Re: [tied] MIA and Vedic

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 12356
Date: 2002-02-14

Classical Sanskrit is an artificially codified literary language. The Middle and Modern Indo-Aryan languages do not derive directly from it but from vernacular varieties of Old Indo-Aryan, which were not identical with Sanskrit in all respects. Vedic is not a monolithic language but a temporally stratified collection (and mixture) of different dialects -- accidentally surviving members of a larger dialectal network from which Middle Indo-Aryan evolved. There's nothing untypical about this situation. Modern standard English is not directly descended from King Alfred's Old West Saxon (which owes its place in Histories of the English Language merely to being a particularly well recorded variety of Old English), and the Romance languages are not descended for Classical Latin but from the popular dialects of the provinces. Models of linguistic history showing lineal descent from one well-documented historical stage to another are at best a didactically useful simplification, ignoring both the extent of dialectal variation in the past and "reticulate" effects in the development of literary languages (which often combine elements of originally distinct dialects).
 
Piotr
 
 
----- Original Message -----
From: michael_donne
To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Thursday, February 14, 2002 2:42 AM
Subject: [tied] MIA and Vedic

I read somewhere that the modern Indian languages are descended from
the Middle Indo-Aryan languages (Prakrits, etc.) but that they are
not directly descended from Vedic Sanskrit. Is this true? How can it
be true?

If so, are they descended from Classical Sanskrit?

How did such a disconnect occur?