Sanskrit
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| − | Various [[Hindutva|Hindu traditionalists]] have asserted that Sanskrit is the original language of the human race. One motivation behind these claims appears to be a wish to assert that the Sanskrit language, and the [[Aryan]] people who spoke it, did not arise elsewhere, but rather are indigenous to India and arose locally. Even if their ancestors had moved into the area before 1500 BC, that still makes them outsiders, apparently; they do not want this. These writers will take exception to the usual claims of historical linguistics, that: | + | Various [[Hindutva|Hindu traditionalists]], and [[Hare Krishna]] devotees such as Stephen Knapp, have asserted that Sanskrit is the original language of the human race. One motivation behind these claims appears to be a wish to assert that the Sanskrit language, and the [[Aryan]] people who spoke it, did not arise elsewhere, but rather are indigenous to India and arose locally. Even if their ancestors had moved into the area before 1500 BC, that still makes them outsiders, apparently; they do not want this. These writers will take exception to the usual claims of historical linguistics, that: |
*there exists a Proto-Indo-European language that existed prior to Sanskrit, and is ancestral to it; or | *there exists a Proto-Indo-European language that existed prior to Sanskrit, and is ancestral to it; or | ||
*the ancestor of Sanskrit developed outside of India, and was spread to the subcontinent by Aryan migrations. | *the ancestor of Sanskrit developed outside of India, and was spread to the subcontinent by Aryan migrations. | ||
Revision as of 05:33, 10 December 2013
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Sanskrit (in Devanagari: संस्कृतम्) is the classical language of India, and one of the liturgical languages of Hinduism, the language of the Vedas and Upanishads. It is also the language of the Indian epic poems, the Ramayana and Mahabharata. It is one of the oldest and earliest attested of the Indo-European languages; parts of the Rig Veda are believed to date back to around 1500 BCE.
When Sanskrit was encountered by British colonialists in India, it became clear to them that the language was related to Classical Greek and other Indo-European languages. This led to the then-startling discovery that the languages of least some people in India shared a common ancestor with the languages spoken by most Europeans.
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Hindu fundamentalist claims
Various Hindu traditionalists, and Hare Krishna devotees such as Stephen Knapp, have asserted that Sanskrit is the original language of the human race. One motivation behind these claims appears to be a wish to assert that the Sanskrit language, and the Aryan people who spoke it, did not arise elsewhere, but rather are indigenous to India and arose locally. Even if their ancestors had moved into the area before 1500 BC, that still makes them outsiders, apparently; they do not want this. These writers will take exception to the usual claims of historical linguistics, that:
- there exists a Proto-Indo-European language that existed prior to Sanskrit, and is ancestral to it; or
- the ancestor of Sanskrit developed outside of India, and was spread to the subcontinent by Aryan migrations.
A related set of claims seeks to relate the Brahmi alphabet, the ultimate source of all the wide variety of native alphabets in India, South Asia, and parts beyond[1] were not derived from existing alphabets, probably Aramaic. Instead, the Brahmi scripts have been claimed by some to descend from the undeciphered writing system of the Indus Valley civilization, despite the intervention of a millennium and a half of illiteracy between the disappearance of the Indus Valley civilization and the first Brahmi inscriptions.[2]
"Sanskrit is the source of all the languages of the world and not a derivation of any language. As such, Sanskrit is the Divine mother language of the world."[3] This literature resorts to many of the standard tropes of denialism. For instance, because there is disagreement among linguists about the Indo-European homeland, claiming that it is native to India is as likely as any other explanation:[4]
“”So, as we can see, most of these ideas are but speculations that remain ever-changing, or, to put it plainly, inconclusive. Nonetheless, some people think that the original language has indeed already been identified, and has been around for thousands of years, if not longer, which is Sanskrit, which is the oldest of all languages and from which all other languages are but derivatives. Whatever factors for a Proto-Indo-European language the scholars are looking for can be found in Sanskrit.
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Sanskrit is not the first language
Sanskrit is descended from Indo-European. But many features shared among other Indo-European languages, and that can be shown to be the result of inheritance from the original protolanguage, cannot be derived from Sanskrit alone.
There are many features of the Proto-Indo-European language whose existence is attested by the comparative evidence, that are not found in Sanskrit:
- The laryngeal sounds, for instance, that are required for most linguists' reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European are not well preserved in Sanskrit. They can appear in Hittite, and also leave telltale signs in Greek and Old Irish.
- Sanskrit also reduces the five primary vowels of Indo-European (*a *e *i *o *u) to three (a, i, u; *e> a, *o > u; Sanskrit e and o are in origin diphthongs representing *ai and *au, and are treated as diphthongs in Panini's grammar).[5]
- Proto-Indo-European contained the labialized stops *kʷ and *gʷ. That these consonants had a 'w' component can be established by Latin quod (/kʷod/) and English what /ʍʌt/, requiring the reconstructed Indo-European root to be *kʷō-. The Sanskrit cognate of quod and what is kah (कः); in Sanskrit this 'w' quality is consistently lost. The Sanskrit form cannot be ancestral to the Latin or the English.[6]
- Sanskrit is also a satem language. This is a group of Indo-European languages that underwent a common sound shift; at some point in their history, a sound reconstructed as *ḱ was palatized to s. They stand in contrast to the centum languages, which preserved the underlying sound as k. The names derive from the Latin word centum and the Indo-Iranian Avestan word satəm (Sanskrit शतम्, śatam), both meaning "one hundred".[7] In Sanskrit, this sound has regularly shifted; Sanskrit is in fact closely related to its sister Indo-Iranian language Avestan.[8]
In short, we can be certain that Sanskrit has changed several of its sounds from the ancestral form, and merged them with sounds it already had. The entire sound inventory of Indo-European can therefore not be recovered from the evidence of Sanskrit alone, and the method of comparative reconstruction requires inputs from other Indo-European languages. Sanskrit cannot be the sole ancestor of the Indo-European languages, much less all the world's languages.
Sanskrit comes from somewhere other than India
The lexicon of the Indo-European languages quite simply suggests that the people who spoke the language ancestral to Sanskrit were not all that familiar with the features of the Indian subcontinent. The words they had suggest that they lived elsewhere.
They had words for trees like ash, apple, oak, linden, aspen, pine, but nothing for palm tree or sandalwood, for example. They knew animals: bear, wolf, hound, turtle, elk, deer, trout/salmon, rabbit, horse, cow, but no words can be reconstructed for tiger or elephant. They had words for snow but none for typhoon or monsoon. While there are a number of competing proposals for locating the Indo-European homelands, these focus on steppe or woodland territories from Northern Europe, the Ukraine, and Anatolia. The reconstructed lexicon of Indo-European does not suggest that they came from a tropical or subtropical area.
And, by contrast, in the Dravidian languages, most of which are spoken in southern India, words can be reconstructed for trees like banyan, neem, coconut, mango, palmyra and tamarind; crops like rice paddy, yam, banana, sugar-cane, and animals like tiger, elephant, mongoose, cobra and monkey.[9] Sanskrit, in turn, borrowed many of these words, even borrowing certain Dravidian sounds. The people who originally spoke Sanskrit had no names for any of those tropical animals or plants. This suggests that the Dravidian languages were first spoken in a place where rice paddies, cobras, and ginger could be found. Unlike the Sanskrit homeland, the homeland of the Dravidian languages seems tropical or subtropical, and looks a lot like India.
There were bears and wolves, but no cobras or tigers, where the language ancestral to Sanskrit was spoken. Sanskrit is therefore descended from a language that is not indigenous to India.[10]
See also
External links
- Hey kids! Free Sanskrit lessons!
Notes
- ↑ These scripts are the basis of Burmese and Thai, and were carried as far as the Philippines and Korea.
- ↑ See, e.g., G. R. Hunter, The Script of Harappa and Mohenjodaro and Its Connection with Other Scripts (Studies in the history of culture, London:K. Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1935).
- ↑ Sanskrit - The Mother of All Languages, pt. 1 - The Vedic Foundation
- ↑ Stephen Knapp, Sanskrit: Was it the Original Language?, Haindava Keralam
- ↑ Alexander M Lubotsky, (1988). The System of Nominal Accentuation in Sanskrit and Proto-Indo-European. (Brill. ISBN 90-04-08835-0.)
- ↑ In fact, in the neuter gender Sanskrit innovates further; the word that directly translates "what" is kim (किम्), originally an accusative. This definitely cannot be an ancestor to the Latin or English words.
- ↑ Centum-satem isogloss, Wikipedia.
- ↑ Robert S.P. Beekes, Comparative Indo-European Linguistics: an introduction. (Benjamins, 1995), pp. 109-113.
- ↑ Bhardriraju Krishnamurti The Dravidian Languages (Cambridge, 2003; ISBN 0-521-77111-0), pp. 12-14
- ↑ David W. Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. (Princeton, 2007; ISBN 0-691-05887-3).