Paisaci

Paisaci, also known as Paisachi, or Paishachi, is an extinct language of classical India, its existence as a medium of debate and literary expression is recorded in various Theravada Buddhist sources, and mentioned in Prakrit and Sanskrit grammars of antiquity.

There are no extant works in this language today, although archaeology may yet uncover them.One famous work was supposedly the "Brihat-katha", or "Brahatkatham" (Ocean of Stories), a collection of short stories written in the 5th century BC. It is known of through its adaptation in Sanskrit as the "Katha-Saritsagara" in the 11th century by Somadeva. One of the famous series of stories in this work is the "Vikram and Vetaal" series.

The Sanskrit etymology of the name of the language (suggesting that it means "Spoken by Demons") is deemed by modern scholars to be either jocular or simply false. As with most languages, the name seems to be devolved from a toponym associated with the origin or homeland of the language.

It is not precisely known to what extent this was a vernacular or an artificial, literary language, comparable to Pāli.

External links

* [http://linguistlist.org/forms/langs/LLDescription.cfm?code=qpp Linguist List of Paisaci Prakrit]