Sanskrit and linguistics

 

The roots of modern linguistics trace back to a lecture delivered in Calcutta in 1786. Sir William Jones, a British judge serving in India, hypothesized that Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin must all have sprung from a common source – what today we call Indo-European. In the mid-nineteenth century, Jacob Grimm explained how German phonology systematically differed from the sound systems of such languages as Latin and Sanskrit. Soon thereafter, the Junggrammatiker (neogrammarians) created a linguistic research agenda for comparing languages in the Indo-European family, predominantly focusing on phonology. By the early twentieth century, linguistics had largely become the diachronic study of Indo-European sound systems. Baron, Naomi S. "Linguistics." The International Encyclopedia of Communication. Donsbach, Wolfgang (ed). Blackwell Publishing, 2008. Blackwell Reference Online. 29 July 2009

Sir William Jones, a comparative philologist holding expertise in more than fifteen languages including Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, and Hebrew, was struck by the linguistic affinities between Sanskrit, Greek and Latin. He hypothesized that Sanskrit, Greek and Latin must have originated from one linguistic source – the Proto-Indo-European language, which has been lost to us forever. Efforts to reconstruct the mother of Indo-European languages have proved futile. In his annual lecture delivered before the Asiatic Society on the history and culture of the Hindus 1786, he described Sanskrit and its relationship to other Indo-European languages as follows:

The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists; there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanscrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family.  (Quoted from Readings in Early Anthropology by James Sydney Slotkin, Routledge 2004, page 240)

Almost a hundred year later in 1877, Sir R.G. Bhandarkar delivered a series of lectures on Sanskrit in which he further mapped developmental phases of Sanskrit, analyzed its relationship with several north and central Indian languages including Pālī, Prākrit, Hindī and Marathi. These lectures laid “the foundations of linguistic studies of Indo-Aryan family of languages.”

In modern linguistics, Sanskrit has been recognized as the ancestor of modern Indo-Iranian languages spoken in North India, Pakistan, Nepal, and Bangladesh. Moreover, Sanskrit is also a language of the learned and served on Indian subcontinent as the major interlingua. Even Dravidian languages spoken in South India have a high percentage of Sanskrit loanwords. Because of Sanskrit’s rich linguistic and textual contributions reflected in India’s social and cultural continuity, the Indian constitution lists it among the three national languages of India, the other two being Hindī and English. In the last census in India, about 50,000 thousand people claimed that they spoke Sanskrit. since been esteemed as one of the earliest Dictionaries and thesauri are instrumental in the field of comparative linguistics because the latter relies mainly on the knowledge of extensive vocabulary from different languages. While it is difficult to establish the existence of comparative studies in ancient Sanskrit texts, they have a long tradition in lexicographical studies. For instance, Nighantu, a very small text consisting of Vedic words organized according to their meanings, is perhaps the earliest thesaurus available today. Yāska, an etymologist and grammarian, wrote a commentary titled Nirukta on Nighantu. Sanskrit has also preserved the earliest work on quantitative description of texts. Śaunaka, a Sanskrit grammarian who lived around 300 BCE, counted and referenced all syllables, words, and stanzas in the Rigveda. In the sixth century, Amarasiṃha composed his dictionary/thesaurus of classical Sanskrit called Amarakośa.