur
The Tengyur or Tanjur or Bstan-’gyur (Tibetan: "Translation of Teachings") is the Tibetan collection of commentaries to the Buddhist teachings, or "Translated Treatises".
The Buddhist Canon
To the Tengyur were assigned commentaries to b ...
.
Sanskrit has also influenced the religious register of Japanese mostly through transliterations. These were borrowed from Chinese transliterations. In particular, the Shingon
Shingon monks at Mount Koya
is one of the major schools of Buddhism in Japan and one of the few surviving Vajrayana lineages in East Asia, originally spread from India to China through traveling monks such as Vajrabodhi and Amoghavajra.
Kn ...
() sect of esoteric Buddhism has been relying on Sanskrit and original Sanskrit mantra
A mantra ( Pali: ''manta'') or mantram (मन्त्रम्) is a sacred utterance, a numinous sound, a syllable, word or phonemes, or group of words in Sanskrit, Pali and other languages believed by practitioners to have religious, ...
s and writings, as a means of realizing Buddhahood.
Southeast Asia
A large number of inscriptions in Sanskrit across Southeast Asia testify the influence the language held in these regions.
Languages such as Indonesian
Indonesian is anything of, from, or related to Indonesia, an archipelagic country in Southeast Asia. It may refer to:
* Indonesians, citizens of Indonesia
** Native Indonesians, diverse groups of local inhabitants of the archipelago
** Indonesian ...
, Thai
Thai or THAI may refer to:
* Of or from Thailand, a country in Southeast Asia
** Thai people, the dominant ethnic group of Thailand
** Thai language, a Tai-Kadai language spoken mainly in and around Thailand
*** Thai script
*** Thai (Unicode block ...
and Lao contain many loanword
A loanword (also loan word or loan-word) is a word at least partly assimilated from one language (the donor language) into another language. This is in contrast to cognates, which are words in two or more languages that are similar because th ...
s 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.
Other Austronesian languages, such as Malay
Malay may refer to:
Languages
* Malay language or Bahasa Melayu, a major Austronesian language spoken in Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei and Singapore
** History of the Malay language, the Malay language from the 4th to the 14th century
** Indonesi ...
(descended into modern Malaysian
Malaysian may refer to:
* Something from or related to Malaysia, a country in Southeast Asia
* Malaysian Malay, a dialect of Malay language spoken mainly in Malaysia
* Malaysian people, people who are identified with the country of Malaysia regard ...
and Indonesian
Indonesian is anything of, from, or related to Indonesia, an archipelagic country in Southeast Asia. It may refer to:
* Indonesians, citizens of Indonesia
** Native Indonesians, diverse groups of local inhabitants of the archipelago
** Indonesian ...
standards) also derive much of their vocabulary from Sanskrit. Similarly, Philippine languages
The Philippine languages or Philippinic are a proposed group by R. David Paul Zorc (1986) and Robert Blust (1991; 2005; 2019) that include all the languages of the Philippines and northern Sulawesi, Indonesia—except Sama–Bajaw (languag ...
such as Tagalog have some Sanskrit loanwords, although more are derived from Spanish
Spanish might refer to:
* Items from or related to Spain:
**Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain
**Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many Latin American countries
**Spanish cuisine
Other places
* Spanish, Ontario, Can ...
.
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.
To this day, Southeast Asian languages such as Thai are known to draw upon Sanskrit for technical vocabulary.
=''Indonesia''
=
The earliest Sanskrit text which was founded in the Indonesian archipelago
The islands of Indonesia, also known as the Indonesian Archipelago ( id, Kepulauan Indonesia) or Nusantara, may refer either to the islands comprising the country of Indonesia or to the geographical groups which include its islands.
History ...
was at Eastern Borneo dating back to 400 CE known as the Mulavarman inscription. 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
Indonesians ( Indonesian: ''orang Indonesia'') are citizens or people originally from Indonesia, regardless of their ethnic or religious background. There are more than 1,300 ethnicities in Indonesia, making it a multicultural archipelagic cou ...
. 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
Thai or THAI may refer to:
* Of or from Thailand, a country in Southeast Asia
** Thai people, the dominant ethnic group of Thailand
** Thai language, a Tai-Kadai language spoken mainly in and around Thailand
*** Thai script
*** Thai (Unicode block ...
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
Indonesian is anything of, from, or related to Indonesia, an archipelagic country in Southeast Asia. It may refer to:
* Indonesians, citizens of Indonesia
** Native Indonesians, diverse groups of local inhabitants of the archipelago
** Indonesian ...
to a great extent. 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
Papua is a province of Indonesia, comprising the northern coast of Western New Guinea together with island groups in Cenderawasih Bay to the west. It roughly follows the borders of Papuan customary region of Tabi Saireri. It is bordered by the ...
), including terms and mottoes of government, educational and military institutions use Sanskrit, such as the rank of general for example in the Indonesian Navy
The Indonesian Navy ( id, Tentara Nasional Indonesia Angkatan Laut, , Indonesian National Military-Naval Force, TNI-AL) is the naval branch of the Indonesian National Armed Forces. It was founded on 10 September 1945 and has a role to patrol ...
is "Laksamana" (taken from the Ramayana
The ''Rāmāyana'' (; sa, रामायणम्, ) is a Sanskrit literature, Sanskrit Indian epic poetry, epic composed over a period of nearly a millennium, with scholars' estimates for the earliest stage of the text ranging from the 8th ...
). 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
Pura may refer to:
Places
* Pura, Kushtagi, a village in Koppal district, Karnataka, India
* Pura, Iran, a village in Mazandaran Province, Iran
* Pura, Tarlac, a municipality in the Philippines
* Pura, Switzerland, a municipality in Ticino, S ...
" (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 National Police may refer to the national police forces of several countries:
*Afghanistan: Afghan National Police
*Haiti: Haitian National Police
*Colombia: National Police of Colombia
*Cuba: Cuban National Police
*East Timor: National Police of ...
, 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.
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 during the British Raj
The British Raj (; from Hindi ''rāj'': kingdom, realm, state, or empire) was the rule of the British Crown on the Indian subcontinent;
*
* it is also called Crown rule in India,
*
*
*
*
or Direct rule in India,
* Quote: "Mill, who was himsel ...
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
Jainism ( ), also known as Jain Dharma, is an Indian religion. Jainism traces its spiritual ideas and history through the succession of twenty-four tirthankaras (supreme preachers of ''Dharma''), with the first in the current time cycle being ...
traditions. It is used during worship in Hindu temple
A Hindu temple, or ''mandir'' or ''koil'' in Indian languages, is a house, seat and body of divinity for Hindus. It is a structure designed to bring human beings and gods together through worship, sacrifice, and devotion.; Quote: "The Hin ...
s. 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 Jain Agamas (Śvētāmbara), Agamas are in Sanskrit. Further, states Paul Dundas
Paul Dundas (born 1952) is a scholar and a senior lecturer in Sanskrit language and head of Asian Studies in the University of Edinburgh. His main areas of academic and research interest include Jainism, Buddhism, classical Sanskrit literature ...
, Sanskrit mantras and Sanskrit as a ritual language was commonplace among Jains throughout their medieval history.
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. 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. In the south, Sanskrit texts are recited at many major Hindu temples such as the Meenakshi Temple. 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".
Literature and arts
More than 3,000 Sanskrit works have been composed since India's independence in 1947. Much of this work has been judged of high quality, in comparison to both classical Sanskrit literature and modern literature in other Indian languages.
The Sahitya Akademi has given an List of Sahitya Akademi Award winners for Sanskrit, 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.
Sanskrit is used extensively in the Carnatic music, Carnatic and Hindustani classical music, 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.
In Mainland China, musicians such as Sa Dingding have written popular music, pop songs in Sanskrit.
Numerous loan Sanskrit words are found in other major Asian languages. For example, List of loanwords in Tagalog#Sanskrit, Filipino, Cebuano language, Cebuano, Lao, Khmer[Sak-] List of loanwords in Thai, Thai and its Thai alphabet#Sanskrit and Pali, alphabets, List of loanwords in Malay, Malay (including Malaysian
Malaysian may refer to:
* Something from or related to Malaysia, a country in Southeast Asia
* Malaysian Malay, a dialect of Malay language spoken mainly in Malaysia
* Malaysian people, people who are identified with the country of Malaysia regard ...
and List of loanwords in Indonesian#From Sanskrit, Indonesian), Javanese (old Javanese-English dictionary by P.J. Zoetmulder contains over 25,500 entries), and even in List of English words of Sanskrit origin, English.
Media
Since 1974, there has been a short daily news broadcast on state-run All India Radio. These broadcasts are also made available on the internet on AIR's website. Sanskrit news is broadcast on TV and on the internet through the DD National channel at 6:55 AM IST.
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.
Schools and contemporary status
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
Varanasi (; ; also Banaras or Benares (; ), and Kashi.) is a city on the Ganges river in northern India that has a central place in the traditions of pilgrimage, death, and mourning in the Hindu world.
*
*
*
* The city has a syncretic t ...
. Sanskrit is taught in 5,000 traditional schools (Pathashalas), and 14,000 schools in India, where there are also 22 colleges and universities dedicated to the exclusive study of the language. Sanskrit is one of the 22 Languages with official status in India#List of scheduled languages of India, scheduled languages of India. Despite it being a studied school subject in contemporary India, Sanskrit has not been spoken as a native language in centuries.
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.
A number of List of Sanskrit universities in India, 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 (India), central university status.
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
Indonesia, officially the Republic of Indonesia, is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania between the Indian and Pacific oceans. It consists of over 17,000 islands, including Sumatra, Java, Sulawesi, and parts of Borneo and New Guine ...
, a number of educational and scholarly institutions have also been conducting Sanskrit lessons for Hindu locals.
In the West
St James Independent Schools, St James Junior School and Avanti Schools Trust in London, England, offer Sanskrit as part of the curriculum. 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. In Australia, the private boys' high school Sydney Grammar School offers Sanskrit from years 7 through to 12, including for the Higher School Certificate (New South Wales), Higher School Certificate. 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.
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 William Jones (philologist), Sir William Jones (1746–1794). This research played an important role in the development of Western philology, or historical linguistics.
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. 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". 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.[
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 (linguist), 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 Max Müller, 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.][
]
Symbolic usage
In India, Indonesia
Indonesia, officially the Republic of Indonesia, is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania between the Indian and Pacific oceans. It consists of over 17,000 islands, including Sumatra, Java, Sulawesi, and parts of Borneo and New Guine ...
, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Southeast Asia
Southeast Asia, also spelled South East Asia and South-East Asia, and also known as Southeastern Asia, South-eastern Asia or SEA, is the geographical south-eastern region of Asia, consisting of the regions that are situated south of mainlan ...
, Sanskrit phrases are widely used as mottoes for various national, educational and social organisations:
* India
India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...
: ''Satyameva Jayate'' (सत्यमेव जयते), meaning 'truth alone triumphs'.
* Nepal: ''Janani Janmabhumishcha Swargadapi Gariyasi, Janani Janmabhūmischa Swargādapi Garīyasī'', meaning 'mother and motherland are superior to heaven'.
* Indonesia
Indonesia, officially the Republic of Indonesia, is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania between the Indian and Pacific oceans. It consists of over 17,000 islands, including Sumatra, Java, Sulawesi, and parts of Borneo and New Guine ...
: In Indonesia, Sanskrit is widely used as terms and mottoes of the armed forces and other national organizations ''(See: List of military unit mottoes by country#Indonesia, Indonesian Armed Forces mottoes)''. ''Rastra Sewakottama'' (राष्ट्र सेवकोत्तम, ) 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, ) is the official motto of the Indonesian Army, ''Adhitakarya Mahatvavirya Nagarabhakti'' (अधीतकार्य महत्ववीर्य नगरभक्ति, ) is the official motto of the Indonesian Military Academy, ''Upakriya Labdha Prayojana Balottama'' (उपक्रिया लब्ध प्रयोजन बालोत्तम, ) is the official motto of the Army Psychological Corps, ''Karmanye Vadikaraste Mafalesu Kadatjana'' (कर्मण्येवाधिकारस्ते मा फलेषु कदाचन, ) is the official motto of the Air-Force Special Forces (Paskhas), ''Jalesu Bhumyamca Jayamahe'' (जलेषु भूम्यम्च जयमहे, ) is the official motto of the Indonesian Marine Corps, 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 Integrated Guided Missile Development Program, 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 (missile), Prithvi, Agni (missile), Agni, Akash (missile), Akash, Nag (missile), Nag and the Integrated Guided Missile Development Program#Trishul missile system, Trishul missile system. India's first modern fighter aircraft is named HAL Tejas.
In November 2020, Gaurav Sharma (politician), Gaurav Sharma, a New Zealand politician of Indian origin swore into New Zealand Parliament, parliament using Sanskrit alongside Māori language, Māori; the decision was made as a "homage to all Indian languages" compromising between his native Pahari language, Pahari and Punjabi language, Punjabi.
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 (opera), Satyagraha'', an opera by Philip Glass, uses texts from the ''Bhagavad Gita'', sung in Sanskrit. In 1996, English psychedelic rock band Kula Shaker released ''Govinda (Kula Shaker song), 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 (entertainer), Madonna's album ''Music (Madonna album), Music'' includes Sanskrit chants, and ''Shanti/Ashtangi'' from her 1998 album ''Ray of Light'', which won a Grammy, is the ashtanga vinyasa yoga chant. The lyrics include the mantra ''Om shanti''. 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''. The theme song of ''Battlestar Galactica (2004 TV series), Battlestar Galactica 2004'' is the Gayatri Mantra, taken from the Rigveda
The ''Rigveda'' or ''Rig Veda'' ( ', from ' "praise" and ' "knowledge") is an ancient Indian collection of Vedic Sanskrit hymns (''sūktas''). It is one of the four sacred canonical Hindu texts ('' śruti'') known as the Vedas. Only one ...
. The lyrics of "The Child in Us" by Enigma (German band), Enigma also contain Sanskrit verses. In 2006, Mexican singer Paulina Rubio was influenced in Sanskrit for her concept album ''Ananda (album), Ananda''.
See also
* Arsha prayoga
* Āryabhaṭa numeration
* List of Sanskrit-related topics
* The Spitzer manuscript
* Proto-Indo-Aryan language, Proto-Indo-Aryan
* Proto-Indo-Iranian language, Proto-Indo-Iranian
* Proto-Indo-European language, Proto-Indo-European
Notes
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External links
* 31 Sanskrit and Dravidian dictionaries for Lingvo.
* free online lessons from the
* an organisation promoting the usage of Sanskrit
* — Documents in ITX format of Upanishads, Stotras etc.
*
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* for typing Sanskrit in the Devanagari script.
* — sources results from Monier Williams etc.
* — dynamic online declension and conjugation tool
* — Sanskrit hypertext dictionary
* — Collection of Sanskrit Shlokas from Various Sanskrit Texts
{{Authority control
Sanskrit,
Indo-Aryan languages
Languages attested from the 2nd millennium BC
Languages written in Devanagari
Subject–object–verb languages
Classical Language in India
Official languages of India
Languages of Nepal
Languages of India
Languages officially written in Indic scripts
Formal languages used for Indian scriptures
Sacred languages
Sahitya Akademi recognised languages