Introduction
History of sanskrit
The Language
• Sanskrit is the oldest surviving Indo-European (I-E) language.
• It is an older sibling rather than the mother of modern day I-E
languages. The original mother language is lost to us but referred to
as Proto I-E
• I-E languages can be split into roughly 12 families. For example,
English belongs to the Germanic family whereas Latin (and modern
Romance descendents) belong to the Italic family. The furthest west
I-E language is Icelandic and the furthest east is Bengali.
• Sanskrit belongs to the Indo_Iranian (also called Aryan) family, which
includes such languages as Avestan (the language of the
Zoroastrians) and Old Persian
The Language
• Sanskrit is the anglicized name. In the Sanskrit language it is called
“saṁskr̥ta” translaSng into “refined,” someSmes with the word
“bhaṣā” added which means spoken language
• Sanskrit remains the liturgical language in Hinduism, but was also
used extensively in Buddhist and Jainist texts
• Sanskrit has been spoken for over 3,000 years. The early version was
known as Vedic Sanskrit or simply Vedic which gradually morphed
into classical sanskrit by around the middle of the 1st millennium BCE.
• Note the Vedas are the oldest I-E texts in existence today
Script & Grammar
• Pāṇini was a famous grammarian around 5th century BCE who created
a manual called “Aṣṭādhyāyī” (The Eight Chapters). In just 40 pages he
analyzed the entire structure of the Sanskrit language.
• Earliest script was called Brāhmī from which other scripts evolved
such as Devanāgarī along with many others e.g. Bengali, Malayālam…
• Devanāgarī attained a separate independent status by the 7th century
CE and by the late medieval period, it was the predominant script for
writing the sanskrit language.
Script & Grammar
• Important not to confuse script with language! Sanskrit can be
written in devanāgarī script, but is also often presented in Latin script
using such writing conventions as IAST (International Alphabet of
Sanskrit Transliteration), which is the romanization format that we
shall use in this course.
• It is also instructive to see how interrelated Sanskrit is with a variety
of other I-E languages by taking an example of one word such as the
English word “brother”:
Script & Grammar
• Proto Indo European
bʰréh₂tēr
• Aryan (Indo-Iranian)
Sanskrit bhrātar
Avestan brātar
• Hellenic
Greek phrātōr
• Italic
Latin frater
• Baltic
Lithuanian broterēlis
• Germanic
Old High German bruoder (whence Modern German brüder)
Old English brōthor ( whence Modern English brother)
• Celtic
Old Irish brāthir
Old Welsh broder
