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Something glossed over by articles like this that discuss "Sanskrit" as a singular language is that prior to Panini, the spoken Vedic Sanskrit language was far
by danans 4y ago
Something glossed over by articles like this that discuss "Sanskrit" as a singular language is that prior to Panini, the spoken Vedic Sanskrit language was far less codified and rules-based, and replete with swashbuckling irregular grammatical and phonetic forms that were in free variation, and often used for rhythmic or poetic effect, just as in living spoken languages today. It was a campfire language, not a scholarly one, and far more complex and disorderly than what would follow it.
Then Panini came along and analyzed the language in a way never before done (perhaps in any language), and in doing so also forced the language into a rigid system of derivational rules from which it never emerged again. In the process, a great number of irregular forms and usages were expunged from the language, and the subjunctive and injunctive moods [1] ceased to exist entirely. Many words that once had a variety of pronunciations got standardized to "thematic" forms. Thus the language came to be known as "samskrta", which literally means "well-done" or "perfected".
He probably did this because he was trying to preserve the language of the scriptures for scholars because the common-speak that people used in their day to day lives even in 500BC was already changing rapidly enough for him to notice. By constraining the language he ended up preserving it in a way that it could be studied methodically for thousands of years, albeit in a grammatically sterilized form compared to what it was.
1. https://web.stanford.edu/~kiparsky/Papers/injunctive.article.pdf https://web.stanford.edu/~kiparsky/Papers/injunctive.article...
- spaceman_2020 4y agoWas this the reason for slow death of Sanskrit as a living language? Too codified and "pure"? Hindi thrives precisely because its very happy to borrow words from anywhere and everywhere.
- danans 4y ago> Was this the reason for slow death of Sanskrit as a living language? To use a software analogy, liturgical languages like Classical Sanskrit (and Latin and Greek, etc) got "forked" from their messy spoken source language and then "refactored". I don't think that their formalization necessarily caused their death as spoken languages any more than the natural processes by which spoken languages change over time. Some of those processes are internal to the language, and some are caused by the influence of other languages in the region (i.e. Dravidian for Sanskrit, Etruscan for Latin, and Minoan for Greek). > Too codified and "pure"? I'd say that since learning it came to require studying it (since it stopped being learned "naturally" as a primary language), it just wasn't accessible to most people. Broad accessibility was after all a non-goal of the codified language. And while it was codified grammatically, it was certainly not "pure" from that point on. Even after its grammatical codification, Classical Sanskrit admitted a lot of lexical influence from other languages, which allowed it to become the lingua franca of scholarship, statecraft, and literature (not just religion as we tend to think today) across the Subcontinent. In that sense, it was very much "alive", but maybe wasn't used for things like buying milk at the market.
- rep_movsd 4y agoHindi is relatively new - Its changed a lot since teh start. I doubt that most Hindi speakers today would easily grok the dialect spoken during the Delhi Sultanate Sanskrit remains understandable after 4000 years
- pessimizer 4y agoWasn't Hindi's origin an intentional purge of Persian influences from Urdu?
- danans 4y agoThe modern official languages Hindi and Urdu are both the result of the politically motivated purging of their respectively "undesired" elements from the language Sprachbund known as Hindustani.