Linguistic history of India

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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.

Contents

Language of the Indus Valley Civilization

Indo-Aryan languages

Origins of Sanskrit

The adjective saṃskṛta- means "refined, consecrated, sanctified". The language referred to as saṃskṛtā vāk "the refined language" has by definition always been a 'high' language, used for religious and scientific discourse and contrasted with the languages spoken by the people. The oldest surviving Sanskrit grammar is does not cite its [[Opentopia:Citing sources|references or sources]].
You can [[Opentopia:WikiProject Fact and Reference Check|help]] Wikipedia by introducing appropriate citations.

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 North West India and Pakistan) 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 1900 BC, use of the symbols ends, together with the final stage of Harappan civilization. Some early scholars, starting with Cunningham in 1877, thought that the script was the archetype of the Brahmi script used by Ashoka. Today Cunningham's claims are rejected by nearly all researchers, but a minority of mostly Indian scholars continues to argue for the Indus script as the predecessor of the Brahmic family. There are over 400 different signs, but many are thought to be slight modifications or combinations of perhaps 200 'basic' signs.

If the signs are purely ideographical, they may contain no information about the language spoken by their creators, and cannot be called a script in the true sense of the word. A recent paper by Steve Farmer, Richard Sproat, and Michael Witzel - a comparative historian, computational linguist, and Indologist respectively - offers evidence that the symbols were not coupled to oral language, which in part explains the extreme brevity of the inscriptions. For their paper, see the external links.

A number of writers associated with Hindutva have attempted to prove that the script encodes Vedic Sanskrit. R.S. Rajaram and N. Jha made one such claim. D. B. Kasar has compared the Indus script to Germanic runes and claims that IVC inscriptions contain Rigvedic hymns. These theories are not accepted by most scholars.

Brahmi script

The best known inscriptions in 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 may push back the date for the earliest use of Brahmi to the 5th or 6th century BC, however the dating methods used have a significant margin of error.

Brāhmī is generally believed to be derived from a Semitic script such as the Imperial Aramaic alphabet, as was clearly the case for the contempory 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 they belonged to the 6th century BC. [link]

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

Kharosthi script

The Kharoṣṭhī script, also known as the 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 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 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 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.

Siddham script

Siddham (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.

Siddham 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, and the aspirated vowel. A special mark 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 Siddham 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.

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