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History of Sanskrit
Sanskrit is originated as Vedic Sanskrit as early as 1700-1200 BCE, and was orally preserved as a part of the Vedic chanting tradition. The scholar Panini standardized Vedic Sanskrit into Classical Sanskrit when he defined the grammar, around 500 BCE.
History of Sanskrit
Sanskrit (fàn), one of the Indian languages. (English: Sanskrit language, Devanagari writing: संस्कृतावाक्, Latin transliteration: saṃskṛtāvāk, abbreviated as संस्कृतम्, saṃskṛtam), Chinese Buddhists call this language the patron saint of Buddhism / Sanskrit created by Sanskrit.
Modern linguistic research shows that Sanskrit is a language of the Indo-European language family, one of the oldest languages of the Indo-European language family, and has a great influence on the Sino-Tibetan language family.
Sanskrit is one of the 22 official languages of India today, but it is no longer a language of communication in daily life. In 2001, only 14,000 people mastered the language, which is the language with the least number of people among the official languages of India. Strictly speaking , Sanskrit, like Latin and ancient Chinese, has become a living fossil of linguistic research.
Modern Sanskrit is a phonetic script written from left to right. In the early 19th century, European scholars developed Devanagari into a standard for mechanical printing. Its alphabet consists of 48 symbols, of which 34 are consonants and 14 are consonants. A vowel or diphthong.
In the late 18th century, Sanskrit had been transliterated with the Latin alphabet, and the system most commonly used today is IAST (International Sanskrit Transliteration Alphabet). With the development of modern computer technology, the standardized Sanskrit can not only be easily input into the computer system, but also can be translated into and out of multiple languages, which provides convenience for the study of linguistics and religion.
Historical evolution
Sanskrit gradually spread and developed as the Aryans entered the Indian mainland in the 14th century BC, and influenced the cultures of South Asia, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, and even East Asia.
Literally, in Sanskrit, it means “completely organized”, that is, well-organized language, which is an expression of elegance, purity or perfection, not a secular language.
Early Sanskrit was not expressed in written form, it was a language taught orally through epics and Brahman religious rituals. Religious texts and literary works such as Buddhism, Buddhism and Hinduism are preserved.
The study of the evolution of Sanskrit should not be regarded as a special language in isolation from other local languages of ancient India, but being able to listen and speak Sanskrit correctly at that time was indeed one of the symbols of the higher hereditary class in ancient Indian society. In the 6th century BC, when Sakyamuni founded Buddhism, as a new religious doctrine against Brahmanism, it clearly stipulated that Buddhism should use Pali for preaching.
Sanskrit has maintained oral traditions for a long time. But research shows that, even so, there are four major dialects of Classical Sanskrit, namely paścimottarī (northwest), madhyadeśī (central), pūrvi (eastern) and dakṣiṇī (south, which emerged in the Classical period). The predecessors of the first three can even be verified in the Vedic Sanskrit books, with the first one being the most authentic.
During the early use of Sanskrit, on the one hand, it tried to maintain its elegance, but on the other hand, it had to coexist and evolve with various ancient Indian vernaculars. At this time, Sanskrit was equivalent to Sanskrit.
Modern research has shown that Sanskrit and Phoenician writing (the prototype of modern European writing) belong to the Semitic writing system. Around 700 BC, Indian merchants contacted people in Mesopotamia (a branch of the Semites) and passed the 22 letters of the Semites to India.
After the arrangement of the Indians, about 400 BC, about 40 letters were produced, that is, Brahmi (Latin alphabet: Brāhmī, English: Brahmi, Brahmilipi, Bragmi) handwritten script.
Brahmi is not strictly Sanskrit, but a colloquial language, but it is indeed the first written evidence of Sanskrit and the origin of most Indian languages. When Sanskrit was written, it was first used in administrative, literary or scientific texts. The religious texts of Brahmanism are still passed down orally, and were written “reluctantly” at a relatively late stage.
At the same time, in the north and west of India, Prakrit is also popular, its original meaning is colloquial, it is considered to be the origin of the Pali language, so the Pali script will not be earlier than Brahmi, it can be concluded that early Buddhism also adopted the method of dictation, and the earliest written records should start from the third assembly period.
In India, the choice of Sanskrit writing system was influenced by the location of the scribe. With the different times and places, calligraphy and fonts have gradually become different. By the first century AD, Sanskrit characters in the north gradually became square fonts, and Sanskrit characters in the south gradually became round fonts. By the 4th century, the differences between the two were extremely pronounced, and eventually evolved into various languages belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch.
Roughly speaking, the square typeface evolved into Gupta between the 4th and 8th centuries AD. In the 7th century, the Nagari body evolved, and it was finally replaced by the Devanagari script in the 11th and 12th centuries, and the burning script was fixed.
In the process of evolution from Gupta script to Devanagari script, there are actually many variants. The one that has the greatest influence on China is Siddham script, which will be discussed below. The interaction of Sanskrit and various northern Indian vernaculars has resulted in the following modern Indian official languages: Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, Nepali, etc.
The circular font is used in the southern Dravida (also known as Dravida) region, and interacts with southern colloquialisms to derive the following modern Indian official languages: Tamil (by Pala Wawen (Grantha), Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, etc., as well as Sinhala used in Sri Lanka.
The Gupta language mentioned above has a great influence on Chinese Buddhism. During the Eastern Jin Dynasty, Kumarajiva translated a large number of Buddhist scriptures, and later when Master Faxian went to India to seek Dharma, they all used this style of Sanskrit. And this kind of script spread in Qiuci, Khotan and other places, and evolved into Tocharian language (existing in the 6th to 8th centuries AD), and became the language of Yanqi, Qiuci, Yuezhi, Kangju, Dawan and other countries. . In short, the formation of ancient characters in Central Asian countries was greatly influenced by Sanskrit.
In the 6th century AD, Siddham was derived from the Gupta script, which means “achievement” in Sanskrit. It was a transitional state in the evolution of the Sanskrit script, but it was the Sanskrit popular in India during the westward travel of Master Xuanzang in the early Tang Dynasty. It is named after Master Xuanzang’s introduction to the Sanskrit teaching in India, the “Sidan Chapter”, which has been preserved in China and Japan until now, becoming a unique school of Sanskrit.
Since then, Buddhist Tantric Buddhism strictly required the recitation of mantras in Sanskrit phonetics, which led to the study of Sanskrit phonetics after the Sui and Tang dynasties. Scholars analyzed the structure of Sanskrit initials and finals, and produced a reverse cut phonetic method for the pronunciation of Chinese characters. Expanded the spread of Chinese.
During the Song Dynasty in China, the early form of Devanagari Sanskrit was popular in Han, Liao and Dali, and it is now completely preserved in the “Jingyou Tianzhu Origin” published in AD 1035, and spread eastward to Korea and Japan.
The thick, beautiful Lanza script became popular in Tibet and Nepal, and became popular in Han China with the Chinese Qing ruling class’s belief in Tibetan Buddhism. Tibet also writes Sanskrit using an alphabet called Wadhi, which is actually just a headless variant of Lanza. Tibetan, Mongolian, Toth Mongolian, and Manchu languages all have their own systems of transcribing Sanskrit.
As we all know, many Chinese words are directly transliterated from Sanskrit Buddhist scriptures. At the beginning of the 20th century, these phonetic materials provided materials for the study of the pronunciation of ancient Chinese characters, and became an important tool in Chinese phonology—one of the basic phonetic materials for phonology.
As a temple language, Sanskrit attaches great importance to the standardization of language. The declarative science of ancient India is the grammatical theory of Sanskrit.
The oldest surviving Sanskrit grammar is Aṣṭādhyāyī (Aṣṭādhyāyī) of Pāṣṇṇi (Dahasagi: पाणिनि, Latin transliteration: Pāṇini), which took shape around the 4th century BC, and was written by Master Xuanzang in his “Da Tang” This is described in The Records of the Western Regions. The nature of Ponyanine grammar is normative, it defines rather than describes the usage of correct Sanskrit.
Some of the Indian epics that have appeared since then, whose language deviates from the stipulations of Ponny, should have been interfered with by common sayings, or have been innovated, reflecting the characteristics of the development of Sanskrit grammar of the times. However, the basic paradigm developed by Ponny is still the basis of present-day Sanskrit grammar.
In the 7th century AD, Master Xuanzang’s “Records of the Western Regions of the Tang Dynasty”, Volume 2, and Master He Yijing’s “Biography of the South China Sea to Return to the Neifa”, Volume 4, both recorded that the “Xitanzhang” was an Indian chapter. -Enlightenment readings for 7-year-olds to learn Sanskrit, including first learning Sanskrit alphabets (47 in Xuanzang, 49 in Yijing), and then teaching grammar through the method of “synthesizing objects and converting them as needed”, with 12 chapters (Xuanzang) or 18 chapters (Yijing) different textbooks, it takes 6 months to complete the course.
The study of Sanskrit grammar is the foundation of comparative linguistics in the Indo-European language family.
