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Sanskrit

03-08-2020

Sanskrit is an Old Indo-Aryan language. As one of the oldest documented members of the Indo-European family of languages. Sanskrit holds a prominent position in Indo-European studies. It is related to Greek and Latin, as well as Hittite,  Luwian , Old Avestan and many other living and extinct languages with historical significance to Europe, West Asia, Central Asia and South Asia. It traces its linguistic ancestry to the Proto-Indo-Aryan, Proto-Indo-Iranian and Proto-Indo-European Languages. Sanskrit holds a prominent position in Indo-European studies. Sanskrit is traceable to the 2nd millennium BCE in a form known as Vedic Sanskrit, with the Rigveda as the earliest-known composition. A more refined and standardized grammatical form called Classical Sanskrit emerged in the mid-1st millennium BCE with the Ashtadhyayi treatise of Panini. Sanskrit, though not necessarily Classical Sanskrit, is the root language of many Prakrit languages. Examples include numerous, modern, North Indian, subcontinental daughter languages such as Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Punjabi, Gujarati, Sindhi, Kashmiri, Kumaoni, Garhwali, Urdu, Dogri, Maithili, Konkani, Assamese, Odia, and Nepali. Sanskrit has significantly influenced the grammar, phonology and vocabulary of the Kannada, Telugu, Tamil and Malayalam languages of South India. The earliest known inscriptions in Sanskrit are from the 1st century BCE, such as the few discovered in Ayodhya and Ghosundi-Hathibada (Chittorgarh). Sanskrit texts dated to the 1st millennium CE were written in the Brahmi script, the Nagari script, the historic South Indian scripts and their derivative scripts. Sanskrit is one of the 22 languages listed in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution of India.There are 52 letters used in Sanskrit language comprising 16 vowels and 32 consonants. Lipi is the term in Sanskrit which means “writing, letters, alphabets”.  More than 3,000 Sanskrit works have been composed since India's independence in 1947. Sanskrit is a living language and spoken as a primary language in some villages in India. It is taught in a large number of schools in India. It also continues to be widely used as a ceremonial and ritual language in Hinduism and some Buddhist practices such as recitation of hymns and chants.Sanskrit is a living language and spoken as a primary language in some villages in India. The Sampurnanand university is the  first sanskrit university established in 1791 at varanasi, Uttar Pradesh. Moksha is the character and form of human salvation, as described in the Upanishads. Sramana refers to several Indian religious movements that existed alongside the Vedic religion, the historical predecessor of modern Hinduism. Brahman is the nature of ultimate reality, as described in the Upanishads. Upanishads is a collection of Vedic texts that contain the earliest emergence of some of the central religious concepts of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism.Upanishads are commonly referred to as vedanta. Kalidasa is the immortal poet and playwright of India and a peerless genius whose works became famous worldwide in the modern world. Translation of Kalidasa’s works in numerous Indian and Foreign Languages has spread his fame all over the world and now he ranks among the top poets of all times. Rabindranath Tagore, not only propagated the works of Kalidasa but also expounded their meanings and philosophy that made him an immortal poet dramatist. “To acquire the mastery of the language is almost a labour of a life; is acknowledged by William Cooke Taylor”.