> 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 G

> 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.