Linguistic history of India
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Originating over 5,000 years ago, the linguistic history of India describes the evolution and transformation of early human communications techniques - from pictures, pictorial scripts and engravings - to the modern Indian languages that belong to the Indo-Aryan languages and the Dravidian languages.
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[edit] Language of the Indus Valley civilization
[edit] Indo-Aryan languages
[edit] Origins of Sanskrit
The adjective saṃskṛta- means "refined, consecrated, sanctified". The language referred to as saṃskṛtā vāk "the refined language" has by definition always been a 'high' language, used for religious and scientific discourse and contrasted with the languages spoken by the people. The oldest surviving Sanskrit grammar is Pāṇini's Aṣtādhyāyī ("Eight-Chapter Grammar") dating to ca. the 5th century BC. It is essentially a prescriptive grammar, i.e., an authority that defines (rather than describes) correct Sanskrit, although it contains descriptive parts, mostly to account for Vedic forms that had already passed out of use in Pāṇini's time.
When the term arose in India, "Sanskrit" was not thought of as a specific language set apart from other languages (the people of the time regarded languages more as dialects), but rather as a particularly refined or perfected manner of speaking. Knowledge of Sanskrit was a marker of social class and educational attainment and was taught mainly to Brahmins through close analysis of Sanskrit grammarians such as Pāṇini.
Sanskrit is a descendent of the Proto-Indo-European language. It belongs to the Indo-Aryan sub-family of the Indo-European family of languages. It belongs to the Satem group of Indo-European languages, which also includes the Iranian branch and the Balto-Slavic branch. The categorization may be shown as:
Indo-European → Indo-Iranian → Indo-Aryan (i.e., Sanskrit and its descendants).
Technically, Sanskrit is the oldest of the Old Indo-Aryan languages. Its "daughter languages" include the Prakrits of ancient India, Hindi, Bengali, Kashmiri, Urdu, Marathi, Gujarati, Assamese, Nepali, Punjabi and Romany (spoken by the European Roma people).
[edit] Vedic Sanskrit
Sanskrit, as defined by Pāṇini, had evolved out of the earlier "Vedic" form, and scholars often distinguish Vedic Sanskrit and Classical or "Paninian" Sanskrit as separate dialects. However, they are extremely similar in many ways and differ mostly in a few points of phonology, vocabulary, and grammar. Classical Sanskrit can therefore be considered a seamless evolution of the earlier Vedic language. Vedic Sanskrit is the language of the Vedas, a large collection of hymns, incantations, and religio-philosophical discussions which form the earliest religious texts in India and the basis for much of the Hindu religion. Modern linguists consider the metrical hymns of the Rigveda Samhita to be the earliest, composed by many authors over centuries of oral tradition. The end of the Vedic period is marked by the composition of the Upanishads, which form the concluding part of the Vedic corpus in the traditional compilations. The current hypothesis is that the Vedic form of Sanskrit survived until the middle of the first millennium BC. It is around this time that Sanskrit began the transition from a first language to a second language of religion and learning, marking the beginning of the Classical period.
It is interesting to note that orthodox Hinduism believes that the language of the Vedas is eternal and revealed. Evidence for this belief is found in the Vedas itself, where in the Upanishads they are described as the very "breath of God" (nihsvasitam brahma). The Vedas are therefore considered "the language of reality", so to speak, and are unauthored, even by God, the rishis or seers ascribed to them being merely individuals gifted with a special insight into reality with the power of perceiving these eternal sounds. Orthodox Hindus, while accepting the linguistic development of Sanskrit as such, do not admit any historical stratification within the Vedic corpus itself, except for the Rig/Sama/Yajur/Atharva order.
This belief is of significant consequence in Indian religious history, as the very sacredness and eternality of the language encouraged exact memorization and transmission and discouraged textual learning via written propagation. Each word is believed to have innate mystic and eternal meaning.
Erroneous learning of repetition of the Veda was considered a grave sin with potentially negative consequences. Consequently, Vedic learning by rote was encouraged and prized, particularly among Brahmins, where learning of one's own Vedic texts was a mandated duty.
Vedic Sanskrit differs from Classical Sanskrit in as much as Homeric Greek differs from Classical Greek. The important differences are:Ė
- Vedic Sanskrit had a voiceless bilabial fricative (/ɸ/, called upamādhamīya) and a voiceless velar fricative (/x/, called jihvāmūlīya)—which used to occur when the breath visarga appeared before labial and velar consonants respectively. Both of them were lost in Classical Sanskrit.
- Vedic Sanskrit had a retroflex lateral approximant (/ɭ/), which was lost in Classical Sanskrit.
- Vedic Sanskrit had a pitch accent which was completely lost sometime around the 6th century ACE (about the same time when Classical Greek also lost its pitch accent) —preserved only in the Vedic chantings.
- The subjunctive tense of Vedic Sanskrit was also lost in Classical Sanskrit.
- More than 12 ways of forming infinitives in Vedic Sanskrit became redundant and clubbed under a single infinitive in Classical Sanskrit.
- A large number of Indo-European words were lost in Classical Sanskrit, and a large number of loanwords were incorporated from neighboring language families (Dravidian, Munda), and also from now lost substrate languages.
- There was wide-ranging simplification of inflected noun forms for athematic nouns (those not ending in the theme vowel 'a'). Many of the athematic consonant-final nouns were reanalyzed in thematic form (ending with 'a').
- Word order became more standardized on the SOV (Subject-Object-Verb) pattern, whereas in Vedic Sanskrit word order was more variable.
- Verbal affixes in Classical Sansrkit like 'vi', 'upa', etc. became cemented to the verbs they corresponded to, whereas in Vedic Sanskrit these could occur anywhere in the sentence structure.
Other than these, many significant linguistic changes have occurred in Classic Sanskrit to distinguish it from Vedic Sanskrit during the millennia that it evolved due to both internal change, and also due to influences from neighboring language families with whom its speakers had intense contact.
[edit] Classical Sanskrit
- Further information: Pāṇini
[edit] Pali
Pali is sometimes believed to be the same language as Magadhi, but other scholars believe the language to be a slightly different but closely related descendant language.
[edit] Emergence of Prakrits
Prakrit (Sanskrit prākṛta प्राकृत (from pra-kṛti प्रकृति), "original, natural, artless, normal, ordinary, usual", i.e. "vernacular", in contrast to samskrta "excellently made", both adjectives elliptically referring to vak "speech") refers to the broad family of the Indic languages and dialects spoken in ancient India. The Prakrits became literary languages, generally patronized by kings identified with the ksatriya caste, but were regarded as illegitimate by the Brahmin orthodoxy. The earliest extant use of Prakrit are the inscriptions of Asoka, emperor of Northern India, and while the various Prakrit languages are associated with different patron dynasties, with different religions and different literary traditions, none of them were at any time an informal "mother tongue" in any area of India.
In Sanskrit drama, kings speak in Prakrit when addressing women or servants, in contrast to the Sanskrit used in reciting more formal poetic monologues.
The three Dramatic Prakrits - Sauraseni, Magadhi, Maharashtri, as well as Jain Prakrit each represent a distinct tradition of literature within the history of India. Other Prakrits are reported in historical sources, but have no extant corpus (e.g., Paisaci).
Prakrit is foremost a native term, designating "vernaculars" as opposed to the artificial Sanskrit. Some modern scholars follow this classification by including all Middle Indo-Aryan languages under the rubric of "Prakrits", while others emphasise the independent development of these languages, often separated from the history of Sanskrit by wide divisions of caste, religion, and geography. Ardhamagadhi, which was used extensively to write Jain scriptures, is the definitive form of Prakrit, while others are considered variants.
[edit] The Apabhramshas
The Prakrits (which includes Pali) were gradually transformed into Apabhramshas which were used until about 13th century. The term Apabhramsha refers to the dialects of North India before the rise of modern North Indian languages. The term apabhramsha implies a corrupt or non-standard language. A significant amount of Apabhramsha literature has been found in Jain libraries. While Amir Khusro and Kabir were writing in a language quite similar to modern Hindi, many poets, specially in regions that were still ruled by Hindu kings, continued to write in Apabhramsha. The Apabhramsha authors include Sarahapad of Kamarupa, Devasena of Dhar (9th c. CE), Pushpadanta of Manyakhet (9th c. CE), Dhanapal, Muni Ramsimha, Hemachandra of Patan, Raighu of Gwalior (15th CE). An early example of the use of Apabhramsha is in Vikramuurvashiiya of Kalidasa, when Pururava asks the animals in the forest about his beloved who had disappeared.
[edit] Emergence of modern Indo-Aryan languages
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[edit] Dravidian languages
The origins of the Dravidian languages, as well as their subsequent development and the period of their differentiation, are unclear, and the situation is not helped by the lack of comparative linguistic research into the Dravidian languages. Inconclusive attempts have also been made to link the family with the Japonic languages, Basque, Korean, Sumerian, the Australian Aboriginal languages and the unknown language of the Indus valley civilisation.
Legends common to many Dravidian-speaking groups speak of their origin in a vast, now-sunken continent far to the south. Many linguists, however, tend to favour the theory that speakers of Dravidian languages spread southwards and eastwards through the Indian subcontinent, based on the fact that the southern Dravidian languages show some signs of contact with linguistic groups which the northern Dravidian languages do not. Proto-Dravidian is thought to have differentiated into Proto-North Dravidian, Proto-Central Dravidian and Proto-South Dravidian around 1500 BC, although some linguists have argued that the degree of differentiation between the sub-families points to an earlier split.
The existence of the Dravidian language family was first suggested in 1816 by Alexander D. Campbell in his Grammar of the Teloogoo Language, in which he and Francis W. Ellis argued that Tamil and Telugu were descended from a common, non-Indo-European ancestor. However, it was not until 1856 that Robert Caldwell published his Comparative grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian family of languages, which considerably expanded the Dravidian umbrella and established it as one of the major language groups of the world. Caldwell coined the term "Dravidian" from the Sanskrit drāvida, which was used in a 7th century text to refer to the languages of the south of India. The publication of the Dravidian etymological dictionary by T. Burrow and M. B. Emeneau was a landmark event in Dravidian linguistics.
[edit] Origins of Tamil
The origins of Tamil, like the other Dravidian languages, but unlike most of the other established literary languages of India, are independent of Sanskrit. Tamil has the oldest literature amongst the Dravidian languages (Hart, 1975), but dating the language and the literature precisely is difficult. Literary works in India or Sri Lanka were preserved either in palm leaf manuscripts (implying repeated copying and recopying) or through oral transmission, making direct dating impossible. External chronological records and internal linguistic evidence, however, indicates that the oldest extant works were probably composed sometime between the 5th century BCE and the 2nd century CE.
The earliest extant text in Tamil is the Tolkāppiyam, a work on poetics and grammar which describes the language of the classical period, the oldest portions of this book may date back to around 200 BCE (Hart, 1975). Preliminary results from archaeological excavations in 2005 suggest that the oldest inscriptions in Tamil may date at least to around 500 BCE[2]. Apart from these, the earliest examples of Tamil writing we have today are rock inscriptions from the 3rd century BCE, which are written in an adapted form of the Brahmi script (Mahadevan, 2003). Many Tamils argue in favour of a much earlier date for the literature by referring to Tamil legends of a lost continent, or by positing links to the Indus valley civilisation, the Sumerian Tammuz, and the Australian Kamilaroi, but none of these theories have been recognised by the mainstream scholarly community.
Linguists categorise Tamil literature and language into three periods: ancient (500 BCE to 700 CE), medieval (700 CE to 1500 CE) and modern (1500 CE to the present). During the medieval period, a number of Sanskrit loan words were absorbed by Tamil, which many 20th century purists, notably Parithimaar Kalaignar and Maraimalai Adigal, later sought to remove. This movement was called thanith thamizh iyakkam (meaning pure Tamil movement). As a result of this, Tamil in formal documents, public speeches and scientific discourses is largely free of Sanskrit loan words. Between 800 and 1300 CE, Malayalam is believed to have evolved into a distinct language.
[edit] Emergence of modern Dravidian languages
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[edit] Languages of other families in India
[edit] Tibeto-Burman languages
[edit] Austroasiatic languages
The Austroasiatic family of languages includes the Santal and Munda languages of eastern India, Nepal, and Bangladesh, along with the Mon-Khmer languages spoken in Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, and southern China. The Austroasiatic languages are thought to have been spoken throughout the Indian subcontinent by hunter-gatherers who were later assimilated first by the agriculturalist Dravidian settlers and later by the Indo-Europeans from Central Asia.
The Austroasiatic family is thought to be the first to be spoken in ancient India. Some believe the family to be a part of an Austric superstock of languages, along with the Austronesian language family.
[edit] Evolution of scripts
[edit] Indus script
The term Indus script refers to short strings of symbols associated with the Harappan civilization of ancient India (most of the Indus sites are distributed in present day North West India and Pakistan) used between 2600–1900 BC, which evolved from an early Indus script attested from around 3500–3300 BC. They are most commonly associated with flat, rectangular stone tablets called seals, but they are also found on at least a dozen other materials. The first publication of a Harappan seal dates to 1875, in the form of a drawing by Alexander Cunningham. Since then, well over 4000 symbol-bearing objects have been discovered, some as far afield as Mesopotamia. After 1500 BC, use of the symbols ends, together with the final stage of Harappan civilization. Some early scholars, starting with Cunningham in 1877, thought that the script was the archetype of the Brahmi script used by Ashoka. Today Cunningham's claims are rejected by a majority of researchers, but a minority of mostly Indian scholars continue to argue for the Indus script as the predecessor of the Brahmic family. There are over 400 different signs, but many are thought to be slight modifications or combinations of perhaps 200 'basic' signs.
- Attempts at decipherment
Over the years, numerous decipherments have been proposed, but none has been accepted by the scientific community at large. The following factors are usually regarded as the biggest obstacles for a successful decipherment:
- The substrate language has not been identified, nor the language family to which it belongs.
- The average length of the inscriptions is less than five signs, the longest being one of only 26 signs.
- No bilingual texts have been found.
The Finnish Indologist Asko Parpola, who has edited a multivolumed corpus of the inscriptions, surmises that the symbols represent a logo-syllabic script, with an underlying Dravidian language as the most likely linguistic substrate.
If the signs are purely ideographical, they may contain no information about the language spoken by their creators, and cannot be called a script in the true sense of the word. A recent paper by Steve Farmer, Richard Sproat, and Michael Witzel - a comparative historian, computational linguist, and Indologist respectively - offers evidence that the symbols were not coupled to oral language, which in part explains the extreme brevity of the inscriptions. For their paper, see the external links.
A number of writers associated with Hindutva have attempted to prove that the script encodes Vedic Sanskrit. R.S. Rajaram and N. Jha made one such claim. D. B. Kasar has compared the Indus script to Germanic runes and claims that IVC inscriptions contain Rigvedic hymns. These theories are not accepted by most scholars.
[edit] Brahmi script
The best known inscriptions in Brāhmī are the rock-cut edicts of Ashoka, dating to the 3rd century BC. These were long considered the earliest examples of Brahmi writing, but recent archeological evidence in Sri Lanka and Tamil Nadu suggest the dates for the earliest use of Brahmi to be around the 6th century BC, dated using radiocarbon and thermoluminescence dating methods.
This script is ancestral to most of the scripts of South Asia, Southeast Asia, Tibet, Mongolia, Manchuria, and perhaps even Korean Hangul. The Brāhmī numeral system is the ancestor of the Hindu-Arabic numerals, which are now used world-wide.
Brāhmī is generally believed to be derived from a Semitic script such as the Imperial Aramaic alphabet, as was clearly the case for the contemporary Kharosthi alphabet that arose in a part of northwest Indian under the control of the Achaemenid Empire. Rhys Davids suggests that writing may have been introduced to India from the Middle East by traders. Another possibility is with the Achaemenid conquest in the late 6th century BC. It was often assumed that it was a planned invention under Ashoka as a prerequiste for the his edicts. Compare the much better documented parallel of the Hangul script.
Older examples of the Brahmi script appear to be on fragments of pottery from the trading town of Anuradhapura in Sri Lanka, which have been dated to the early 5th century BC. Even earlier evidence of the Brahmi script has been discovered on pieces of pottery in Adichanallur, Tamil Nadu. Radio-carbon dating has established that they belonged to the 6th century BC. [3]
A minority position holds that Brāhmī was a purely indigenous development, perhaps with the Indus script as its predecessor; these include the English scholars G.R. Hunter and Raymond Allchin.
[edit] Kharosthi script
The Kharoṣṭhī script, also known as the Gāndhārī script, is an ancient abugida (a kind of alphabetic script) used by the Gandhara culture of historic northwest India to write the Gāndhārī and Sanskrit languages. It was in use from the 4th century BC until it died out in its homeland around the 3rd century AD. It was also in use along the Silk Road where there is some evidence it may have survived until the 7th century in the remote way stations of Khotan and Niya.
Scholars are not in agreement as to whether the Kharoṣṭhī script evolved gradually, or was the work of a mindful inventor. An analysis of the script forms shows a clear dependency on the Aramaic alphabet but with extensive modifications to support the sounds found in Indic languages. One model is that the Aramaic script arrived with the Achaemenid conquest of the region in 500 BC and evolved over the next 200+ years to reach its final form by the 3rd century BC. However, no intermediate forms have yet been found to confirm this evolutionary model, and rock and coins inscriptions from the 3rd century BC onward show a unified and mature form.
The study of the Kharoṣṭhī script was recently invigorated by the discovery of the Gandharan Buddhist Texts, a set of birch-bark manuscripts written in Kharoṣṭhī, discovered near the Afghanistan city of Hadda just west of the Khyber Pass. The manuscripts were donated to the British Library in 1994. The entire set of manuscripts are dated to the 1st century AD making them the oldest Buddhist manuscripts in existence.
[edit] Gupta script
The Gupta script was used for writing Sanskrit and is associated with the Gupta Empire of India which was a period of material prosperity and great religious and scientific developments. The Gupta script was descended from Brahmi and gave rise to the Siddham script.
[edit] Siddham script
Siddham (Sanskrit, accomplished or perfected), descended from the Brahmi script via the Gupta script, which also gave rise to the Devanāgarī script as well as a number of other Asian scripts such as Tibetan script.
Siddham is an abugida or alphasyllabary rather than an alphabet because each character indicates a syllable. If no other mark occurs then the short 'a' is assumed. Diacritic marks indicate the other vowels, the pure nasal, and the aspirated vowel. A special mark can be used to indicate that the letter stands alone with no vowel which sometimes happens at the end of Sanskrit words. See links below for examples.
The writing of mantras and copying of Sutras using the Siddham script is still practiced in Shingon Buddhism in Japan but has died out in other places. It was Kūkai who introduced the Siddham script to Japan when he returned from China in 806, where he studied Sanskrit with Nalanda trained monks including one known as Prajñā. Sutras that were taken to China from India were written in a variety of scripts, but Siddham was one of the most important. By the time Kūkai learned this script the trading and pilgrimage routes over land to India, part of the Silk Road, were closed by the expanding Islamic empire of the Abbasids. Then in the middle of the 9th century there were a series of purges of "foreign religions" in China. This meant that Japan was cut off from the sources of Siddham texts. In time other scripts, particularly Devanagari replaced it in India, and so Japan was left as the only place where Siddham was preserved, although it was, and is only used for writing mantras and copying sutras.
Siddham was influential in the development of the Kana writing system, which is also associated with Kūkai — while the Kana shapes derive from Chinese characters, the princlple of a syllable-based script and their systematic ordering was taken over from Siddham.
