This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Andre Engels (talk | contribs) at 21:19, 21 September 2002. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.
Revision as of 21:19, 21 September 2002 by Andre Engels (talk | contribs)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)Sanskrit is a classical language that was spoken by the Aryan invaders who settled in the Indus Valley region and displaced the Indus Valley or Harappan civilization in perhaps 1500 B.C. It remains a 'living' second language and is one of the official languages of . For India, Sanskrit occupies a role similar to that of Latin in Western Europe. It was a language of religious ritual and scholars, and it had locally varied spoken forms (Prakrits) such as Pali.
It is generally written in the syllabic Devanagari script. Several Latin-alphabet transliterations of varying utility are also available. It is found written on stone, birch bark, palm leaves and paper.
Sanskrit belongs to the Indo-European family of languages and its common origin with modern European and the more familiar classical languages of Greek and Latin can be seen, for instance, in the Sanskrit words for mother, matr, and father, pitr. The similarities between Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit led to the discovery of this language family, and thus played an important role in the development of linguistics.
Sanskrit had some influence on the Chinese culture because Buddhism was initially transmitted to China in Sanskrit. Many Chinese Buddhist scriptures were written with Chinese transliterations of Sanskrit words. Some Chinese proverbs use Buddhist terms that originate from Sanskrit.
Sanskrit words are found in many present-day languages. For instance the Thai language contains many loan words from Sanskrit.
Phonology
Sanskrit is typically said to have 36 sounds, though there is some debate over whether certain sounds are separate phonemes or allophones of one phoneme.
The sounds are described here in their traditional order: vowels, stops and nasals (starting in the back if the mouth and moving forward), and finally the liquids and sibilants.
(Note: The long vowels are held about twice as long as their short counterparts)
Vowels (with approximate English equivalents)
a - gut
aa - father
i - pin
ii - tweak
u - push
uu - moo
r^i = r + i
long r^i = r + ii or r + uu, depending on the region
l^i = l + r^i
e - hay
ai - aisle
o - snow
au - pow
Vowels can be .
Consonants
Sanskrit has a voiceless, voiceless aspirate, voiced, voiced aspirate, and nasal stop at each of the following places of articulation:
- Velar (soft palate)
- Palatal (hard palate)
- Retroflex (roughly the place of articulation of English alveolars like t, but with the tongue curled back)
- Dental (tongue against teeth, like Spanish)
- Labial (with the lips)
It also has four semivowels: y,r,l,v. All of these but r have nasalized forms. Sanskrit also has palatal, retroflex, and alveolar sibilants. Rounding out the consonants are the voiced and voiceless h (the voiceless h, called the visarga, tends to repeat the preceding vowel after itself) and the anusvaara, which often appears as nasalization of the the preceding vowel or as a nasal homorganic to the following consonant.
Vedas Sanskrit had a pitch or tonal accent, but it was lost by the Classical period.
Sanskrit has an elaborate set of phonological rules called sandhi which are expressed in its writing (except in so-called pada texts). This makes Sanskrit 'very' hard to read without a great deal of practice. It also creates ambiguities which clever poets have exploited to perform such feats as writing poems which can be interpreted in multiple, unrelated ways depending on how the reader chooses to break apart the sandhi.
Morphology and Syntax
Sanskrit is a heavily inflected language with three genders (masculine, feminine, neuter) and three numbers (singular, plural, ). It has eight cases: nominative, vocative, accusative, instrumental, dative, ablative, genitive, and locative. It has over ten noun declensions.
Sanskrit has ten classes of verbs divided into in two broad groups: athematic and thematic. The thematic verbs are so called because an a, called the theme vowel, is inserted between the stem and the ending. This serves to make the thematic verbs generally more well-behaved. utilized in verb conjugation include prefixes, suffixes, infixes, and reduplication. Also extremely common is vowel gradation; every root has (not necessarily all distinct) zero, guna, and vrdhii grades. If V is the vowel of the zero grade, the guna grade vowel is traditionally thought of a V + a, and the vrdhii grade vowel as V + aa.
One other notable feature of the nominal system is the very common use of nominal compounds, which may be huge (10+ words).
The verbs tenses (a very inexact application of the word, since more distinctions than simply tense are expressed) are organized into four 'systems' (plus gerunds and infinitives, along with such creatures as intensives/frequentives, desideratives, causatives, and benedictives derived from more basic forms). Each verb is also active, passive, or middle. (Middle indicates actions done to something other than the speaker for the speaker's own benefit. The semantic distinction between middle and passive is not maintained in later Sanskrit). The four systems are:
Word order is free with tendency toward SOV.
Here is a simple example to illustrate the different contexts in which the cases are used for the pronouns:
mayaa tatamidam sarva jagadavyaktamuurtina |
matsthaani sarvabhutani na chaaham teshvavasthit ||
-- Geeta (9.4)
"mayaa" (by me) in the first line is in the instrumental case. A loose translation would be "I pervade this universe..." or "this universe is pervaded by me..."
"mat" (from me) in the second line is in the ablative. Translated: " from my place (from me) are all beings..."
"-aham" (I) in the second line is nominative. Translated: "...and not I....".
"teshv-" (in/at/by them) at the end of the second line is in locative. Translated: "...in them residing separately/ distributed/ condescended".
History
Sanskrit is the oldest member of Indo-Aryan sub-branch of Indo-Iranian. It and Avestan are the oldest memebers of the Indo-Iranian sub-branch of the family. The oldest form of Sanskrit is Vedic, in which the Vedas, the earliest Sanskrit texts, were composed. The earliest of the Vedas, the R^igveda, was composed in the middle of the second millenia BC. The Vedic form survived until the middle of the first millenia BC. Around this time, as Sanskrit made the transition from a first language to a second language of religion and learning, the Classical period began. The intense study of the structure of Sanskrit at this time led to the beginnings of linguistics. The oldest surviving Sanskrit grammar is Paanini's c. 500 BC Astaadhyaayii ("8 Chapter Grammar"). A form of Sanskrit called Epic Sanskrit is seen in the Mahaabhaarata and other epics. Vernacular Sanskrit developed into the Prakrits (in which, among other things, early Buddhist texts are written) and the modern Indic languages. There has been much reciprocal influence between Sanskrit and the Dravidian languages.
See also: Upanishad
--
External links: