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 -----
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?