Linguistic history of India

Originating over 5,000 years ago, the linguistic history of India describes the evolution and transformation of early human communications techniques - from pictures, pictorial scripts and engravings - to the modern Indian languages that belong to the Indo-Aryan languages and the Dravidian languages.

Indo-Aryan languages

Vedic Sanskrit

Sanskrit is a descendent of the Proto-Indo-European language. It belongs to the Indo-Aryan sub-family of the Indo-Iranian branch.
Vedic Sanskrit is the language of the Vedas, a large collection of hymns, incantations, and religio-philosophical discussions which form the earliest religious texts in India and the basis for much of the Hindu religion. Modern linguists consider the metrical hymns of the Rigveda Samhita to be the earliest, composed by many authors over centuries of oral tradition. The end of the Vedic period is marked by the composition of the Upanishads, which form the concluding part of the Vedic corpus in the traditional compilations, dated to roughly the middle of the first millennium BC. It is around this time that Sanskrit began the transition from a first language to a second language of religion and learning, marking the beginning of the Classical period.

Classical Sanskrit

The oldest surviving Sanskrit grammar is unicode|Pāṇini's unicode|Aṣtādhyāyī ("Eight-Chapter Grammar") dating to ca. the 5th century BC. It is essentially a prescriptive grammar, i.e., an authority that defines (rather than describes) correct Sanskrit, although it contains descriptive parts, mostly to account for Vedic forms that had already passed out of use in Unicode|Pāṇini's time.

When the term arose in India, "Sanskrit" was not thought of as a specific language set apart from other languages (the people of the time regarded languages more as dialects), but rather as a particularly refined or perfected manner of speaking. Knowledge of Sanskrit was a marker of social class and educational attainment and was taught mainly to Brahmins through close analysis of Sanskrit grammarians such as Unicode|Pāṇini.

Scholars often distinguish Vedic Sanskrit and Classical or "Paninian" Sanskrit as separate dialects. However, they are extremely similar in many ways and differ mostly in a few points of phonology, vocabulary, and grammar. Classical Sanskrit can therefore be considered a seamless evolution of the earlier Vedic language.Fact|date=July 2008

Emergence of Prakrits

Prakrit Unicode|(Sanskrit "prākṛta" प्राकृत (from "pra-kṛti" प्रकृति), "original, natural, artless, normal, ordinary, usual", i.e. "vernacular", in contrast to "samskrta" "excellently made", both adjectives elliptically referring to "vak" "speech") refers to the broad family of the Indic languages and dialects spoken in ancient India. Some modern scholars include all Middle Indo-Aryan languages under the rubric of "Prakrits", while others emphasise the independent development of these languages, often separated from the history of Sanskrit by wide divisions of caste, religion, and geography.

The Prakrits became literary languages, generally patronized by kings identified with the ksatriya caste. The earliest extant use of Prakrit are the inscriptions of Asoka, emperor of Northern India, and while the various Prakrit languages are associated with different patron dynasties, with different religions and different literary traditions.

In Sanskrit drama, kings speak in Prakrit when addressing women or servants, in contrast to the Sanskrit used in reciting more formal poetic monologues.

The three Dramatic Prakrits - Sauraseni, Magadhi, Maharashtri, as well as Jain Prakrit each represent a distinct tradition of literature within the history of India. Other Prakrits are reported in historical sources, but have no extant corpus (e.g., Paisaci).

Pali

Pali is a term used to describe the Middle Indo-Aryan language in which the Theravada Buddhist scriptures and commentarial texts are preserved. Pali believed by the Theravada tradition to be the same language as Magadhi, but modern scholars believe this to be unlikely. Pali shows signs of development from several underlying prakrits as well as some Sanskritisation.

The prakrit of the North-western area of India known as Gāndhāra has come to be called Gāndhārī. A few documents written in the Kharoṣṭhi script survive including a version of the Dhammapada.

Middle Indic

The Prakrits (which includes Pali) were gradually transformed into Apabhramshas which were used until about 13th century. The term Apabhramsha refers to the dialects of North India before the rise of modern North Indian languages. The term apabhramsha implies a corrupt or non-standard language. A significant amount of Apabhramsha literature has been found in Jain libraries. While Amir Khusro and Kabir were writing in a language quite similar to modern Urdu, Hindi, many poets, specially in regions that were still ruled by Hindu kings, continued to write in Apabhramsha. The Apabhramsha authors include Sarahapad of Kamarupa, Devasena of Dhar (9th c. AD), Pushpadanta of Manyakhet (9th c. AD), Dhanapal, Muni Ramsimha, Hemachandra of Patan, Raighu of Gwalior (15th AD). An early example of the use of Apabhramsha is in Vikramuurvashiiya of Kalidasa, when Pururava asks the animals in the forest about his beloved who had disappeared.

Emergence of modern Indo-Aryan languages

Dravidian languages

The Dravidian family of languages includes approximately 73 languages [ [http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=90422 Ethnologue] ] that are mainly spoken in southern India and northeastern Sri Lanka, as well as certain areas in Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, and eastern and central India, as well as in parts of Afghanistan and Iran, and overseas in other countries such as the UK, US, Canada, Malaysia and Singapore.

The origins of the Dravidian languages, as well as their subsequent development and the period of their differentiation, are unclear, and the situation is not helped by the lack of comparative linguistic research into the Dravidian languages. Inconclusive attempts have also been made to link the family with the Japonic languages, Basque, Korean, Sumerian, the Australian Aboriginal languages and the unknown language of the Indus valley civilisation.

Legends common to many Dravidian-speaking groups speak of their origin in a vast, now-sunken continent far to the south. Many linguists, however, tend to favour the theory that speakers of Dravidian languages spread southwards and eastwards through the Indian subcontinent, based on the fact that the southern Dravidian languages show some signs of contact with linguistic groups which the northern Dravidian languages do not. Proto-Dravidian is thought to have differentiated into Proto-North Dravidian, Proto-Central Dravidian and Proto-South Dravidian around 1500 BC, although some linguists have argued that the degree of differentiation between the sub-families points to an earlier split.

The existence of the Dravidian language family was first suggested in 1816 by Alexander D. Campbell in his "Grammar of the Teloogoo Language", in which he and Francis W. Ellis argued that Tamil and Telugu were descended from a common, non-Indo-European ancestor. However, it was not until 1856 that Robert Caldwell published his "Comparative grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian family of languages", which considerably expanded the Dravidian umbrella and established it as one of the major language groups of the world. Caldwell coined the term "Dravidian" from the Sanskrit "drāvida",evoled from the word ‘Tamil’ or ‘Tamilan’, which successively changed into ‘Dramila’, ‘Drami˜a’, ‘Dramida’ and ‘Dravida’ which was used in a 7th century text to refer to the languages of the south of India. The publication of the "Dravidian etymological dictionary" by T. Burrow and M. B. Emeneau was a landmark event in Dravidian linguistics.

Origins of Kannada

Kannada is one of the oldest Dravidian languages with an antiquity of at least 2000 years.Kamath (2001), pp5-6] "Purava HaleGannada" or Pre-old Kannada was the language of Banavasi in the early Christian era, the Satavahana and Kadamba eras (Wilks in Rice , B.L. (1897), p490)] cite web |title=The place of Kannada and Tamil in Indias national culture |url=http://web.archive.org/web/20070415154722/http://www.intamm.com/journalism/ta-jour3.htm |author=Sri K. Appadurai |publisher=Copyright INTAMM. 1997 |work= |accessdate=2006-11-25] Mahadevan, Iravatham (2003). "Early Tamil Epigraphy from the Earliest Times to the Sixth Century A.D." Cambridge, Harvard University Press. ISBN 0674012275] cite web |title=Early Tamil Epigraphy from the Earliest Times to the Sixth Century A.D |url=http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/MAHEAR.html |author=Iravatham Mahadevan|publisher= |work=Harvard University Press |accessdate=2007-04-12] The spoken language is said to have separated from its proto-Dravidian source earlier than Tamil and about the same time as Tulu. [ [http://lrrc3.sas.upenn.edu/popcult/MAPS/soudrav.gifA family tree of Dravidian languages] . Sourced from Encyclopaedia Britannica.] However, the archaeological evidence would indicate a written tradition for this language of around 1500-1600 years. The initial development of the Kannada language is similar to that of other Dravidian languages and independent of Sanskrit.Kittel (1993), p1-2] During later centuries, Kannada, along with other Dravidian languages like Telugu, Malayalam, etc., has been greatly influenced by Sanskrit in terms of vocabulary, grammar and literary styles."Literature in Kannada owes a great deal to Sanskrit, the magic wand whose touch raised Kannada from a level of patois to that of a literary idiom". (Sastri 1955, p309)]

tone inscriptions

The first written record in the Kannada language is traced to Emperor Ashoka's "Brahmagiri edict" dated 230 BC.The word "Isila" found in the Ashokan inscription (called the Brahmagiri edict from Karnataka) meaning to "shoot an arrow" is a Kannada word, indicating that Kannada was a spoken language in the third century BC (Dr. D.L. Narasimhachar in Kamath 2001, p5)] cite web|url=http://www.hindu.com/2005/05/27/stories/2005052703230500.htm|title=Declare Kannada a classical language|work=Online webpage of The Hindu|publisher=The Hindu|accessdate=2007-06-29] The first example of a full-length Kannada language stone inscription ("shilashaasana") containing Brahmi characters with characteristics resembling those of Tamil in "Hale Kannada" ("Old Kannada") script can be found in the Halmidi inscription, dated c. 450, indicating that Kannada had become an administrative language by this time.Ramesh (1984), p10] A report on Halmidi inscription, cite web |title=Halmidi village finally on the road to recognition |url=http://www.hindu.com/2003/11/03/stories/2003110304550500.htm |author=Muralidhara Khajane |publisher=The Hindu |work=The Hindu, Monday, 3 November 2003 |accessdate=2006-11-25] Kamath (2001), p10] Over 30,000 inscriptions written in the Kannada language have been discovered so far.cite web |title=Press demand for according classical status to Kannada|url=http://www.hindu.com/2006/04/17/stories/2006041707890400.htm|author=Staff Reporter|publisher=The Hindu|work=The Hindu, Monday, 17 April 2006 |accessdate=2007-06-29] The Chikkamagaluru inscription of 500 AD is another example.Narasimhacharya (1988), p6] Rice (1921), p13] Prior to the Halmidi inscription, there is an abundance of inscriptions containing Kannada words, phrases and sentences, proving its antiquity. The 543 AD Badami cliff "shilashaasana" of Pulakesi I is an example of a Sanskrit inscription in "Hale Kannada" script.Kamath (2001), p58] cite web |title=Badami: Chalukyans' magical transformation |url=http://www.deccanherald.com/deccanherald/jul262005/spectrum1422512005725.asp |author=Azmathulla Shariff |publisher=Deccan Herald |work=Spectrum, Deccan Herald, Tuesday, July 26 2005 |accessdate=2006-11-25]

Copper plates and manuscripts

accessdate=2007-04-11] The manuscript contains 1478 leaves written in ink.

Origins of Tamil

The origins of Tamil, like the other Dravidian languages, but unlike most of the other established literary languages of India, are independent of Sanskrit. Tamil has the oldest literature amongst the Dravidian languages (Hart, 1975), but dating the language and the literature precisely is difficult. Literary works in India or Sri Lanka were preserved either in palm leaf manuscripts (implying repeated copying and recopying) or through oral transmission, making direct dating impossible. External chronological records and internal linguistic evidence, however, indicates that the oldest extant works were probably composed sometime between the 5th century BC and the 2nd century.

The earliest extant text in Tamil is the Tolkāppiyam, a work on poetics and grammar which describes the language of the classical period, the oldest portions of this book may date back to around 200 BC (Hart, 1975). Preliminary results from archaeological excavations in 2005 suggest that the oldest inscriptions in Tamil may date at least to around 500 BC [http://www.hindu.com/2005/02/17/stories/2005021704471300.htm] . Apart from these, the earliest examples of Tamil writing we have today are rock inscriptions from the 3rd century BC, which are written in an adapted form of the Brahmi script (Mahadevan, 2003). Many Tamils argue in favour of a much earlier date for the literature by referring to Tamil legends of a lost continent, or by positing links to the Indus valley civilisation, the Sumerian Tammuz, and the Australian Kamilaroi, but none of these theories have been recognised by the mainstream scholarly community.

Linguists categorise Tamil literature and language into three periods: ancient (500 BC to 700 AD), medieval (700 to 1500) and modern (1500 to the present). During the medieval period, a number of Sanskrit loan words were absorbed by Tamil, which many 20th century purists, notably Parithimaar Kalaignar and Maraimalai Adigal, later sought to remove. This movement was called "thanith thamizh iyakkam" (meaning "pure Tamil movement"). As a result of this, Tamil in formal documents, public speeches and scientific discourses is largely free of Sanskrit loan words. Between 800 and 1300, Malayalam is believed to have evolved from Tamil into a distinct language.

Languages of other families in India

Tibeto-Burman languages

Meitei language, Bodo language, Naga language, Garo language

Austroasiatic languages

The Austroasiatic family of languages includes the Santal and Munda languages of eastern India, Nepal, and Bangladesh, along with the Mon-Khmer languages spoken by the Khasi and Nicobarese in India and in Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, and southern China. The Austroasiatic languages are thought to have been spoken throughout the Indian subcontinent by hunter-gatherers who were later assimilated first by the agriculturalist Dravidian settlers and later by the Indo-Europeans from Central Asia.

The Austroasiatic family is thought to be the first to be spoken in ancient India. Some believe the family to be a part of an Austric superstock of languages, along with the Austronesian language family.

Indo-Pacific languages

According to Joseph Greenberg, the Andamanese languages of the Andaman Islands and the Nihali language of central India are thought to be Indo-Pacific languages related to the Papuan languages of New Guinea, Timor, Halmahera, New Britain,etc. Nihali has been shown to be related to Kusunda of central Nepal. However, the proposed Indo-Pacific relationship has not been established through the comparative method, and has been dismissed as speculation by most comparative linguists.

Nihali and Kusunda are spoken by hunting people living in forests. Both languages have accepted many loan words from other languages, Nihali having loans from Munda (Korku), Dravidian and Indic languages.

Evolution of scripts

Indus script

The term Indus script refers to short strings of symbols associated with the Harappan civilization of ancient India (most of the Indus sites are distributed in present-day Pakistan and northwest India) used between 2600–1900 BC, which evolved from an early Indus script attested from around 3500–3300 BC. They are most commonly associated with flat, rectangular stone tablets called seals, but they are also found on at least a dozen other materials. The first publication of a Harappan seal dates to 1875, in the form of a drawing by Alexander Cunningham. Since then, well over 4000 symbol-bearing objects have been discovered, some as far afield as Mesopotamia. After 1500 BC, use of the symbols ends, together with the final stage of Harappan civilization. There are over 400 different signs, but many are thought to be slight modifications or combinations of perhaps 200 'basic' signs. The symbols remain undeciphered (in spite of numerous attempts that did not find favour with the academic community), and most scholars tend to classify then as proto-writing rather than writing proper.

Brahmi script

[
thumb|280px|right|An_example_of_Brāhmī_script_-_AshokaGirnar.] The best known inscriptions in Unicode|Brāhmī are the rock-cut edicts of Ashoka, dating to the 3rd century BC. These were long considered the earliest examples of Brahmi writing, but recent archeological evidence in Sri Lanka and Tamil Nadu suggest the dates for the earliest use of Brahmi to be around the 6th century BC, dated using radiocarbon and thermoluminescence dating methods.

This script is ancestral to most of the scripts of South Asia, Southeast Asia, Tibet, Mongolia, Manchuria, and perhaps even Korean Hangul. The Brāhmī numeral system is the ancestor of the Hindu-Arabic numerals, which are now used world-wide.

Unicode|Brāhmī is generally believed to be derived from a Semitic script such as the Imperial Aramaic alphabet, as was clearly the case for the contemporary Kharosthi alphabet that arose in a part of northwest Indian under the control of the Achaemenid Empire. Rhys Davids suggests that writing may have been introduced to India from the Middle East by traders. Another possibility is with the Achaemenid conquest in the late 6th century BC. It was often assumed that it was a planned invention under Ashoka as a prerequiste for the his edicts. Compare the much better documented parallel of the Hangul script.

Older examples of the Brahmi script appear to be on fragments of pottery from the trading town of Anuradhapura in Sri Lanka, which have been dated to the early 5th century BC. Even earlier evidence of the Brahmi script has been discovered on pieces of pottery in Adichanallur, Tamil Nadu. Radio-carbon dating has established that theybelonged to the 6th century BC. [http://www.orientalthane.com/archaeology/news_2004_05_31_1.htm]

A minority position holds that Unicode|Brāhmī was a purely indigenous development, perhaps with the Indus script as its predecessor; these include the English scholars G.R. Hunter and F. Raymond Allchin.

Kharosthi script

The Unicode|Kharoṣṭhī script, also known as the Unicode|Gāndhārī script, is an ancient abugida (a kind of alphabetic script) used by the Gandhara culture of historic northwest India to write the Gāndhārī and Sanskrit languages. It was in use from the 4th century BC until it died out in its homeland around the 3rd century AD. It was also in use along the Silk Road where there is some evidence it may have survived until the 7th century in the remote way stations of Khotan and Niya.

Scholars are not in agreement as to whether the Unicode|Kharoṣṭhī script evolved gradually, or was the work of a mindful inventor. An analysis of the script forms shows a clear dependency on the Aramaic alphabet but with extensive modifications to support the sounds found in Indic languages. One model is that the Aramaic script arrived with the Achaemenid conquest of the region in 500 BC and evolved over the next 200+ years to reach its final form by the 3rd century BC. However, no Aramaic documents of any kin have survived from this period. Also intermediate forms have yet been found to confirm this evolutionary model, and rock and coins inscriptions from the 3rd century BC onward show a unified and mature form.

The study of the Unicode|Kharoṣṭhī script was recently invigorated by the discovery of the Gandharan Buddhist Texts, a set of birch-bark manuscripts written in Kharoṣṭhī, discovered near the Afghanistan city of Hadda just west of the Khyber Pass. The manuscripts were donated to the British Library in 1994. The entire set of manuscripts are dated to the 1st century AD making them the oldest Buddhist manuscripts in existence.

Gupta script

The Gupta script was used for writing Sanskrit and is associated with the Gupta Empire of India which was a period of material prosperity and great religious and scientific developments. The Gupta script was descended from Brahmi and gave rise to the Siddham script.

iddhaṃ script

Siddhaṃ (Sanskrit, accomplished or perfected), descended from the Brahmi script via the Gupta script, which also gave rise to the Devanāgarī script as well as a number of other Asian scripts such as Tibetan script.

Siddhaṃ is an abugida or alphasyllabary rather than an alphabet because each character indicates a syllable. If no other mark occurs then the short 'a' is assumed. Diacritic marks indicate the other vowels, the pure nasal (anusvara), and the aspirated vowel (visarga). A special mark (virama), can be used to indicate that the letter stands alone with no vowel which sometimes happens at the end of Sanskrit words. See links below for examples.

The writing of mantras and copying of Sutras using the Siddhaṃ script is still practiced in Shingon Buddhism in Japan but has died out in other places. It was Kūkai who introduced the Siddham script to Japan when he returned from China in 806, where he studied Sanskrit with Nalanda trained monks including one known as Prajñā. Sutras that were taken to China from India were written in a variety of scripts, but Siddham was one of the most important. By the time Kūkai learned this script the trading and pilgrimage routes over land to India, part of the Silk Road, were closed by the expanding Islamic empire of the Abbasids. Then in the middle of the 9th century there were a series of purges of "foreign religions" in China. This meant that Japan was cut off from the sources of Siddham texts. In time other scripts, particularly Devanagari replaced it in India, and so Japan was left as the only place where Siddham was preserved, although it was, and is only used for writing mantras and copying sutras.

Siddhaṃ was influential in the development of the Kana writing system, which is also associated with Kūkaindash while the Kana shapes derive from Chinese characters, the princlple of a syllable-based script and their systematic ordering was taken over from Siddham.

Nagari script

Descended from the Siddham script around eleventh century.

Modern scripts

ee also

* Indo-Aryan loanwords in Tamil

References

*Steve Farmer, Richard Sproat, and Michael Witzel, " The Collapse of the Indus-Script Thesis: The Myth of a Literate Harappan Civilization", EVJS, vol. 11 (2004), issue 2 (Dec) [http://users.primushost.com/~india/ejvs/ejvs1102/ejvs1102article.pdf] (PDF)
*Scharfe, Harmut. Kharoṣṭhī and Brāhmī. Journal of the American Oriental Society. 122 (2) 2002, p.391-3.
*Stevens, John. Sacred Calligraphy of the East. [3rd ed. Rev.] (Boston : Shambala, 1995)

External links

*Omniglot alphabets for [http://www.omniglot.com/writing/kharosthi.htm Kharoṣṭhī] , [http://www.omniglot.com/writing/brahmi.htm Brahmi] , [http://www.omniglot.com/writing/siddham.htm Siddham] , [http://www.omniglot.com/writing/devanagari.htm Devanāgarī] .
* [http://www.cs.colostate.edu/~malaiya/scripts.html Indian Scripts and Languages]
* [http://www.visiblemantra.org/index.html Siddham Calligraphy]