one of the principal Old Indic languages of the Indo-European family of languages, which was developed into a literary language.
Sanskrit was spoken in northern India from the first century B.C. The language is characterized by a strictly normalized grammar and a standardized system of rules. Sanskrit differs from the Prakrits in that the former is a language developed to formal perfection, as indicated by the word samskrta, which literally means “perfected.” It is also distinguished from Vedic, an archaic language with little standardization, and from the other ancient Indic dialects from which the Prakrits derived. Sanskrit, a language of fiction, religion, philosophy, law, and science, influenced the culture of Southeast and Central Asia and Western Europe. It influenced the development of the languages of India, primarily in the area of vocabulary, and the development of other languages within the sphere of Sanskrit or Buddhist culture, such as the Kawi and Tibetan languages. In India, Sanskrit is used as a language of the humanities and in worship and is also spoken as a conversational language by a small circle of people.
There are several types of Sanskrit. Epic Sanskrit, the language of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, is more archaic and less normalized. Classical Sanskrit, the standardized language of an extensive literature, was described by ancient Indian grammarians and occupies a central position among the various types of Sanskrit. Vedic Sanskrit, the language of the late Vedic texts, was influenced by the Sanskrit of its time. Buddhist hybrid Sanskrit and Jain Sanskrit are the middle Indic languages of the Buddhist and Jain scriptures, respectively.
Sanskrit uses various scripts deriving from Brahmi, including Kharoshthi, Kushan, Gupta, Nagari, and Devanagari. The phonetics and phonology of the language are characterized by three pure vowels (a, e, and o), two phonemes with vowel and consonant allophones (i/y and u/v), and two liquid consonants that can be syllabic (r and l). The system of consonants is highly ordered. There are five groups: labials, dentals, retroflexes, velars, and palatals. Each group is divided into voiced and unvoiced and aspirated and nonaspirated phonemes. The prosody of Sanskrit is characterized by a movable accent, the pitch of the stressed syllable, and long and short syllables. The numerous rules of sandhi determine the behavior of phonemes at the junctures of morphemes and words. A morphonemic peculiarity of the language is the presence of three types of roots, depending upon the length of vowels. The morphology is characterized by an eight-case system of nouns, three genders, and three numbers. The verb has a developed system of tenses and moods. The syntax depends on the nature of the text: some texts exhibit a richness of inflected forms, whereas others have a predominance of compound words and analytic forms of tense and voice. The vocabulary is rich and stylistically varied.
Sanskrit was first studied in Europe in the late 18th century. In the early 19th century Sanskrit played a decisive role in the emergence of comparative-historical linguistics.
V. N. TOPOROV