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Vedic Sanskrit is the language of the Vedas, which are the earliest sacred texts of India,. The Vedas were first passed down orally and therefore have no known date. The earliest of the Vedas, the Rigveda, is said to have been 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. However it must be noted that many scholars throughout India and parts of Europe highly dispute these two dates and feel that the Vedas are much older than given credit for.
The Vedic form of Sanskrit is an early descendant of Proto-Indo-Iranian (spoken around 2000 BC), and still comparatively similar (being removed by maybe 1500 years) to the Proto-Indo-European language. Vedic Sanskrit is the oldest attested language of the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European family. It is also still closely related to Avestan, the oldest preserved Iranian language.
History
Five chronologically distinct strata can be identified within the Vedic language.
- 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.
- 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 ' "all" to ', and the spread of ' (for Rigvedic ') as the present tense form of the verb "make, do". 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 about the 12th century BC.
- Samhita prose (roughly 1100 BC to 800 BC). This period marks the beginning collection and codification of a Vedic canon. An important linguistic change is the complete loss of the injunctive and of the modi of the aorist. The commentary part of the Black Yajurveda (MS, KS) belongs to this period.
- Brahmana prose (roughly 900 BC to 600 BC). The Brahmanas proper of the four Vedas belong to this period, as well as the oldest of the Upanishads (BAU, ChU, JUB).
- 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 emerged, using the vernacular Pali, a Prakrit dialect, rather than Sanskrit for their texts. Darius I of Persia invaded the Indus valley and the political center of the Indo-Aryan kingdoms shifted further East, to the Gangetic plain. Around this time (5th century BC), Panini fixes the grammar of Classical Sanskrit.
Phonology
- This section treats the differences of Vedic Sanskrit compared to Classical Sanskrit - see there for a basic account.
Sound changes between Proto-Indo-Iranian and Vedic Sanskrit include loss of the voiced sibilant z.
Vedic Sanskrit had a bilabial fricative similar to English , called ', and a velar fricative , called '. These are both allophones to visarga: upadhmaniya occurs before ' and ', jihvamuliya before ' and '. Vedic also had a separate symbol for retroflex l, an intervocalic allophone of ', transliterated as ' or '. In order to disambiguate vocalic l from retroflex l, vocalic l is sometimes transliterated with a ring below the letter, '; when this is done, vocalic r is also represented with a ring, , for consistency.
Vedic Sanskrit had a pitch accent. 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 udātta and the second a (so called) dependent svarita. Early Vedic was thus definitely not a tone language but a pitch accent language. See Vedic accent.
Pitch accent was not restricted to Vedic: early Sanskrit grammarian Panini gives (1) accent rules for the spoken language of his (post-Vedic) time and (2) the differences of Vedic accent. We have, however, no extant post-Vedic text with accents.
The pluti vowels (trimoraic vowels) were on the verge of becoming phonological during middle Vedic, but disappeared again.
Grammar
Vedic had a subjunctive absent in Panini's grammar and generally 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
References
- Michael Witzel, Tracing the Vedic dialects in Dialectes dans les litteratures Indo-Aryennes ed. Caillat, Paris, 1989, 97–265.
Sanskrit | Linguistic history of India
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"Vedic Sanskrit"