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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.

1. 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 1200 BCE.
2. 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 viśva "all" to sarva, and the spread of kuru- (for Rigvedic kṛno-) as the present tense form of the verb kar- "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.
3. 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.
4. 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).
5. 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 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 upamādhmīya, and a velar fricative , called jihvamuliya. These are both allophones to visarga: upadhmaniya occurs before p and ph, jihvamuliya before k and kh. Vedic also had a separate symbol ळ for retroflex l, an intervocalic allophone of ḍ, transliterated as ḷ or ḷh. In order to disambiguate vocalic l from retroflex l, vocalic l is sometimes transliterated with a ring below the letter, l̥; when this is done, vocalic r is also represented with a ring, r̥, for consistency (c.f. ISO 15919).

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

• Vedic meter
• Vedic civilization

References

1. Mallory and Mair 2000
2. Bryant 2001
   Mallory 1989
   Mallory and Mair 2000
3. Mallory and Mair 2000
4. Mallory and Mair 2000

• 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.

• Vedic Civilization
• Sanskrit
• Linguistic history of India