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Vedic Sanskrit is the language of the Vedas, the oldest scriptures of Hinduism. The Vedic form of Sanskrit is an early descendant of Proto-Indo-Iranian, which is attested during the period between 1700 BCE (early Rigveda) and 600 BCE (Sutra language) , and still comparatively similar (being removed by maybe 1500 years) to the Proto-Indo-European language. It is closely related to Avestan, the oldest preserved Iranian language. Vedic Sanskrit is the oldest attested language of the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European family. The composition of the Rgveda, the oldest of the Vedas, is conventionally dated to before 1200 BCE , 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.
History Five chronologically distinct strata can be identified within the Vedic language. 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 Eastward, 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 , 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. 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. See also | ||||||||
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