Sanskrit Language

Sanskrit Language (from Sanskrit samskrta, “adorned, cultivated, perfected”), the classical sacred and literary language of the Hindus of India, belonging to the Indo-Aryan (Indic) branch of the Indo-Iranian languages, a subfamily of the Indo-European languages. Since roughly the beginning of the Christian era, Sanskrit has been more or less artificially maintained as the literary language of the priestly, learned, and cultivated castes of India, and it retains this position in the 20th century. During its early centuries, and increasingly later, Sanskrit came to mean the language as “perfected” by the rules of the Indian grammarian Panini. His work forms the basis for modern Sanskrit grammars and is considered the most scientific grammar produced before the 19th century. Sanskrit is written in the Devanagari alphabet.

Sanskrit is distinguishable from the oldest preserved forms of Indian speech, in the Vedic religious scriptures, the Brahmanas, Vedas, and Upanishads. Collectively referred to as Vedic (or as Vedic Sanskrit in contrast to classical Sanskrit), these forms of speech show dialectical, stylistic, and chronological differences from one work to another. Vedic, however, like Sanskrit, was a more or less artificial “high tongue” based on popular idioms but handed down through generations of priestly singers. Vedic (fl. c. 1500 bc-c. 200 bc) and Sanskrit (classically considered to begin with Panini's grammar) are both dialects of the Old Indic speech, which also existed in many non-literary vernacular dialects. These vernaculars, over time, underwent modifications, some of which are observable in the differences between Vedic and Sanskrit. Other ancient vernaculars evolved into the Prakrits, or Middle Indic languages (the best known of which is Pali). In a loose sense, the Prakrits (fl. c. 3rd century bc- c. ad 12th century) are related to Sanskrit somewhat as the Romance languages are related to Latin.

Vedic differs from classical Sanskrit about as much as the Greek of Homer differs from classical Greek. In grammatical forms, Vedic was richer and less settled than Sanskrit, which gave up much of the early grammar without, as a rule, supplying substitutes; in nouns, for example, separate case endings for each of the eight Sanskrit cases are found only in the singular of the most common noun declension. The Vedic subjunctive was lost, and about a dozen Vedic infinitives were reduced to a single one in Sanskrit. By the Middle Ages, Sanskrit had also lost the Vedic system of pitch or tonal accent, which was still in full force in Panini's time. Notwithstanding these losses, Sanskrit is a complex language, not only highly inflected but also subject to certain alternations of vowels and context-influenced modifications of sounds. It has three genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter) and three numbers (singular, dual, and plural). Sanskrit has, on the whole, preserved the linguistic conditions of the supposed Indo-European speech better than any other Indo-European language, except possibly ancient Greek.

After the 16th century, European missionaries acquired some familiarity with the Sanskrit language and literature. The first Sanskrit grammar was published in Europe in 1790. The discovery by Western scholars of the existence of Sanskrit, and of Indian methods of teaching it, led both to the identification of the Indo-European language family and, under the stimulation of Panini's methodology, to the establishment of the science of comparative linguistics or comparative philology. Sanskrit writings profoundly influenced the study of comparative mythology and religion and that of comparative jurisprudence. See also Indian Languages; Phonetics; Sanskrit Literature.