# Sanskrit: Dead Sanskrit Was Always Dead



## Qureshpor

The title of this thread is taken from a book consisting of six chapters by Shyam Rao. I thought of bringing it to the notice of forum members because recently the language was described as "artificial" by one member and this description was objected to by another. 

I wanted to quote one or two points made by the author but unfortunately the book does not give page numbers, at least in the version available on the net. What I would like to know from forum members and especially those who know the language or have interest in it, is whether they are aware of the author of this book and more importantly, his work. If you have read this book or its reviews, do you have views on his conclusions either for or against?

http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/sanskrit_exposure.htm

Sheldon Pollock, who is a scholar of Sanskrit has written an article entitled, "The Death of Sanskrit". This I think is more to do with its decline and death rather than it always having been "dead".

http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pollock/sks/papers/death_of_sanskrit.pdf


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## greatbear

The work cited doesn't even merit a discussion; however, for the benefit of those who are not conversant with these things, a few things in order. While the decline and death of Sanskrit as a spoken and commonly understood language is indisputable, the theory that "it was always dead" has its foremost flaw in that, that even if only the Brahmins spoke it - which even the author is admitting - they are not an insubstantial number of Indian population, and anyway a language does exist whether a few speak it or many more. And this few, the number of Brahmins, would be in the order of a few millions. So how could it have been a dead language? Now, some horrible figments of imagination from the work cited:

- In the opening section, the author mentions "Anglo-Brahman colonisation": really? When did this happen? Brahmins colluded with the British to suppress the rest of the Indians? That's quite a news.

- Vedas _are_ written in Sanskrit. And so are many other Hindu scriptures. I have an elementary understanding of Sanskrit, and so I don't have to rely on any sources to tell me what the Vedas and Puranas are written in. I can access them and I can see Sanskrit all over.

- There are an astonishing number of cognate words between Sanskrit and Russian, Old Persian, and Latin. That is a fact.

- The author seems to know much more than the archeaologists when he says that Aryans invaded the Indus Valley Civilisation. As far as I know, it has been always a mystery why did the civilisation disappear, and climate change and the subsequent change of the river path is considered to be the most probable factor so far. He even knows who were the Indus Valley settlers: when no one else knows!

- How are Shaivism, Tantrism and Shaktism pre-Aryan? Where are the author's findings for such an outrageous claim?

- There is no need to even think of discussing further a paranoid author who constructs sick stories like the one below:

_"Free Time - The Brahmins had nothing to do, living on a system of tremendous extortion and plunder of native populations They hence created a more and more useless language by inventing more and more difficult words and letters. Devadasis - The huge temples played a great role in the formation of Sanskrit. Large numbers of women of all races, especially Sudrani Negresses, who were ravished and enslaved by the Aryan invaders, were forced by the cruel Brahmins into immoral prostitution. The non-Aryan women were also raped by their monstrous Brahmin pimps, who kept the helpless Dravidian women in the huge prison-temples of Vishnu. Their mongrel offspring are the Tamil Brahmins of today, and their bastard language is the Sanskrit of today. It is in these giant brothels that Sanskrit arose, and hence Sanskrit is a bastard language, containing a confused jumble of elements of various languages (Vedic, Dravidian, Mon-Khmer, etc.)."_

The above work might be to the taste of certain forum members here who think of Sanskrit as some "artificial" language and think of modern-day Hindi as some conspiratorial arrangement arrived at through some imagined Sanskritisation, but if that be the case, that will only reflect the state of the minds of those members, just as the above cited paragraph reveals everything about the author's diseased state of mind.

It is not an unconnected matter that the work in question is written in extremely poor English.


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## Au101

I haven't read the source, so please forgive me if my comments are not quite what you were looking for, but whether Sanskrit was always dead is not really questionable. We can chart the evolution of Sanskrit as a living language all the way back to Proto-Indo-European. We can look at Sanskrit words and grammar and sounds and see how they compare with Latin, Ancient Greek, Hittite and many other languages. This allows us to see how Sanskrit developped as a spoken language, as any other language would develop. The history of the Sanskrit language - at least from a linguistic viewpoint, if not a historical, cultural, or human viewpoint - is relatively well understood. It was not invented, anymore than Hindi, English, Mandarin Chinese or any other language was invented. The fact that Sanskrit was, and is, used as a liturgical language does not mean that it wasn't once spoken, much as Latin was once spoken.

If the fact that we can't chart an organic, natural, normal development from its proto-language is not enough and one still wants to argue that it was invented, under the influence of an older language we can see that this is not a reasonable claim. If we look at the form of the language in the Vedas, we see how much it changes and evolves, within the Vedas themselves, with the earlier Ṛg Veda having different forms to the ones we find in later Vedas. Then, as we move onwards, we see the loss of the Vedic pitch accent, the organic, living evolution as certain grammatical forms are lost and the classical language begins to shape. Even in the Epics, we have a different dialect of Sanskrit, with unusual forms. If you open a Sanskrit dictionary, you will find, after every definition, an indication as to when this form was used. We can see in Sanskrit numerous different dialects and the evolution of the language. It then continued to evolve into the Prākrits and so it grew. If the language was never living and was invented, why did it not stay the same? Why is it not uniform? It is a largely untennable position and is quite a curious idea. Also, from what little our friend greatbear has given us, the reasoning behind the position - the idea that a deliberately complicated language was invented because some evil Brahmins were bored sounds utterly ridiculous. The other thing I would just like to point out is that the Sanskrit language is not deliberately complicated. It is old and, like many ancient languages, retains a lot of cases and other grammatical features which are lost in most modern languages. Certainly, this does make it fairly difficult to grasp, there is a lot to it and - like all languages - it has its fair share of irregularities, too. But it is hardly more difficult than, say, Latin, Ancient Greek, or Old English. I don't know of any rigorous study about how easy any of these languages is for most people to learn, but I have studied Sanskrit and Latin and have looked at Old English. There is nothing about it that seems deliberately obtuse - in fact, if you understand the phonology and have a small knowledge of linguistics, it's actually very logical. I don't find it unusually difficult, I mean it's not very easy, there are probably many languages which are easier to pick-up, but there's nothing that looks artificially hard and - as I say - if you know it's history then it's plain as day that these grammatical forms were not invented by people just to make their lives hard for themselves, there's actually a perfectly logical, traceable devlopment.

Just to add one more thing, in Qureshpor's introduction, he mentioned the idea that the language is 'artificial'. As you can probably tell, I don't think that that's true. However, the great grammarian Pāṇini sought to describe the language as he heard it and to understand it. He was - in some ways - the first linguist, writing a book on his language, just as many people have written books on the English language. However, just like some of the English usage guides you get that tell you not to use the passive voice and when to use 'fewer' and when to use 'less', some people took Pāṇini's descriptive grammar and thought of it as 'correct usage'. So many of the later poets referred to this work, in much the same way that an English speaker might refer to a usage guide when writing his discertation or an important essay, when they wrote their poetry. In that sense, then, there is a certain amount of unnatural regularity, people use a prescribed form, instead of what trips off of their tongue, but I don't think that it's 'artificial', at all, it's the same situation as in English in many ways. A word of caution though is that Pāṇini was doing this for the first time and - genuinely incredible though his work was - some of his analyses are not considered correct in today's usage. This does mean that some of what Pāṇini has to say, some of the verbal roots that he talks about, for example, probably never existed in actual spoken usage. But the important thing is that actual spoken usage there was. It was a living language, a natural language, and one that came into being like any other. It had styles and standards that people later stuck to, which is perhaps not how a language should work, but that's written language for you. It's the same in Urdu, where you have formal Urdu - I believe - and spoken Urdu. I mean, I guess people who stuck to Pāṇini's grammar were like a modern day Lucknowi. (I am told that in Lucknow they pride themselves on their elegant, formal Urdu, but I've never been, so I appologise if I am mistaken about the people of that city, I certainly didn't mean offense.) Finally, yes, Pāṇini did imbue the language with a certain regularity that might not have existed without him, but that doesn't negate the perfectly normal, natural development of a real, spoken, living language.


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## tonyspeed

No one knows the true history of Sanskrit fully. All we have is bits and pieces and circumstantial evidence. So to be vehement about the matter is really a waste of time. 

That being said, I think the Sanskrit we have today can be viewed as Classical Latin was to Vulgar Latin. 



> *Classical Latin*
> 
> During the late republic and into the first years of the empire, a new Classical Latin arose, a conscious creation of the orators, poets, historians and other literate men, who wrote the great works of classical literature, which were taught in grammar and rhetoric schools. Today's instructional grammars trace their roots to these schools, which served as a sort of informal language academy dedicated to maintaining and perpetuating educated speech.[11]
> *
> Vulgar Latin*
> 
> Philological analysis of Archaic Latin works, such as Plautus', which contain snippets of everyday speech, indicates that a spoken language, which was in Classical Latin called Vulgar Latin (_sermo vulgi_ by Cicero), the language of the _vulgus_  or "commoners", existed contemporaneously with the literate Classical  Latin. Since this language, by virtue of its informality, was rarely  written, philologists have been left with only individual words and  phrases cited by Classical authors, as well as those found as graffiti.



By the time Panini created his work, Vedic Sanskrit was already in the throes of death. He recorded essentially what at that point was an almost dead language (maybe even already dead?) and codified it for future generations: Classical Sanskrit.

The most telling evidence is that by the time Ashoka the Great created his pillars (between 269 BC and 232 BC ), he does not use Sanskrit at all, but rather the prakrit dialects.
By that time, Sanskrit was dead and no longer in use for everyday communication and was lost to the common man. 


  The attitude is interesting, however: People are saying  that if one says maulavi or galati, one is stuffy, living in the past, antiquated, pretentious, etc.. in essence "artificial" . But if one says Classical Sanskrit is "artificial"
(it has been a dead language for at least a thousand years), then the world has ended.

I see a great bit of double standard in that. Sanskrit has been long dead and we have changed perfectly good colloquial forms "aas" into their stuffy forms "aashaa". But that is still considered fine for "native speakers".

In any case, the bottom line is we will never know, and all we can do is speculate and have socio-religious battles. The author above makes several good points even if his anti-Brahmin, anti-European attitude is clear.
His ideas are generally plausible but ultimately unprovable. And we are stuck with the Euro-Aryan world view the Europeans created barring new evidence.


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## tonyspeed

More interesting theories can be found here. The Development Of Hinduism By M.M.Ninan.

It explains (from archaeological evidence) that the peak of Sanskrit was the 5th to 6th C. AD.
Before then it was virtually unused (as evidences by Ashokan Pillars), but it came to replace the Prakrits for educated speech and spread even to South India.

This even claims that Sanskrit could have been developed out of the Prakrits and other extant languages.


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## greatbear

tonyspeed said:


> The attitude is interesting, however: People are saying  that if one says maulavi or galati, one is stuffy, living in the past, antiquated, pretentious, etc.. in essence "artificial" . But if one says Classical Sanskrit is "artificial"
> (it has been a dead language for at least a thousand years), then the world has ended.
> 
> I see a great bit of double standard in that. Sanskrit has been long dead and we have changed perfectly good colloquial forms "aas" into their stuffy forms "aashaa". But that is still considered fine for "native speakers".



Full marks to you for twisting other people's statements to suit your fictional arguments. It was clearly answered by me and member hindiurdu in response to your questions how certain Hindi words are pronounced: to take, another example, pronouncing "anant" as "ananta" is indeed pretentious in Hindi (and not in Sanskrit). Just as "galatii" is pretentious in Urdu and Hindi. The double standards are in your mind; you can continue to live in that world of yours or start accepting reality as it is. Sanskrit is a dead language, and when it was alive there was nothing "artificial" about it. How can a dead language be artificial?

Also note that for a native Hindi speaker there is a wide difference of nuance between "aas" and "aashaa" (they are not synonyms, my dear!): so don't put your foot in mouth where you are not aware of a language's nuances. Probably because as a learner you thought they were synonyms, you thought one of them is the stuffy form of the other?


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## greatbear

tonyspeed said:


> More interesting theories can be found here. The Development Of Hinduism By M.M.Ninan.
> 
> It explains (from archaeological evidence) that the peak of Sanskrit was the 5th to 6th C. AD.
> Before then it was virtually unused (as evidences by Ashokan Pillars), but it came to replace the Prakrits for educated speech and spread even to South India.
> 
> This even claims that Sanskrit could have been developed out of the Prakrits and other extant languages.



I didn't bother to read your wise link with such "interesting" theories, because common sense forbid me to.
Laughable, isn't it, anyway? Especially considering the number of cognates that Sanskrit has with Latin, Old Persian and Russian.

What's most interesting however is that anyway you contradict yourself in post 3 with what you say in post 4, and thus both positions stand negated.


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## tonyspeed

Another interesting book is one which shows why we have no idea the date of Panini's work. *"*On the Aindra school of Sanskrit grammarians" By Arthur Coke Burnell (published 1882)

He himself on page 106 says "Panini's* artifical* system".

Unlike some, I have no entrenched position or socio-religous agenda. I only portray various theories and really ascribe to none. I am only interested in the facts and ideas, even if they contradict.

Archaeology is much more reliable than circumstantial grammatical evidence. The reason being that grammars and languages can be concocted as also mentioned in this book on page 107.


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## tonyspeed

greatbear said:


> Also note that for a native Hindi speaker there is a wide difference of nuance between "aas" and "aashaa" (



The nuances come because native speakers are unused to the foreign word. They therefore create a formal nuance for the foreign word because they assume there must be one.
Other examples include "pustak" and "kitaab" as we have already discussed. I can also add "nafrat" and "ghrinaa" to this list. The nuance was added in the minds of the reader
because of the status of Sanskrit, not because there was really a difference.

Similar differences occur in English with words of French origin.


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## hindiurdu

I think the point has been made before that language actually exists only in dialects. Sanskrit had many dialects and the more I look at Avestan and Vedic the more their early forms really seem like dialects of each other. I now understand why people researching this Iranian language also learn Sanskrit. But in Sanskrit you can see lots of change over thousands of years. There seem to be many markers. For one thing, it seems like both the IndoAryan and Iranian branches have a s → h tendency, which is stronger in Iranian. So, saptah ↔ hafta and sarasvati ↔ harahvati. But within IndoAryan you also see rahit/sahit in Vedic Sanskrit which Dardic preserves in its 'roust'/''soust' forms. This definitely shows contending dialects in which Vedic won out. 

Then you see the active rooting out of 'f' and 'x' from Sanskrit, which were entrenched in Vedic but were already being disapproved of by Valmiki (http://books.google.com/books?id=M0smAQAAIAAJ&pg=PR37) - '_it is recorded that Agnivecya and Valmiki did not accept Jihvamuliya or Upadhmaniya_'. Panini completely demolished Vedic and standardized the language as he saw fit. However, by his time it seems like the Prakrits were already flowering.

I don't know of any good and readable works on this, but it seems like Sanskrit had many dialects and was constantly evolving until maybe 200BC-200AD. After that it seems to have become liturgical and I would consider that to be 'dead', much as Latin or Avestan or Classical (Quranic) Arabic are. I guess we can get into all sorts of arguments about defining 'dead' so this is strictly my personal view. Of course, all these live on for those to whom they speak as religiously important things. All we need to see are the Catholic infights about Latin vs English mass.


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## Qureshpor

Au101, I am most indebted to your detailed and insightful reply. Please do read the link if and when you get some spare time and then get back with any further comments. With regard to Sanskrit being "artificial", it is not something that I had said. In fact the reason for including this comment was to contrast what one person had said with what this author is saying. Something can be artificial but alive nevertheless yet the author of this book seems to be saying that the language was never the language of the common people and was restricted to the Brahmins. How much this is true, I don't know but for a language to develop an extensive literature in various fields only points to one thing and that is that at some period in the past it was a living language.


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## souminwé

There seems to be some confusion as to when what died.
When Panini was writing his grammar, the language was not terribly different from Vedic Sanskrit. A lot of what Panini spends time on is discussing the differences between the spoken language of the time and the language of the Vedas. I wouldn't go so far as to call his language a "Prakrit" - more so a dialect of Vedic Sanskrit, on its way to becoming the classic language.

Panini's grammar was composed before the advent of writing in India. Though this seems like a grand feat, if it weren't true that would mean that writing was present in the sub-continent much earlier than we have evidence for.
For now, it seems in line with Vedic traditions of orally preserving knowledge, strictly focusing on accurately reciting each syllable, using disciples as living 'notepads'. Do also keep in mind that the majority of early Indian philosophers were linguists; it seems the position of language in society was quite high.

As for the claim of "Sanskrit being completely aritifical", I believe this misconception comes from the fact that Sanskrit wasn't written down until about a thousand years after its death - indeed, the first example we have of writing in India is in Prakrit, not Sanskrit. 
I believe the bigger question is, how accurate is the transcription in the Vedas, our main records of once spoken Sanskrit. 

Our ability to analyse the Vedas and find a gradation of change, and the retention of many irregularities that find cognates outside Indo-Aryan (some of which were lost in Panini's grammar and others which were forcefully regularised in Classical Sanskrit) show us that Sanskrit is a remarkably well preserved dialect of Old Indo-Aryan.
As hindiurdu has said, the retention of pre-Vedic forms in Dardic (and the existence of the Dardic family all together) gives support to the idea of Old Indo-Aryan dialects. The dialect we call "Sanskrit" seems to be the one the form in which Indo-Aryan spread north of Vindhyas; another, unrecorded dialect survived up in the northwestern mountains.

The Dardic languages Kalasha and Khowar ('Chitrali') are phonologically much more conservative than Mainland Indo-Aryan languages. They can give us some idea of how accurate our Vedic transcriptions are. Some examples:

Khowar: _a__ś__ru_ ('tear', cf. S. _aśru_), _gri__ṣ__p_ ('summer', cf. S. _grīṣma_), _hast_ ('hand', cf. S. _hasta_)
Kalasha: _istriža _('woman', cf. S. _strī _), _aṣṭ_ ('eight', cf. S._ aṣṭā_), _mutra_ ('urine', cf. S. _mūtra_)


If you want to give Classic Sanskrit the label of "artificial", go ahead, though it is no more artificial than Classic Latin. But it seems our transcriptions of spoken Sanskrit are rather accurate (I am sure there are mistakes of course).



> This even claims that Sanskrit could have been developed out of the Prakrits and other extant languages.



This claim seems doubtful to me; again, the retention of Pan-Indo-European suppletive forms, the many cognates, the existence of the Dardic languages etc. do not seem to support that Sanskrit arose from "Prakrits", unless by Prakrit you mean 'Old Indo-Aryan dialects/languages'.

Nevertheless, I will read your source and compare it with other sources I can find.


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## Qureshpor

greatbear said:


> It was clearly answered by me and member hindiurdu in response to your questions how certain Hindi words are pronounced: to take, another example, pronouncing "anant" as "ananta" is indeed pretentious in Hindi (and not in Sanskrit). Just as "galatii" is pretentious in Urdu and Hindi.



Just for the record. Whether "galatii" is pretentious in Hindi or not, in Urdu "galatii" is wrong and "Ghalatii" is correct. Nothing pretentious about it whatsoever, as has already been pointed out.


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## Qureshpor

hindiurdu said:


> I don't know of any good and readable works on this, but it seems like Sanskrit had many dialects and was constantly evolving until maybe 200BC-200AD. After that it seems to have become liturgical and I would consider that to be 'dead', much as Latin or Avestan or Classical (Quranic) Arabic are. I guess we can get into all sorts of arguments about defining 'dead' so this is strictly my personal view. Of course, all these live on for those to whom they speak as religiously important things. All we need to see are the Catholic infights about Latin vs English mass.



The difference here is that an educated Arab (who would use his own dialect of Arabic for day to day situations and Standard Arabic for higher registers or to use it as a bridge between two dialects) can understand the Classical Arabic of the Qur'an. I asked a taxi driver in Cairo who happened to be listening to a recitation of the Qur'an if he could understood what was being recited and the reply was a most emphatic yes! I can't imagine a taxi driver in any of the Indian cities understanding lines from the play "Shakuntala", for example, unless he/she had studied Sanskrit. So, in this sense  Classical Arabic and Classical Sanskrit comparison is not correct.


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## souminwé

QURESHPOR said:


> The difference here is that an educated Arab (who would use his own dialect of Arabic for day to day situations and Standard Arabic for higher registers or to use it as a bridge between two dialects) can understand the Classical Arabic of the Qur'an. I asked a taxi driver in Cairo who happened to be listening to a recitation of the Qur'an if he could understood what was being recited and the reply was a most emphatic yes! I can't imagine a taxi driver in any of the Indian cities understanding lines from the play "Shakuntala", for example, unless he/she had studied Sanskrit. So, in this sense  Classical Arabic and Classical Sanskrit comparison is not correct.



Well there's two things here:
1) The form of Arabic recorded in the Qur'an is from about 500 years after Christ, I believe. Much time has not passed since then; most of the highly innovative Arabic dialects occur outside the Arabian Penninsula. Sanskrit, in contrast, was recorded much earlier. Of course, no language is older than the other, it is simply the form that has been passed down to us. Vernaculars in India are much further removed from Sanskrit than Arabic vernaculars are from Qur'anic Arabic.

2) I suppose if we created a diglossic situation where Sanskrit was used for all official purposes and the vernaculars for everything else, we'd have the same situation in India.


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## Qureshpor

souminwé said:


> Well there's two things here:
> 1) The form of Arabic recorded in the Qur'an is from about 500 years after Christ, I believe. Much time has not passed since then; most of the highly innovative Arabic dialects occur outside the Arabian Penninsula. Sanskrit, in contrast, was recorded much earlier. Of course, no language is older than the other, it is simply the form that has been passed down to us. Vernaculars in India are much further removed from Sanskrit than Arabic vernaculars are from Qur'anic Arabic.



This is the point I had in mind. On top of this, if one learns Modern Standard Arabic, one is almost there as far as Qur'anic Arabic is concerned and Standard Arabic is what is taught in schools and it is the language of media. So, once again, Sanskrit's comparison with Classical Arabic was not relevant. We all know the antiquity of Sanskrit. It is in fact so old that even the dinosaurs spoke Sanskrit!


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## souminwé

My apologies QURESHPOR. I responded to what everyone else in the thread was arguing about instead of what you originally asked. I just read your article by Shyam Rao. He seems to be attacking common misconceptions about Sanskrit in India. He doesn't really seem to have any linguistically founded knowledge. Some of his childish claims:

1)_Slow Speed of Writing - Writing in Dev Nagari is much slower compared to other scripts. Slow Speed of Reading - Reading text in Devanagari takes much longer compared to other scripts. Large Number of Alphabets - Devanagari has more than 500 alphabets; hence printing in Devanagari is highly expensive.


_2)_Phonology The phonology (sound system) of Sanskrit is also highly compiicated. The ancient barbaric Indo-Aryans had, besides warfare, little else to do. Their pandits, living on a system of free subsidy, spent time devising new sounds and a more and more complicated language & script. Thus there are 4 different types of `n', 4 types of `sh' and various types of `s'. __Minor changes in the pronounciation of these sounds completely changes the meaning of words, leading to much confusion. Because of its extremely complicated grammar and cumbersome phonology it is virtually certain that Sanskrit was ever a widely spoken language, current among the general populace. It was only restricted to the fanatic Brahmins, who still clandestinely employ it in their homes_

He seems to think Sanskrit phonology is so complicated that there is no way that it was ever spoken. Nevermind the Dardic languages, nevermind the complex phonology of Slavic languages or even Pashto - Sanskrit is too hard and too different from Hindi for Shyam Rao to ever have been real!

Here he shows how he does not understand Sanskrit lexical formation processes:

3)_There are frequently more than a dozen names for one and the same object, rendering Sanskrit utter confustion counfounded. As an example, consider the following two Sanskrit words, each having more than 10 meanings -
bhag (16) portion, part, share, fragment, fortune, wealth fraction, destiny, degree, one division, wish, luck, happiness, sun, moon, vagina_


_
_4)_Moreover, Sanskrit possesses a highly complex system of inflection which has been discarded all over the world. English, Mughali (Urdu) & Hindustani have all discarded the ancient inflected systems, as have virtually all the vernaculars of India. A complex grammar is never an indicator of the richness of a language, rather a cumbersome grammar indicates a less evolved state_

Not sure if you read the whole thing QP, but he sounds kind of insane.

tonyspeed's link, on the otherhand, seems much more insightful as to when Sanskrit seems to have died. Unlike I had been misled to believe, Panini seems to have been alive around the advent of script in India, probably writing in the Aramaic script and not using human "notepads". I do find it odd that the source provided by tonyspeed claims that Panini's language was similar to the Vedic one it described, yet at the same time mentions how Panini was "definitely writing after Buddha" - which means the vernacular would indeed have been the rather un-Veda-like Prakrits. 

EDIT: It seems that Pali flourished either during  Panini's life, but in the East (Magadh). The language around Gandhara, Panini's homeland, remained closer to Classical Sanskrit for longer (as evidenced by Dardic languages). 
All this talk about Vedic homelands and Dardic peoples makes me really want to visit Pakistan : P


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## hindiurdu

QURESHPOR said:


> This is the point I had in mind. On top of this, if one learns Modern Standard Arabic, one is almost there as far as Qur'anic Arabic is concerned and Standard Arabic is what is taught in schools and it is the language of media. So, once again, Sanskrit's comparison with Classical Arabic was not relevant. We all know the antiquity of Sanskrit. It is in fact so old that even the dinosaurs spoke Sanskrit!



Well, do people natively speak Quranic Arabic to each other? Or are there pop songs in it? If not, it is basically liturgical and essentially 'dead'. Plenty of people understand Latin or Sanskrit. There are broadcasts in these languages. Books are published in them too. But they are not living in the sense that no one (or an exceptionally tiny minority) is born into a family that speaks them as their primary language. I understand your point about the proximity of QA to Modern Arabic vis-a-vis the proximity of Sanskrit to HU or Latin to Italian. That's irrelevant to the language being dead or alive though. Let's say all native speakers of Awadhi disappeared tomorrow. Plenty of HU speakers would still understand Awadhi but that language would still be 'dead'. It wouldn't matter that, say, the Ramcharitmanas was in it. Actually, afaik the Old Awadhi of the RCM is 'dead' though people still understand it without any exceptional training.


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## hindiurdu

souminwé said:


> There seems to be some confusion as to when what died. When Panini was writing his grammar, the language was not terribly different from Vedic Sanskrit. A lot of what Panini spends time on is discussing the differences between the spoken language of the time and the language of the Vedas. I wouldn't go so far as to call his language a "Prakrit" - more so a dialect of Vedic Sanskrit, on its way to becoming the classic language.



Classical Sanskrit does seem like an artificial construct to me. It was purified away from Vedic. Those tendencies are easy to understand. It stems from trying to make something conform to some idealized state that is held in high regard. We can see those impulses right here on this board too. Vedic had lects and irregularities and Panini (interesting: native of the Khyber-Paktunkhwa region) 'fixed' them by laying down thousands of rules on what was acceptable and non-acceptable. If he were on this board, he'd be saying something like 'I refuse to accept corruption in language, a ghalati-e-aam is still a ghalati'.  I wouldn't agree with him but hey, he's a hero to many people.

I suppose we could also say that the name Sanskrit was first used only for this constructed language and retroactively applied to the preceding languages (was that the case? i don't know). The name itself saṃ(s) (cognate of 'same' in English and 'ham' in Persian - in this situation meaning 'harmonized'/'together') and krit (cognate of 'create') seems to imply a crafted language. I suppose the *purified* Hindi or Urdu championed by many people are similar artificial languages too. That doesn't make Hindi/Urdu artificial though and in that sense neither was Sanskrit.


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## greatbear

hindiurdu said:


> I suppose we could also say that the name Sanskrit was first used only for this constructed language and retroactively applied to the preceding languages (was that the case? i don't know). The name itself saṃ(s) (cognate of 'same' in English and 'ham' in Persian - in this situation meaning 'harmonized'/'together') and krit (cognate of 'create') seems to imply a crafted language. I suppose the *purified* Hindi or Urdu championed by many people are similar artificial languages too. That doesn't make Hindi/Urdu artificial though and in that sense neither was Sanskrit.



I agree with you; the "purified" or imaginary "pure" forms of any language are the artificial forms to me. Of course, there are some who want the status quo to be retained and there are others for whom any evolution sounds horrible: more importantly, they simply ignore what language the actual language users are using, but go along some fictional lines they've drawn.


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## Qureshpor

hindiurdu said:


> Well, do people natively speak Quranic Arabic to each other? Or are there pop songs in it? If not, it is basically liturgical and essentially 'dead'. Plenty of people understand Latin or Sanskrit. There are broadcasts in these languages. Books are published in them too. But they are not living in the sense that no one (or an exceptionally tiny minority) is born into a family that speaks them as their primary language. I understand your point about the proximity of QA to Modern Arabic vis-a-vis the proximity of Sanskrit to HU or Latin to Italian. That's irrelevant to the language being dead or alive though. Let's say all native speakers of Awadhi disappeared tomorrow. Plenty of HU speakers would still understand Awadhi but that language would still be 'dead'. It wouldn't matter that, say, the Ramcharitmanas was in it. Actually, afaik the Old Awadhi of the RCM is 'dead' though people still understand it without any exceptional training.



I am glad you have followed my line of thinking. For the rest I shall not waste my time.


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## Qureshpor

souminwé said:


> As for the claim of "Sanskrit being completely aritifical", I believe this misconception comes from the fact that Sanskrit wasn't written down until about a thousand years after its death - indeed, the first example we have of writing in India is in Prakrit, not Sanskrit. I believe the bigger question is, how accurate is the transcription in the Vedas, our main records of once spoken Sanskrit.



Are you saying that this polished and literary Sanskrit from its hay day to a period extending a thousand years after its death, was never a written language? Perhaps I have misunderstood you but this sounds incredible. How were the compilers of Sanskrit literature, in all the fields, able to assemble a large body of works? Was it all transmitted down by "human notepads"?


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## Qureshpor

souminwé said:


> Panini's grammar was composed before the advent of writing in India. Though this seems like a grand feat, if it weren't true that would mean that writing was present in the sub-continent much earlier than we have evidence for.
> 
> For now, it seems in line with Vedic traditions of orally preserving knowledge, strictly focusing on accurately reciting each syllable, using disciples as living 'notepads'. Do also keep in mind that the majority of early Indian philosophers were linguists; it seems the position of language in society was quite high.



Just when I thought the above was "gospel truth"...(  )



souminwé said:


> tonyspeed's link, on the otherhand, seems much more insightful as to when Sanskrit seems to have died. Unlike I had been misled to believe, Panini seems to have been alive around the advent of script in India, probably writing in the Aramaic script and not using human "notepads". I do find it odd that the source provided by tonyspeed claims that Panini's language was similar to the Vedic one it described, yet at the same time mentions how Panini was "definitely writing after Buddha" - which means the vernacular would indeed have been the rather un-Veda-like Prakrits.



...you come up with Panini possibly writing his grammar in Aramaic! How did/could this come about? What about other Sanskrit writers. I am somewhat confused to say the least! On the one hand Sanskrit was n't written down until a thousand years *after *its death and on the other Panini could have written his grammar in Aramaic!


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## hindiurdu

QURESHPOR said:


> On the one hand Sanskrit was n't written down until a thousand years *after *its death and on the other Panini could have written his grammar in Aramaic!



I think he is saying that he may have been mistaken about his previous belief that writing was not available in Panini's region during Panini's time. Please also remember that Devnagri, Brahmi, and all other Indian scripts are believed to have derived from Aramaic. It is the parent script for all Indic scripts (as well as for Perso-Arabic). It makes sense that the earliest Sanskrit writings would have been in Aramaic, whether or not those exist or were destroyed.


Anyway, focusing on the main point: It is true that the Vedas (or the Avesta or other religious texts) were ritualistically memorized and transmitted across generations. Aramaic is entirely possible too (though I don't know if it is attested for Panini and Kharoshti is more likely). Ashok's edicts in Panini's area were in Aramaic, Greek and Kharoshti. Part of the problem is determining when Panini lived. Vedic was certainly still spoken in some form because he criticized it and tried to standardize the dialects. Proto-Indo-Aryan had already splintered because Dardic and Vedic Sanskrit were already competing for influence. He also referred to Greeks (Yavans/Ionians), i.e. he was aware of their existence. Using all these facts it is very likely that writing was around when Panini was and the likely dominant script was Kharoshti in which, of course, Sanskrit was written extensively in Northwest India (NW subcontinent). Kharoshti was also exported north and northeast, partly with Buddhism, and is found used to write East Iranian languages like Soghdian also (infact evidence of worship of Vedic deities by Soghdians has been found too). All this takes time and points to writing already existing around Panini's time. AFAIK no one argues that Panini preceded Buddha, do they?


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## hindiurdu

QURESHPOR said:


> I am glad you have followed my line of thinking. For the rest I shall not waste my time.



Thank you for conceding the rest (kidding


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## hindiurdu

souminwé said:


> For now, it seems in line with Vedic traditions of orally preserving knowledge, strictly focusing on accurately reciting each syllable, using disciples as living 'notepads'. Do also keep in mind that the majority of early Indian philosophers were linguists; it seems the position of language in society was quite high.



I feel great regret when I think of how many such traditions have existed worldwide where people have memorized things and passed them strictly from generation to generation only to have them die out before writing was available. I saw this 'Story of India' BBC thing which showed precise orally memorized passages that have been carried on in South India. They do not correspond to any known language but are faithfully reproduced generation after generation. He was speculating that they may be preserved fragments of the first human arrivals into India via the coastal route (i.e. ~50k years ago). He was cross-linking it with DNA which indicated that some local families had some of the most ancient human DNA strains in existence. As an aside, I was inspired by this to have my own DNA tested (turned out to be R1a).

Update: I found it! http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2359467386775757720 start at 4:30. It's even more fascinating than I remembered. There is resemblance to bird sounds which is not writable. This does not exist in Northern India at all. Very local to Kerala-Tamil Nadu.


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## bSky

It's amazing how a hypothetical ancestor "proto-indo-european" is talked about as real language, while in same breath sanskrit ( a still living/pulsing entity) is suggested to be invented.


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