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Sanskrit ( , for short ) is a classical language of India, and a liturgical language of Hinduism and other Indian religions. It is one of the recognized classical languages of India and one of the 22 scheduled languages of India. It belongs to the historical Indo-Aryan sub-branch of the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European family of languages.
Its position in the cultures of South and Southeast Asia is akin to that of Latin and Greek in Europe and it has significantly influenced most modern languages of India.
The pre-Classical form of Sanskrit is known as Vedic Sanskrit, with the language of the Rigveda being the oldest and most archaic stage preserved, its oldest core dating back to as early as 1500 BCE, qualifying Rigvedic Sanskrit as the oldest attestation of any Indo-Iranian language, next to the Mitanni records, and one of the earliest attested members of the Indo-European language family.
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Sanskrit ( , for short ) is a classical language of India, and a liturgical language of Hinduism and other Indian religions. It is one of the recognized classical languages of India and one of the 22 scheduled languages of India. It belongs to the historical Indo-Aryan sub-branch of the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European family of languages.
Its position in the cultures of South and Southeast Asia is akin to that of Latin and Greek in Europe and it has significantly influenced most modern languages of India.
The pre-Classical form of Sanskrit is known as Vedic Sanskrit, with the language of the Rigveda being the oldest and most archaic stage preserved, its oldest core dating back to as early as 1500 BCE, qualifying Rigvedic Sanskrit as the oldest attestation of any Indo-Iranian language, next to the Mitanni records, and one of the earliest attested members of the Indo-European language family. Classical Sanskrit is the standard register as laid out in the grammar of , around the 4th century BCE.
The corpus of Sanskrit literature encompasses a rich tradition of poetry and drama as well as technical scientific, philosophical and generally Hindu religious texts, though many central texts of Buddhism and Jainism have also been composed in Sanskrit. Today, Sanskrit continues to be widely used as a ceremonial language in Hindu religious rituals in the forms of hymns and mantras. Spoken Sanskrit is still in use in a few traditional institutions in India, and there are some attempts at revival.
EtymologyThe verbal adjective may be translated as "put together, well or completely formed, refined, highly elaborated". It is derived from the root "to put together, compose, arrange, prepare", where "together" (as English same) and "do, make".
The language referred to as "the cultured language" has by definition always been a "high" language, used for religious and learned discourse and contrasted with the languages spoken by the people, "natural, artless, normal, ordinary". It is also called meaning "divine language".
History
Sanskrit is a member of the Indo-Iranian sub-family of the Indo-European family of languages. It is one of the oldest attested Indo-European languages, dating back to approximately 1500 BCE. It has the characteristic Satem sound changes associated with other members of Indo-Iranian.
The oldest surviving Sanskrit grammar is 's ("Eight-Chapter Grammar") dating to circa the 4th century BCE. It is essentially a prescriptive grammar, i.e., an authority that defines (rather than describes) correct Sanskrit, although it contains descriptive parts, mostly to account for some Vedic forms that had already passed out of use in 's time.
The term "Sanskrit" was not thought of as a specific language set apart from other languages, but rather as a particularly refined or perfected manner of speaking. Knowledge of Sanskrit was a marker of social class and educational attainment in ancient India and the language was taught mainly to members of the higher castes, through close analysis of Sanskrit grammarians such as . Sanskrit, as the learned language of Ancient India, thus existed alongside the Prakrits (vernaculars), which evolved into the Middle Indic dialects, and eventually into the contemporary modern Indo-Aryan languages.
Vedic SanskritSanskrit, as defined by , had evolved out of the earlier "Vedic" form. Beginning of Vedic Sanskrit can be traced as early as around 1500 BCE (accepted date of Rig-Veda). Scholars often distinguish Vedic Sanskrit and Classical or "Paninian" Sanskrit as separate 'dialects'. Though they are quite similar, they differ in a number of essential points of phonology, vocabulary, and grammar and syntax. Vedic Sanskrit is the language of the Vedas, a large collection of hymns, incantations, theological discussions, and religio-philosophical discussions which are the earliest religious texts of the Hindu religion. Modern linguists consider the metrical hymns of the Rigveda Samhita to be the earliest, composed by many authors over centuries of oral tradition. The end of the Vedic period is marked by the composition of the Upanishads, which form the concluding part of the Vedic corpus in the traditional compilations. The current hypothesis holds that the Vedic form of Sanskrit survived until the middle of the first millennium BCE. It is around this time that Sanskrit began the transition from a first language to a second language of religion and learning, marking the beginning of the Classical period.
Classical SanskritFor nearly two thousand years, a cultural order existed that exerted influence across South Asia, Inner Asia, Southeast Asia, and to a certain extent, East Asia. A significant form of post-Vedic Sanskrit is found in the Sanskrit of the Hindu Epics—the Ramayana and Mahabharata. The deviations from in the epics are generally considered to be on account of interference from Prakrits, or "innovations" and not because they are pre-Paninean. Traditional Sanskrit scholars call such deviations aarsha (????), or "of the rishis", the traditional title for the ancient authors. In some contexts there are also more "prakritisms" (borrowings from common speech) than in Classical Sanskrit proper. Finally, there is also a language called "Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit" by scholars, which starts out from Buddhist prakrit texts and gradually evolved to various forms of Sanskrit, some more prakritized than the others, According to , there were four principal dialects of classical Sanskrit, viz., (Northwestern, also called Northern or Western), (lit., middle country), (Eastern) and (Southern, arose in the Classical period). The predecessors of the first three are even attested in Vedic , of which the first one was regarded as the purest ().
European ScholarshipEuropean scholarship in Sanskrit, begun by Heinrich Roth (1620–1668) and Johann Ernst Hanxleden (1681–1731), is regarded as responsible for the discovery of the Indo-European language family by Sir William Jones, and played an important role in the development of Western linguistics.
Sir William Jones, speaking to the Asiatic Society in Calcutta (now Kolkata) on February 2, 1786, said:
- The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong, indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.
PhonologyClassical Sanskrit distinguishes about 36 phonemes. There is, however, some allophony and the writing systems used for Sanskrit generally indicate this, thus distinguishing 48 sounds.
The sounds are traditionally listed in the order vowels (Ach), diphthongs (Hal), anusvara and visarga, plosives (Sparsa) and nasals (starting in the back of the mouth and moving forward), and finally the liquids and fricatives, written in IAST as follows (see the tables below for details):
- ;
- ;
An alternate traditional ordering is that of the Shiva Sutra of .
VowelsThe vowels of Classical Sanskrit with their word-initial Devanagari symbol, diacritical mark with the consonant (), pronunciation (of the vowel alone and of /p/+vowel) in IPA, equivalent in IAST and ITRANS and (approximate) equivalents in English are listed below:
The long vowels are pronounced twice as long as their short counterparts. Also, there exists a third, extra-long length for most vowels, called pluti, which is used in various cases, but particularly in the vocative. The pluti is not accepted by all grammarians.
The vowels and continue as allophonic variants of Proto-Indo-Iranian , and are categorized as diphthongs by Sanskrit grammarians even though they are realized phonetically as simple long vowels. (See above).
Additional points:
- There are some additional signs traditionally listed in tables of the Devanagari script:
- The diacritic called anusvara,. It is used both to indicate the nasalization of the vowel in the syllable ( and to represent the sound of a syllabic or ; e.g. .
- The diacritic called visarga, represents ; e.g. .
- The diacritic called chandrabindu, not traditionally included in Devanagari charts for Sanskrit, is used interchangeably with the anusvara to indicate nasalization of the vowel, primarily in Vedic notation; e.g. .
- If a lone consonant needs to be written without any following vowel, it is given a halanta/virama diacritic below ().
- The vowel in Sanskrit is realized as being more central and less back than the closest English approximation, which is . But the grammarians have classified it as a back vowel..
- The ancient Sanskrit grammarians classified the vowel system as velars, retroflexes, palatals and plosives rather than as back, central and front vowels. Hence and are classified respectively as palato-velar (a+i) and labio-velar (a+u) vowels respectively. But the grammarians have classified them as diphthongs and in prosody, each is given two matras. This does not necessarily mean that they are proper diphthongs, but neither excludes the possibility that they could have been proper diphthongs at a very ancient stage (see above). These vowels are pronounced as long and respectively by learned Sanskrit Brahmans and priests of today. Other than the "four" diphthongs, Sanskrit usually disallows any other diphthong—vowels in succession, where they occur, are converted to semivowels according to sandhi rules.
- In the Devanagari script used for Sanskrit, whenever a consonant in a word-ending position is without any virama (freely standing in the orthography: as opposed to ), the neutral vowel schwa () is automatically associated with it—this is of course true for the consonant to be in any position in the word. Word-ending schwa is always short. But the IAST a appended to the end of masculine noun words rather confuses the foreigners to pronounce it as —this makes the masculine Sanskrit words sound like feminine! e.g., shiva must be pronounced as and not as . argues that in Vedic Sanskrit, ? indicated short , and became centralized and raised in the era of the Prakrits.
ConsonantsIAST and Devanagari notations are given, with approximate IPA values in square brackets.
The table below shows the traditional listing of the Sanskrit consonants with the (nearest) equivalents in English (as pronounced in General American and Received Pronunciation) and Spanish. Each consonant shown below is deemed to be followed by the neutral vowel schwa (), and is named in the table as such.
Plosives – Sprshta | Unaspirated
Voiceless
Alpaprana Svasa | Aspirated
Voiceless
Mahaprana Svasa | Unaspirated
Voiced
Alpaprana Nada | Aspirated
Voiced
Mahaprana Nada | Nasal
Anunasika Nada |
|---|
Velar
Kantya | ; English: skip | ; English: cat | ; English: game | ; somewhat similar to English: doghouse | ; English: ring | Palatal
Talavya | ; English: exchange | ; English: church | ; ˜English: jam | ; somewhat similar to English: hedgehog | ; English: bench | Retroflex
Murdhanya | ; No English equivalent | ; No English equivalent | ; No English equivalent | ; No English equivalent | ; No English equivalent | Apico-Dental
Dantya | ; Spanish: tomate | ; Aspirated | ; Spanish: donde | ; Aspirated | ; English: name | Labial
Oshtya | ; English: spin | ; English: pit | ; English: bone | ; somewhat similar to English: clubhouse | ; English: mine |
Non-Plosives/Sonorants | Palatal
Talavya | Retroflex
Murdhanya | Dental
Dantya | Labial/
Glottal
Oshtya |
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Approximant
Antastha | ; English: you | ; English: trip | ; English: love | Phonology and SandhiThe Sanskrit vowels are as discussed in the section above. The long syllabic l () is not attested, and is only discussed by grammarians for systematic reasons. Its short counterpart occurs in a single root only, "to order, array". Long syllabic r () is also quite marginal, occurring in the genitive plural of r-stems (e.g. "mother" and "father" have gen.pl. and ). are vocalic allophones of consonantal . There are thus only 5 invariably vocalic phonemes,
- .
Visarga is an allophone of and , and anusvara , Devanagari of any nasal, both in pausa (ie, the nasalized vowel). The exact pronunciation of the three sibilants may vary, but they are distinct phonemes. An aspirated voiced sibilant was inherited by Indo-Aryan from Proto-Indo-Iranian but lost shortly before the time of the Rigveda (aspirated fricatives are exceedingly rare in any language). The retroflex consonants are somewhat marginal phonemes, often being conditioned by their phonetic environment; they do not continue a PIE series and are often ascribed by some linguists to the substratal influence of Dravidian or other substrate languages. The nasal is a conditioned allophone of ( and are distinct phonemes— 'minute', 'atomic' [nom. sg. neutr. of an adjective] is distinctive from 'after', 'along'; phonologically independent occurs only marginally, e.g. in 'directed forwards/towards' [nom. sg. masc. of an adjective]). There are thus 31 consonantal or semi-vocalic phonemes, consisting of four/five kinds of stops realized both with or without aspiration and both voiced and voiceless, three nasals, four semi-vowels or liquids, and four fricatives, written in IAST transliteration as follows:
or a total of 36 unique Sanskrit phonemes altogether.
The phonological rules to be applied when combining morphemes to a word, and when combining words to a sentence are collectively called sandhi "composition". Texts are written phonetically, with sandhi applied (except for the so-called padapaha).
PalindromeSanskrit is famous for certain specialities, one of them being the Palindrome.
As early as the 14th Century, the scholar Dyvagyna Surya Pandita wrote "Ramakrishna Viloma Kavyam," a set of poems that when read forward relate to Rama and the Ramayana, and when read in reverse relate to Krishna and the Mahabharata.
Writing system
Sanskrit was spoken in an oral society, and the oral tradition was maintained through the development of early classical Sanskrit literature. Writing was not introduced to India until after Sanskrit had evolved into the Prakrits; when it was written, the choice of writing system was influenced by the regional scripts of the scribes. As such, virtually all of the major writing systems of South Asia have been used for the production of Sanskrit manuscripts. Since the late 19th century, Devanagari has been considered as the de facto writing system for Sanskrit, quite possibly because of the European practice of printing Sanskrit texts in this script.
The earliest known inscriptions in Sanskrit date to the first century BCE. They are in the Brahmi script, which was originally used for Prakrit, not Sanskrit. It has been described as a "paradox" that the first evidence of written Sanskrit occurs centuries later than that of the Prakrit languages which are its linguistic descendants. When Sanskrit was written down, it was first used for texts of an administrative, literary or scientific nature. The sacred texts were preserved orally, and were set down in writing, "reluctantly" (according to one commentator), and at a comparatively late date.
Brahmi evolved into a multiplicity of scripts of the Brahmic family, many of which were used to write Sanskrit. Roughly contemporary with the Brahmi, the Kharosthi script was used in the northwest of the subcontinent. Later (ca. 4th to 8th centuries CE) the Gupta script, derived from Brahmi, became prevalent. From ca. the 8th century, the Sharada script evolved out of the Gupta script. The latter was displaced in its turn by Devanagari from ca. the 11/12th century, with intermediary stages such as the Siddham script. In Eastern India, the Bengali script and, later, the Oriya script, were used. In the south where Dravidian languages predominate, scripts used for Sanskrit include Kannada in Kannada and Telugu speaking regions, Telugu in Telugu and Tamil speaking regions, Malayalam and Grantha in Tamil speaking regions.
Sanskrit in modern Indian scripts. May Siva bless those who take delight in the language of the gods.
Grammar
Grammatical tradition
Sanskrit grammatical tradition (, one of the six Vedanga disciplines) began in late Vedic India and culminated in the of , which consists of 3990 sutras (ca. 5th century BCE). After a century (around 400 BCE) Katyayana composed Vartikas on Paninian sutras. Patañjali, who lived three centuries after Panini, wrote the , the "Great Commentary" on the and Vartikas. Because of these three ancient Sanskrit grammarians this grammar is called Trimuni Vyakarana. To understand the meaning of sutras Jayaditya and Vamana wrote the commentry named Kasika 600 CE. Paninian grammar is based on 14 Shiva sutras (aphorisms). Here whole Matrika is abbreviated. This abbreviation is called Pratyahara.
VerbsSanskrit has ten classes of verbs divided into in two broad groups: athematic and thematic. The thematic verbs are so called because an a, called the theme vowel, is inserted between the stem and the ending. This serves to make the thematic verbs generally more regular. Exponents used in verb conjugation include prefixes, suffixes, infixes, and reduplication. Every root has (not necessarily all distinct) zero, gua, and vddhi grades. If V is the vowel of the zero grade, the gua-grade vowel is traditionally thought of as a + V, and the vddhi-grade vowel as a + V.
The verb tenses (a very inexact application of the word, since more distinctions than simply tense are expressed) are organized into four 'systems' (as well as gerunds and infinitives, and such creatures as intensives/frequentatives, desideratives, causatives, and benedictives derived from more basic forms) based on the different stem forms (derived from verbal roots) used in conjugation. There are four tense systems:
NounsSanskrit is a highly inflected language with three grammatical genders (masculine, feminine, neuter) and three numbers (singular, plural, dual). It has eight cases: nominative, vocative, accusative, instrumental, dative, ablative, genitive, and locative.
The number of actual declensions is debatable. Panini identifies six karakas corresponding to the nominative, accusative, dative, instrumental, locative, and ablative cases . Panini defines them as follows (Ashtadhyayi, I.4.24-54):
- Apadana (lit. 'take off'): "(that which is) firm when departure (takes place)." This is the equivalent of the ablative case, which signifies a stationary object from which movement proceeds.
- Sampradana ('bestowal'): "he whom one aims at with the object". This is equivalent to the dative case, which signifies a recipient in an act of giving or similar acts.
- Karana ("instrument") "that which effects most." This is equivalent to the instrumental case.
- Adhikarana ('location'): or "substratum." This is equivalent to the locative case.
- Karman ('deed'/'object'): "what the agent seeks most to attain". This is equivalent to the accusative case.
- Karta ('agent'): "he/that which is independent in action". This is equivalent to the nominative case. (On the basis of Scharfe, 1977: 94)
Personal Pronouns and DeterminersThe first and second person pronouns are declined for the most part alike, having by analogy assimilated themselves with one another.
SyntaxBecause of Sanskrit's complex declension system the word order is free (with a strong tendency toward SOV, which was the original system in place in Vedic prose).
NumeralsThe numbers from one to ten:
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
The numbers one through four are declined. Éka is declined like a pronominal adjective, though the dual form does not occur. Dvá appears only in the dual. Trí and catúr are declined irregularly:
| Three | Four |
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| Masculine | Neuter | Feminine | Masculine | Neuter | Feminine |
|---|
| Nominative | tráyas | | tisrás | catva´ras | catva´ri | cátasras |
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| Accusative | trin | | tisrás | catúras | catva´ri | cátasras |
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| Instrumental | tribhís | | catúrbhis | |
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| Dative | tribhyás | | catúrbhyas | |
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| Ablative | tribhyás | | catúrbhyas | |
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| Genitive | | | | |
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| Locative | | | | |
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Influence
Modern-day India
Influence on vernacularsSanskrit's greatest influence, presumably, is that which it exerted on languages of India that grew from its vocabulary and grammatical base; for instance Hindi, which is a "Sanskritized register" of the Khariboli dialect. However, all modern Indo-Aryan languages as well as Munda and Dravidian languages, have borrowed many words either directly from Sanskrit (tatsama words), or indirectly via middle Indo-Aryan languages (tadbhava words). Words originating in Sanskrit are estimated to constitute roughly fifty percent of the vocabulary of modern Indo-Aryan languages, and the literary forms of (Dravidian) Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada.
Especially among élite circles in India, Sanskrit is prized as a storehouse of scripture and the language of prayers in Hinduism. Like Latin's influence on European languages and Classical Chinese's influence on East Asian languages, Sanskrit has influenced most Indian languages. While vernacular prayer is common, Sanskrit mantras are recited by millions of Hindus and most temple functions are conducted entirely in Sanskrit, often Vedic in form. Of modern day Indian languages, while Hindi and Urdu tend to be more heavily weighted with Arabic and Persian influence, Nepali, Bengali, Assamese, Konkani and Marathi still retain a largely Sanskrit and Prakrit vocabulary base. The Indian national anthem, Jana Gana Mana, is written in a literary form of Bengali (known as sadhu bhasha), Sanskritized so as to be recognizable, but still archaic to the modern ear. The national song of India Vande Mataram was originally a poem composed by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay and taken from his book called 'Anandamath', is in a similarly highly Sanskritized Bengali. Malayalam, Telugu and Kannada also combine a great deal of Sanskrit vocabulary. Sanskrit also has influence on Chinese through Buddhist Sutras. Chinese words like ?? chànà (Skt. ???? 'instantaneous period of time') were borrowed from Sanskrit.
Revival attempts The 1991 Indian census reported 49,736 fluent speakers of Sanskrit. Since the 1990s, efforts to revive spoken Sanskrit have been increasing. Many organizations like the Samskrta Bharati are conducting Speak Sanskrit workshops to popularize the language. The CBSE (Central Board of Secondary Education) in India has made Sanskrit a third language (though it is an option for the school to adopt it or not, the other choice being the state's own official language) in the schools it governs. In such schools, learning Sanskrit is an option for grades 5 to 8 (Classes V to VIII). This is true of most schools, including but not limited to Christian missionary schools, affiliated to the ICSE board too, especially in those states where the official language is Hindi. Sudharma |
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