Re: Mapping the Origins and Expansion of the Indo-European Language

From: Rick McCallister
Message: 70081
Date: 2012-09-21

Sanskrit didn't appear until long after the invasion of India. I'm guessing c. 500 BCE, shortly before writing made its way to India. Old Indian was previously spoken. Before Old Indian,  Indo-Iranian was spoken perhaps 500 years before the invasion of India but others know much more than I do
 
 

From: shivkhokra <shivkhokra@...>
To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Thursday, September 20, 2012 10:54 PM
Subject: [tied] Re: Mapping the Origins and Expansion of the Indo-European Language Family

 


--- In mailto:cybalist%40yahoogroups.com, Rick McCallister <gabaroo6958@...> wrote:
>
> Thanks for taking the time to enlighten us. So, Sanskrit itself may have been the languages of one of the earliest prestigious courts and then became a "stylized" language.
> To see fully developed ancient court languages as ur-languages is a fallacy rooted in Platonic recollection. It follows Baxtin's epic chronotope in seeing the past as a golden age and the present as a a degenerate time.
> Sanskrit is a fully developed court language and could only have developed after a group of Indo-Aryans formed a sophisticated polity. Only an advanced culture could have produced an advanced language capable as the linguistic vehicle of Classical Indian literature. The works may well have had antecedents in earlier related languages but what we have is the result of a refined court culture.
>
>

But whose court? What kings do we have between the steppes and India before Aryans invaded India? And where would this kingdom be located? And what language would this kingdom speak?

Shivraj

> ________________________________
> From: Richard Wordingham <richard.wordingham@...>
> To: mailto:cybalist%40yahoogroups.com
> Sent: Monday, September 17, 2012 5:36 AM
> Subject: [tied] Re: Mapping the Origins and Expansion of the Indo-European Language Family
>
>
>  
> --- In mailto:cybalist%40yahoogroups.com, Rick McCallister <gabaroo6958@> wrote:
> >
> > Someone please explain to Shivkhokra the origin of Indo-Aryan languages. My understanding is that they are derived from Prakrits, i.e. local spoken languages that came from Old Indian, the ancestor of Sanskrit, which was and is, a written language. Sanskrit was used in the court, by the priests, etc. but was a polished artificial language, rather like Classical Latin. Just as Spanish, French, etc. did not descend from Classical Latin, but form Vulgar Latin, Indo-Aryan languages came from the local spoken analogues of Sanskrits, the Prakrits. This is my understanding of the matter. But it is superficial.
>
> It might be better to describe Sanskrit as a *recited* language rather than a *written* language. We have the perverse situation that the Prakrits were written before Sanskrit even though Sanskrit shows every sign of being more archaic phonetically. The Indic writing system seems to be designed to handle Prakrits, especially with the simplification of not marking geminate consonants as geminate, a phenomenon also seen in Old Latin.
>
> We also have the confusing situation that literary Sanskrit borrowed from the early Prakrits, so in _cakrava:la_ 'universe' we have Sanskrit /l/ < Pali /l./!
>
> Until recently the oldest Sanskrit inscriptions came from SE Asia and were within a few hundred years of Gothic. It now seems that a much earlier one has been identified in India.
>
> I'm not sure that the difference between Sanskrit and reconstructed Proto-Modern Indic is analogous to the distinction Classical Latin and Vulgar Latin; I had the impression that it might be more akin to the distinction between (West Saxon) Old English and (most) Modern English, which descends from Anglian dialects. (The distinction does seem sound, regardless of what version of the Anglo-Saxon Invasion Theory you hold to.)
>
> The point here would be that Sanskrit had a regional bias - but I do not have facts or analyses to hand, so for now treat what I'm saying as speculative. There have been remarks on a similar disconnect between Vedic and Classical Sanskrit.
>
> To answer Shivraj's post properly, I need to check details, which is why I had been hoping someone else would do the blooming work. I don't have the resource to check first attestations of individual words. It may get even trickier if we go for dates of manuscripts rather than originals of which they may be an imperfect copy.
>
> Richard.
>