Vedic Sanskrit

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Vedic Sanskrit is the language of the Vedas, the earliest sacred texts of India. The earliest of the Vedas, the Rigveda, was composed in the 2nd millennium BC, and use of the Vedic dialect was continued for the composition of religious texts until roughly 500 BC, when the later Classical Sanskrit language began to emerge.

The Vedic form of Sanskrit is a close descendant of Proto-Indo-Iranian, and still comparatively similar (being removed by maybe 1500 years) to the Proto-Indo-European language, the reconstructed root of all later Indo-European languages. Vedic Sanskrit is the oldest attested language of the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European family. It is very closely related to Avestan, the language of Zoroastrianism. The genetic relationship of Sanskrit to modern European languages and classical Greek and Latin can be seen in cognates like Eng. mother /Skt. मतृ matṛ or Eng. father /Skt. िपतृ pitṛ. Other interesting links are to be found between Sanskritic roots and Persian (the language of modern-day Iran), present in such a striking example as the generic term for 'land' which in Sanskrit is sthaan and in Persian staan (cognate with modern English to stand).

Contents 1 History 2 Grammar 3 See also 3.1 References

History

Five chronologically distinct strata can be identified within the Vedic language.

1. Rigvedic. The Rigveda is by far the most archaic of the Vedic texts preserved, and it retains many common Indo-Iranian elements, both in language and in content, that are not present in any other Vedic texts. Its creation must have taken place over several centuries, and apart from the youngest books (1 and 10), it must have been essentially complete by 1500 BC.
2. Mantra language. This period includes both the mantra and prose language of the Atharvaveda (Paippalada and Shaunakiya), the Rigveda Khilani, the Samaveda Samhita (containing some 75 mantras not in the Rigveda), and the mantras of the Yajurveda. These texts are largely derived from the Rigveda, but have undergone certain changes, both by linguistic change and by reinterpretation. Conspicuous changes include change of vishva "all" by sarva, and the spread of the kuru- verbal stem (for Rigvedic krno-). This period corresponds to the early Iron Age in north-western India (iron is first mentioned in the Atharvaveda), and to the kingdom of the Kurus, dating from ca. the 12th century BC.
3. Samhita prose. This period marks the beginning collection and codification of a Vedic canon. An important linguistic change is the complete loss of the injunctive nd of the modi of the aorist. The commentary part of the Yajurveda (MS, KS) belongs to this period.
4. Brahmana prose. The Brahmanas proper of the four Vedas belong to this period, as well as the oldest of the Upanishads (BAU, ChU, JUB).
5. Sutra language. This is the last stratum of vedic Sanskrit leading up to 500 BC, comprising the bulk of the Shrauta and Grhya Sutras, and some Upanishads (E.g. KathU, MaitrU. Younger Upanishads are post-Vedic).

Around 500 BC cultural, political and linguistic factors all contribute to the end of the Vedic period. The codification of Vedic ritual reached its peak, and counter movements such as the Vedanta and early Buddhism, using the vernacular Pali dialect rather than Sanskrit for their texts, emerged. Darius I of Persia invaded the Indus valley and the political power in India shifted further East, to the Ganges.

Grammar

Vedic Sanskrit had a labial fricative [f], called upadhmaniya, and a velar fricative [x], called jihvamuliya. These are both allophones to visarga: upadhmaniya occurs before p and ph, jihvamuliya before k and kh. Vedic also had a separate symbol ळ for retroflex l, an intervocalic allophone of ḍ, transliterated as ḷ or ḷh. In order to disambiguate vocalic l from retroflex l, vocalic l is sometimes transliterated with a ring below the letter, l̥; when this is done, vocalic r is also represented with a ring, r̥, for consistency.

Vedic Sanskrit is a pitch accent language. Since a small number of words in the late pronunciation of Vedic carry the so called independent svarita on a short vowel one can argue that late Vedic was marginally a tonal language. Note however that in the metrically restored versions of the Rig Veda almost all of the syllables carrying an independent svarita must revert to a sequence of two syllables the first of which carries an anusvāra and the second a (so called) dependent svarita. Early Vedic was thus definitely not a tone language but a pitch accent language.

Vedic had a subjunctive, absent in Panini's grammar and generially believed to have disappeared by then at least in common sentence constructions.

Long-i stems differentiate the Devi inflection and the Vrkis inflection, a difference lost in Classical Sanskrit.

See also

• Vedic civilization

References

• Adapted from the Wikipedia article, "Vedic_Sanskrit" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vedic_Sanskrit, used under the GNU Free Documentation License