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Vedic Sanskrit is an Old Indo-Aryan language. It is the spoken ancestor of liturgical Sanskrit, and an early descendant of Proto-Indo-Aryan. It is closely related to Avestan, the oldest preserved of the Iranian languages. Vedic Sanskrit is the oldest attested language of the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages.
Vedic Sanskrit is the language of the Vedas, texts compiled over the period of early-to-mid 2nd to mid 1st millennium BCE. It was orally-preserved as a part of the Śrauta tradition of Vedic chanting, predating the advent of alphabetic writing in India by several centuries. For lack of both epigraphic evidence and an unbroken manuscript tradition, Vedic Sanskrit is one of the languages that can't be translated accurately in this age. Especially the oldest stage of the language, Rigvedic Sanskrit, the language of the hymns of the Rigveda, is preserved only in a redacted form several centuries younger than the texts' composition. Recovering its original form is a matter of linguistic reconstruction.[1]
From about the 4th century BCE, in the classical period of Iron Age India, Vedic Sanskrit gave way to Classical Sanskrit as defined by the grammar of Pāṇini.
In spite of being comparatively close to the reconstructed form of the Proto-Indo-Iranian language, extant Vedic Sanskrit is already clearly marked as a language of the Indic group. Among the phonological changes from Proto-Indo-Iranian is the loss of the /z/ and /ž/ phonemes, and the introduction of a series of retroflex consonants. For example, Proto-Indo-Iranian *nižda- "nest" gives Vedic nīḍa- "resting-place, seat, abode", involving both the loss of *ž (accompanied with a lengthening of the *i to ī) and the substitution of the retroflex ḍ for *d. On the side of vocabulary, Rigvedic Sanskrit shows a considerable number of loanwords taken from an indigenous Indian source. This substratum influence on early Vedic Sanskrit also extends to phonetic, morphological and syntactical features, and is variously traced to the Dravidian or Munda language families.
The separation of the Indo-Aryan peoples proper from the undifferentiated Proto-Indo-Iranian ancestor group is commonly dated, on linguistic grounds, to roughly 1800 BCE.[2] The composition of the oldest hymns of the Rigveda is dated to several centuries after this division, or to roughly 1500 BCE.[3] Both Asko Parpola (1988) and J. P. Mallory (1998) place the locus of the division of Indo-Aryan from Iranian in the Bronze Age culture of the Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC). Parpola (1999) elaborates the model and has "Proto-Rigvedic" Indo-Aryans intrude the BMAC around 1700 BCE. He assumes early Indo-Aryan presence in the Late Harappan horizon from about 1900 BCE, and "Proto-Rigvedic" (Proto-Dardic) intrusion to the Punjab as corresponding to the Gandhara grave culture from about 1700 BCE. According to this model, Rigvedic Sanskrit within the larger Indo-Aryan group is the direct ancestor of the Dardic languages.[4] The hymns of the Rigveda are thus composed in a sacred language which was based on the natural language spoken in Gandhara during the early phase of the Gandhara grave culture at the end of Bronze Age India. This liturgical language over the following centuries came to be separated from spoken vernaculars and came to be known as the "artificial" or "elaborated" (saṃskṛta) language, contrasted to the "natural" or "unrefined" prākṛta vernaculars by the end of the Vedic period.
Five chronologically distinct strata can be identified within the Vedic language (Witzel 1989).
Around 500 BCE, cultural, political and linguistic factors all contribute to the end of the Vedic period. The codification of Vedic ritual reached its peak, and countermovements such as the Vedanta and early Buddhism emerged, using the vernacular Pali, a Prakrit, rather than Sanskrit for their texts. Darius I invaded the Indus Valley and the political center of the Indo-Aryan kingdoms shifted eastward to the Indo-Gangetic Plain. Around this time (4th century BCE), Pāṇini fixes the grammar of Classical Sanskrit.
Sound changes between Proto-Indo-Iranian and Vedic Sanskrit include loss of the voiced sibilant z.
Vedic Sanskrit had a bilabial fricative [ɸ], called upadhmānīya, and a velar fricative [x], called jihvamuliya. These are both allophones of visarga: upadhmaniya occurs before p and ph, jihvamuliya before k and kh. Vedic also had a retroflex l, an intervocalic allophone of ḍ, represented in Devanagari with the separate symbol ळ and transliterated as ḷ or ḷh. In order to disambiguate vocalic l from retroflex l, ISO 15919 transliterates vocalic l with a ring below the letter, l̥. (Vocalic r is then also represented with a ring, r̥, for consistency and to disambiguate it additionally from the retroflex ṛ and ṛh of some modern Indian languages.)
Vedic Sanskrit had a pitch accent. Since a small number of words in the late pronunciation of Vedic carry the so-called "independent svarita" on a short vowel, one can argue that late Vedic was marginally a tonal language. Note however that in the metrically restored versions of the Rig Veda almost all of the syllables carrying an independent svarita must revert to a sequence of two syllables, the first of which carries an udātta and the second a (so called) dependent svarita. Early Vedic was thus definitely not a tonal language but a pitch accent language. See Vedic accent.
Pāṇini gives accent rules for the spoken language of his (post-Vedic) time, though there is no extant post-Vedic text with accents.
The pluti vowels (trimoraic vowels) were on the verge of becoming phonological during middle Vedic, but disappeared again.
Vedic Sanskrit differs from Classical Sanskrit to an extent comparable to the difference between Homeric Greek and Classical Greek. Tiwari ([1955] 2005) lists the following principal differences between the two:
Vedic had a subjunctive mood absent in Pāṇini's grammar and generally believed to have disappeared by then at least in common sentence constructions. All tenses could be conjugated in the subjunctive and optative moods, in contrast to Classical Sanskrit, with no subjunctive and only a present optative. (However, the old first-person subjunctive forms were used to complete the Classical Sanskrit imperative.) The three synthetic past tenses (imperfect, perfect and aorist) were still clearly distinguished semantically in (at least the earliest) Vedic, although not at all with the semantics that would be implied by their name. Rather, the imperfect was a narrative tense, similar to the Greek aorist; the perfect was often indistinguishable from the present tense, although possibly with a stative meaning; and the aorist had a meaning similar to the Greek perfect. A fifth mood, the injunctive, also existed.
Long-i stems differentiate the Devi and Vrkis feminines, a difference lost in Classical Sanskrit.
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Ṛta, Vedic Sanskrit, Mitra, Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture, Indra