Re: [tied] MIA and Vedic

Epic Sanskrit, the language of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, represents the usage of bards who had not had the privilege of a brahminic college education, and is accordingly more "natural" (that is, less strait-jacketed by codified prescriptions) than Classical Sanskrit. Anyway, the position of Vedic and Sanskrit proper with regard to the Middle Indo-Aryan vernaculars was just like that of, respectively, Classical and Mediaeval school Latin with regard to French, Italian, Provencal or Spanish during the Middle Ages. Mediaeval Latin was an artificially codified language used by the educated (though it was nobody's mother tongue), developed out of the literary variety of a natural but dead language. The Romance languages developed independently from the dialect network of regional Latins. Standard spoken Latin (the "sermo cotidianus" of Rome's polite society) and Classical Latin, its literary emanation, are not directly ancestral to French etc.

Piotr

----- Original Message -----
From: wtsdv

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Sunday, February 17, 2002 9:23 AM

Subject: Re: [tied] MIA and Vedic

> Fascinating. So basically the ancient forms of Sanskrit are only > distantly related to the modern Indian languages in that there is > no clear lineage? The modern languages emerged from some other, > presumably Sanskrit, dialect than the ones that are recorded in > the Vedas and later classical Sanskrit texts? Part of the misunderstanding here is caused by the common misuse of 'Sanskrit' to mean Old Indo-Aryan. It doesn't even properly apply to Vedic which was 'one' dialect of Old Indo- Aryan, but only to that particular form of Old Indo-Aryan codified by Panini and Company to preserve it against further change after it had begun its natural evolution into Middle Indo-Aryan (Pali, Prakrit and Apabhramsa) and on into the Modern Indo-Aryan languages.