> Sanskrit is a formalized version of the Prakrits that people spoke. Panini, and to some extent, his near-contemporaries formalized Sanskrit. It wasn't formal

> Sanskrit is a formalized version of the Prakrits that people spoke. Panini, and to some extent, his near-contemporaries formalized Sanskrit. It wasn't formalized before that. Vedic Sanskrit was never formalized. Moreover, the book you cited says, "there are many sutras in the Astadhyayi of Panini which are meaningless unless they have any reference to a living speech". > Sanskrit and Prakrits are different enough to not be dialects. From the book, "It has been said in Bharata's Natyashastra that Prakrit and Sanskrit are different branches of one and the same language. In the earliest known forms of Prakrit, there are passages which can easily be translated into Sanskrit by the application of simple phonetic rules." I agree with what you wrote about Buddha's choice of language. But my point throughout is that there has to have been a time and a place where what was then considered Sanskrit was spoken by the masses. I'd find it hard to conceive of a situation where the educated classes created a dialect/language for themselves, and only this dialect could carry the name "Sanskrit".