I.

Introduction

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.