Vedic Sanskrit
Vedic Sanskrit is the language of the
Vedas, which are the earliest sacred texts of
India and the
Aryan people. The Vedas were first passed down orally and therefore have no known date. Vedic Sanskrit was first known used in the age of the Indus valley civilization between 4000 and 1700 BC. The earliest of the Vedas, the
Rigveda, is said to have been composed in the
4th 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 then given credit for.
The
Vedic form of Sanskrit is an early descendant of
Proto-Indo-Iranian (spoken around
3000 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.
Five chronologically distinct strata can be identified within the Vedic language.#Rigvedic. The
Rigveda 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.
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.
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.
*
Vedic civilization*
Bhagavad Gita*
Rainer Hasenpflug,
The Inscriptions of the Indus Civilization, 2006.
*
Michael Witzel,
Tracing the Vedic dialects in
Dialectes dans les litteratures Indo-Aryennes ed. Caillat, Paris, 1989, 97–265.
