Vedic Sanskrit is an Old Indic language. It is the language of the Vedas The Vedas are a large body of texts originating in ancient India. Composed in Vedic Sanskrit, the texts constitute the oldest layer of Sanskrit literature and the oldest scriptures of Hinduism, the oldest shruti Śruti , often spelled shruti or shruthi, is a term that describes the sacred texts comprising the central canon of Hinduism and is one of the three main sources of dharma and therefore is also influential within Hindu Law. These sacred works span the entire history of Hinduism, beginning with some of the earliest known Hindu texts and ending in texts of Hinduism Hinduism is the predominant and indigenous religious tradition of the Indian subcontinent. Hinduism is often referred to as Sanātana Dharma by its adherents. Generic "types" of Hinduism that attempt to accommodate a variety of complex views span folk and Vedic Hinduism to bhakti tradition, as in Vaishnavism. Hinduism also includes yogic, compiled over the period of 2nd to mid 1st millennium BCE. It is an archaic form of Sanskrit Sanskrit , is a historical Indo-Aryan language and the primary liturgical language of Hinduism and Buddhism[note 1]. Today, it is listed as one of the 22 scheduled languages of India and is an official language of the state of Uttarakhand, an early descendant of Proto-Indo-Iranian Proto-Indo-Iranian is the reconstructed proto-language of the Indo-Iranian branch of Indo-European. Its speakers, the hypothetical Proto-Indo-Iranians, are assumed to have lived in the late 3rd millennium BC, and are usually connected with the early Andronovo archaeological horizon. It is closely related to Avestan Avestan is an Iranian language known only from its use as the language of Zoroastrian scripture, i.e. the Avesta, from which it derives its name. The language must also at some time have been a natural language, but how long ago that was is unknown. Its status as a sacred language ensured its continuing use for new compositions long after the, the oldest preserved Iranian language The Iranian languages or Iranic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family and its subfamily, Indo-Iranian. They are spoken by the Iranian peoples. Old Persian and Avestan are the oldest recorded Iranian languages. Vedic Sanskrit is the oldest attested language of the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European family The Indo-European languages are a family of several hundred related languages and dialects, including most major languages of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and Southern Asia, and historically also predominant in Anatolia and Central Asia. With written attestations appearing since the Bronze Age, in the form of the Anatolian languages and Mycenaean.

From ca. 600 BCE, in the classical period of Iron Age The Iron Age in the Indian subcontinent succeeds the Late Harappan culture, also known as the last phase of the Indus Valley Tradition. The main Iron Age archaeological cultures of India are the Painted Grey Ware culture (1100 to 350 BC) and the Northern Black Polished Ware (700 to 200 BC) Ancient India The history of India begins with evidence of human activity of Homo sapiens as long as 75,000 years ago hominids from about 500,000 years ago. The Indus Valley Civilization, which spread and flourished in the north-western part of the Indian subcontinent from c. 3300 to 1300 BCE, was the first major civilization in India. A sophisticated and, Vedic Sanskrit gave way to Classical Sanskrit Sanskrit is a historical Indo-Aryan language, one of the liturgical languages of Hinduism and Buddhism, and one of the 22 official languages of India as defined by the grammar of Pāṇini. Vedic Sanskrit has been orally preserved as a part of the oral Śrauta Śrauta traditions are conservative ritualistic traditions of historical Vedic religion in Hinduism, based on the body of Śruti literature. They are still practiced in India today although constituting a small minority within Hinduism tradition of Vedic chanting. Linguists seek to restore the historical natural language In the philosophy of language, a natural language is any language which arises in an unpremeditated fashion as the result of the innate facility for language possessed by the human intellect. A natural language is typically used for communication, and may be spoken, signed, or written. Natural language is distinguished from constructed languages of the Vedic period The Vedic Period is the period during which the Vedas, the oldest sacred texts of the Indo-Aryans, were being composed. Scholars place the Vedic period in the second and first millennia BCE continuing up to the 6th century BCE based on literary evidence from the preserved Vedic Sanskrit texts. [1]

Contents

History

Five chronologically distinct strata can be identified within the Vedic language (Witzel 1989).

  1. Ṛgvedic. The Ṛgveda The Rigveda is an ancient Indian sacred collection of Vedic Sanskrit hymns. It is counted among the four canonical sacred texts (śruti) of Hinduism known as the Vedas. Some of its verses are still recited as Hindu prayers, at religious functions and other occasions, putting these among the world's oldest religious texts in continued use retains many common Indo-Iranian Indo-Iranian peoples are a linguistic group consisting of the Indo-Aryan, Iranian, Dardic and Nuristani peoples; that is, speakers of Indo-Iranian languages, a major branch of the Indo-European language family 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 around 1200 BCE The 12th century BC is the period from 1200 to 1101 BC. Although many human societies were literate in this period, most individual persons mentioned in this article ought to be considered legendary rather than historical.[citation needed].
  2. Mantra language. This period includes both the mantra and prose language of the Atharvaveda The Atharvaveda (Sanskrit: अथर्ववेदः, atharvaveda, a tatpurusha compound of atharvan, an ancient Rishi, and veda is a sacred text of Hinduism, and one of the four Vedas, often called the "fourth Veda". According to tradition, the Atharvaveda was mainly composed by two groups of rishis known as the Atharvanas and the (Paippalada and Shaunakiya), the Rigveda Khilani The Khilani are a collection of 98 "apocryphal" hymns of the Rigveda, recorded in the Bāṣkala, but not in the Śākala shakha. They are late additions to the text of the Rigveda, but still belong to the "Mantra" period of Vedic Sanskrit, the Samaveda The Samaveda , is second (in the usual order) of the four Vedas, the ancient core Hindu scriptures. Its earliest parts are believed to date from 1000 BC and it ranks next in sanctity and liturgical importance to the Rigveda. It consists of a collection (samhita) of hymns, portions of hymns, and detached verses, all but 75 taken from the Rigveda, Samhita (containing some 75 mantras not in the Rigveda), and the mantras of the Yajurveda The Yajurveda is the third of the four canonical texts of Hinduism, the Vedas. By some, it is estimated to have been composed between 1,400 and 1000 BCE, the Yajurveda 'Samhita', or 'compilation', contains the liturgy (mantras) needed to perform the sacrifices of the religion of the Vedic period, and the added Brahmana and Shrautasutra add. 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 viśva "all" to sarva, and the spread of kuru- (for Rigvedic kṛno-) as the present tense form of the verb kar- "make, do". This period corresponds to the early Iron Age In archaeology, the Iron Age is the historical period in any area during which cutting tools and weapons were mainly made of iron or steel. The adoption of this material coincided with other changes in society, including differing agricultural practices, religious beliefs and artistic styles in north-western India (iron is first mentioned in the Atharvaveda), and to the kingdom of the Kurus, dating from about the twelfth century BCE.
  3. Samhita prose (roughly 1100 BCE to 800 BCE). 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 grammatical moods Grammatical mood is one of a set of distinctive forms that are used to signal modality. It is distinct from grammatical tense or grammatical aspect, although these concepts are conflated to some degree in many languages, including English and most other modern Indo-European languages, insofar as the same word patterns are used to express more than of the aorist The aorist is a perfective aspect (not to be confused with the perfect) of the verb in the grammatical tradition of Ancient Greek (where it is usually called aorist tense) and in languages whose description has been influenced by that tradition.[not in citation given] In many of these languages, such as Modern Greek, Sanskrit, Bulgarian, and. The commentary part of the Black Yajurveda (MS, KS) belongs to this period.
  4. Brahmana prose (roughly 900 BCE to 600 BCE). The Brahmanas The Brāhmaṇas are part of the Hindu śruti literature. They are commentaries on the four Vedas, detailing the proper performance of rituals proper of the four Vedas belong to this period, as well as the Aranyakas (Āraṇyakas) oldest of the Upanishads The Upanishads are philosophical texts of the Hindu religion. More than 200 are known, of which the first dozen or so, the oldest and most important, are variously referred to as the principal, main (mukhya) or old Upanishads (Brihadaranyaka Upanishad The Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upanishad is one of the older, "primary" (mukhya) Upanishads. It is contained within the Shatapatha Brahmana, and its status as an independent Upanishad may be considered a secondary extraction of a portion of the Brahmana text. This makes it one of the old texts of the Upanishad corpus, dating to roughly one or, Chāndogya Upanishad The Chandogya Upanishad is one of the "primary" Upanishads. Together with the Jaiminiya Upanishad Brahmana and the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad it ranks among the oldest Upanishads, dating to the Vedic Brahmana period (probably before first millennium BCE), Jaiminiya Upanishad Brahmana The Jaiminiya Upanishad Brahmana is a Vedic text associated with the Jaiminiya shakha of the Samaveda. It may be considered a very early Upanishad, together with the Bṛhadāraṇyaka and Chāndogya Upanishads dating to the Brahmana period of Vedic Sanskrit, likely predating the 6th century BC).
  5. Sutra language. This is the last stratum of vedic Sanskrit leading up to 500 BCE, comprising the bulk of the Shrauta Tradition does not single out any special work in this branch of the Vedanga; but sacrificial practice gave rise to a large number of systematic sutras for the several classes of priests. A number of these works have come down to us, and they occupy by far the most prominent place among the literary productions of the sūtra-period. The Kalpa-sū and Grhya Sutras, and some Upanishads The Upanishads are philosophical texts of the Hindu religion. More than 200 are known, of which the first dozen or so, the oldest and most important, are variously referred to as the principal, main (mukhya) or old Upanishads. The oldest of these, the Brihadaranyaka and Chandogya Upanishads, were composed during the pre-Buddhist era of India (E.g. Katha Upanishad The Katha Upanishad , also titled "Death as Teacher", is one of the mukhya ("primary") Upanishads commented upon by Shankara. It is associated with the Cāraka-Kaṭha school of the Black Yajurveda, and is grouped with the Sutra period of Vedic Sanskrit. It is a middle Upanishad. It contains passages that suggest contact with, Maitrayaniya Upanishad The Maitrayaniya or Maitri Upanishad belongs to the Maitri or Maitrayaniya branch of the Kṛṣṇa Yajurveda, though some texts assign it to the Sāmaveda. It figures as number 24 in the Muktika canon of 108 Upanishads under the name of the Maitrāyaṇi Upanishad, which is included there as a Sāmānya Upanishad, associated with the Samaveda. Younger Upanishads are post-Vedic).

Around 500 BCE, 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 Vedānta was originally a word used in Hindu philosophy as a synonym for that part of the Veda texts known also as the Upanishads. The name is a sandhied form of Veda-anta = "Veda-end" = "the appendix to the Vedic hymns." It is also speculated that "Vedānta" means "the purpose or goal [end] of the Vedas." and early Buddhism Buddhism is a religion and philosophy encompassing a variety of traditions, beliefs and practices, largely based on teachings attributed to Siddhartha Gautama, commonly known as the Buddha . The Buddha lived and taught in the northeastern Indian subcontinent some time between the 6th and 4th centuries BCE. He is recognized by adherents as an emerged, using the vernacular Pali Pāli (ISO 15919/ALA-LC: is a Middle Indo-Aryan language of India. It is best known as the language of many of the earliest extant Buddhist scriptures, as collected in the Pāḷi Canon or Tipitaka, and as the liturgical language of Theravada Buddhism, a Prakrit Prakrit (Sanskrit: prākṛta प्राकृत (from pra-kṛti प्रकृति)) is the name for a group of Middle Indic, Indo-Aryan languages, derived from Old Indic dialects. The word, derived from its indian root "Parikrit", itself has a flexible definition, being defined sometimes as, "original, natural, artless, dialect, rather than Sanskrit for their texts. Darius I of Persia Darius I of Persia , also known as Darius the Great, was the third king of kings of the Achaemenid Empire. Darius held the empire at its peak, then including Egypt, and parts of Greece. The decay and downfall of the empire commenced with his death and the coronation of his son, Xerxes I invaded the Indus valley and the political center of the Indo-Aryan kingdoms shifted eastward, to the Gangetic plain The Indo-Gangetic Plain also known as the Northern plains and the North Indian River Plain is a large and fertile plain encompassing most of northern and eastern India, the most populous parts of Pakistan, and virtually all of Bangladesh. The region is named after the Indus and the Ganges, the twin river systems that drain it. The Indo-gangetic. Around this time (4th century BCE), Panini Pāṇini was an Ancient Indian Sanskrit grammarian from Pushkalavati, Gandhara (fl. 4th century BCE) fixes the grammar of Classical Sanskrit.

Phonology

This section treats the distinguishing features of Vedic Sanskrit — see Classical Sanskrit Sanskrit is a historical Indo-Aryan language, one of the liturgical languages of Hinduism and Buddhism, and one of the 22 official languages of India for a general account.

Sound changes between Proto-Indo-Iranian and Vedic Sanskrit include loss of the voiced sibilant z.

Vedic Sanskrit had a bilabial fricative The voiceless bilabial fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ɸ, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is p\ [ɸ], called upadhmānīya, and a velar fricative [x], called jihvamuliya. These are both allophones of visarga: upadhmaniya occurs before p and ph, jihvamuliya before k and kh. Vedic also had a retroflex l for retroflex l, an intervocalic allophone of ḍ, represented in Devanagari Devanagari , also called Nagari (Nāgarī, the name of its parent writing system), is an abugida alphabet of India and Nepal. It is written from left to right, does not have distinct letter cases, and is recognizable by a distinctive horizontal line running along the tops of the letters that links them together. Devanāgarī is the main script with the separate symbol ळ and transliterated as ḷ or ḷh. In order to disambiguate vocalic l from retroflex l, ISO 15919 ISO 15919 Transliteration of Devanagari and related Indic scripts into Latin characters is an international standard for the transliteration of Indic scripts to the Latin alphabet formed in 2001. It uses diacritics to map the much larger set of Brahmic consonants and vowels to the Latin script transliterates vocalic l with a ring below the letter, l̥. (Vocalic r is then also represented with a ring, r̥, for consistency and to disambiguate it additionally from the retroflex ṛ and ṛh of some modern Indian languages.)

Vedic Sanskrit had a pitch accent Pitch accent is a linguistic term of convenience for a variety of restricted tone systems that use variations in pitch to give prominence to a syllable or mora within a word. The placement of this tone or the way it is realized can give different meanings to otherwise similar words. The term has been used to describe the Scandinavian languages,. 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 Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or inflect words. All languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information, and to convey emphasis, contrast, and other such features in what is called intonation, but not all languages use tones to distinguish. Note however that in the metrically restored versions of the Rig Veda The Rigveda is an ancient Indian sacred collection of Vedic Sanskrit hymns. It is counted among the four canonical sacred texts (śruti) of Hinduism known as the Vedas. Some of its verses are still recited as Hindu prayers, at religious functions and other occasions, putting these among the world's oldest religious texts in continued use almost all of the syllables carrying an independent svarita must revert to a sequence of two syllables, the first of which carries an udātta The tone accent of Vedic Sanskrit, or Vedic accent for brevity, is traditionally divided by Sanskrit grammarians into three qualities, udātta "raised" , anudātta "not raised" (grave accent, low pitch) and svarita "sounded" (circumflex, falling pitch) and the second a (so called) dependent svarita. Early Vedic was thus definitely not a tonal language but a pitch accent language. See Vedic accent.

Pāṇini Pāṇini was an Ancient Indian Sanskrit grammarian from Pushkalavati, Gandhara (fl. 4th century BCE) gives accent rules for the spoken language of his (post-Vedic) time, though there is no extant post-Vedic text with accents.

The pluti vowels (trimoraic Mora is a unit of sound used in phonology that determines syllable weight (which in turn determines stress or timing) in some languages. As with many technical linguistics terms, the exact definition of mora varies. Perhaps the most succinct working definition was provided by the American linguist James D. McCawley in 1968: a mora is “Something vowels) were on the verge of becoming phonological during middle Vedic, but disappeared again.

Principal Differences

Vedic Sanskrit differs from Classical Sanskrit to an extent comparable to the difference between Homeric Greek and Classical Greek. Tiwari ([1955] 2005) lists the following principal differences between the two:

Grammar

Main article: Vedic Sanskrit grammar

Vedic had a subjunctive absent in Panini's grammar and generally believed to have disappeared by then at least in common sentence constructions. All tenses could be conjugated in the subjunctive and optative moods, in contrast to Classical Sanskrit, with no subjunctive and only a present optative. (However, the old first-person subjunctive forms were used to complete the Classical Sanskrit imperative.) The three synthetic past tenses (imperfect, perfect and aorist) were still clearly distinguished semantically in (at least the earliest) Vedic. A fifth mood, the injunctive, also existed.

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

Substratum

Main article: Substratum in Vedic Sanskrit

Vedic Sanskrit has a number of phonetic, morphological and syntactical features showing substratum influence of non-Indo-European sources, variously traced to the Dravidian or Munda language families.

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