Origin of Classical Sanskrit

Abstract

It is controversial to determine whether Classical Sanskrit is a refinement of Vedic language or an artificial language independent from Vedic language. Keith and others have advocated the former view, i.e. a modification of Vedic language, whereas Chattergi, Sukumaran Senn and some others have explained latter, i.e. Sanskrit is an artificially created language by Grammarians like Pā ini. There are enough evidences for sustaining these two views. Providing that this latter view is correct, additional problem arises that whether Sanskrit belongs to Indo-European language family spread over Euro-Asian language zone or not. To elucidate the fact, the concepts like phonetical variation of Vedic and Classical Sanskrit, morphemes, conjugation of verbs and so on will be linguistically analysed in this paper. Besides, views of modern scholarships too on this regard will be examined logically. The analysis of the current facts show that Vedic language is comparatively complicated while Classical Sanskrit has systematic refinement. Sanskrit on good ground appears to be an edition of Vedic language, and the artificial characteristics might be a result of this editing, which concludes that Sanskrit is an extension of Vedic language.