Talk:Prakrit

message: Changed "The original crude language from which Sanskrit was derived could be Prakrit" to "Some have suggested that the original crude language from which Sanskrit was derived could be Prakrit, but this contradicts the findings of comparative linguistics, which are that Sanskrit is closer to earlier Indo-European linguistic forms than Prakrits are". -- AnonMoos 06:58, 29 July 2004
:Moved that whole paragraph to a "Traditional accounts" and did a little cleaning up. -- कुक्कुरोवाच|Talk‽ 16:32, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: old talk

message: The statement is very offending - Brahmin Orthodoxy - who these people are? do they really have origion? do they really maintain family history? do they ever respect the nation? do they ever have love for Dharma? what dharma principles they are following or ever followed? There are no brahmins neither their legitimates.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 202.80.57.2 (talk) 11:49, 24 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: It means that for many centuries Brahmins would have regarded the idea of a non-Sanskrit holy book as absurd, at the same time that Buddhists were enthusiastically developing Pali... AnonMoos (talk) 13:41, 21 February 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Prakrits were distinct by the time of Asoka, but from a comparative Indo-European perspective, Sanskrit (especially Vedic Sanskrit) represents a much earlier stage of linguistic history... AnonMoos (talk) 13:41, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

text: The proof is that historical linguists use Vedic Sanskrit as a basis for proto-Indo-European comparison/reconstruction more often than prakrits... AnonMoos (talk) 17:06, 23 October 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  The Prakrits became literary languages, generally patronized by kings identified with the Kshatriya caste, but were regarded as illegitimate by the Brahmin orthodoxy. 

message: Dear editors of this article. I am no expert in this subject and hence can't do the changes myself, and that is why am posting this message (because I often hear people saying- if you dont find it ok, just do it yourself rather than passing comments!). Well, my concern is about the lead. The lead doesn't say that it is a broad family of the Indic languages untill you read till the third line (although the same sentence). Can the lead be changed a bit for ease of the reader? Thanks Wiki San Roze †αLҝ 12:31, 17 April 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: The lead

message: this article needs more references as notes...--Esteban Barahona (talk) 03:30, 30 August 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm assuming that this is simply the result of lacking citations rather than lacking sources, hence the .  We may need to change it to  if we feel that the sources listed at the bottom aren't cutting it.  — Æµ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 04:40, 30 August 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  inline references 

message: Hi, as a reader I find the opening paragraph could be more clear to what Prakrit is. The sentences throughout the article are also a little long and convoluted. Breaking some of the longer sentences into two would be helpful. Secondly, how do these vernaculars differ linguistically? There are articles linked to each one but a brief mention would be good.Rofflebuster (talk) 14:05, 13 April 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  X3nodox 

message: If Prakrits are vernaculars as opposed to "classical" Sanskrit, are there parallels with vernaculars around classical Latin?  The contemporary Indic vernaculars I'm most familiar with -- Hindi and Nepali -- have substituted prepositions for declensions.  The same holds for most Romance languages, except Romanian apparently retains declension to some extent.  LADave (talk) 21:45, 14 February 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: You can analogize Sanksrit to Latin, but there's a greater time-depth in the case of Sanskrit --  Prakrits/Pali were already distinctive languages being written down for some purposes at a time when Latin was rarely spoken outside the Italian peninsula.  Technically, Hindi has "postpositions"... AnonMoos (talk) 05:36, 25 February 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Apart from the fact that the time periods in question do not run in parallel, but that the Indo-Aryan developments are earlier than the Latin/Romance ones, you can view Vedic Sanskrit (probably very close to at least some Indo-Aryan dialects spoken in the 2nd millennium BC) and Old Latin (the Latin of Plautus apparently being close to spoken Latin in 200 BC – except for the spelling, which in some ways reflects even older stages of Latin recorded only in inscriptions, while some archaic, pre-Plautine, texts, such as the Carmen Saliare, the laws of the Twelve Tables or the Carmen Arvale, are known to modern scholars only in partly updated, modernised versions, i. e., spelt more like Classical or Plautine Latin at best; indeed, even Plautus is known to us only in manuscripts which use a spelling more like Classical Latin than the inscriptions of the 3rd/2nd century BC, the inscriptions displaying even more archaic spellings that were not in tune with the spoken language at the time and often disappear in the Classical period) as analogous, while Classical Sanskrit is analogous to Classical Latin in that both are based on stages (Vedic and Old Latin respectively) that were more archaic than any contemporary dialect. At the time when Panini codified Classical Sanskrit (largely) on the basis of Vedic Sanskrit, spoken Indo-Aryan dialects must already have been in the Middle Indo-Aryan stage, hence many Prakritisms in Classical Sanskrit, some of which even crop up in Vedic literature (which continued to be written in the 1st millennium BC). Similarly, at the time of Classical Latin, spoken Latin (Vulgar Latin) must already have been splitting into regional dialects and was on its way to the modern Romance languages. In the 1st millennium AD, Latin was basically used to write incipient Romance (Late Latin), or full-blown early Romance dialects (Middle Latin), in some cases at least. Similarly, Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit is essentially artificially Sanskritised Middle Indo-Aryan. The Sanskrit case is even more complicated in that Vedic Sanskrit, Panini's Classical Sanskrit (both reflecting spoken Old Indo-Aryan dialects) and the Prakrits (all reflecting Middle Indo-Aryan dialects) all appear to go back to Old Indo-Aryan dialects (spoken in the late 2nd millennium BC) which were not identical, but slightly different; yes, even Vedic Sanskrit and Classical Sanskrit are different in some details which seem to be this old. Hence, spoken "Proto-Vedic", "Proto-Classical-Sanskrit", "Proto-Pali", "Proto-Ardhamagadhi", and the Old Indo-Aryan stages of other Prakrits, all were different, but only in details. Contemporary with Vedic, they were probably fully mutually intelligible with Vedic, merely slight regional varieties, but all of them were different, independent continuations from Proto-Indo-Aryan (which itself was probably spoken in the early to mid 2nd millennium BC). This would all be much easier to show in a diagram. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 01:45, 24 December 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Parallels with other language groups? 

message: The first paragraph says "But there are scholars who believe that Prakrit is older than Sanskrit, and it is on the base of Prakrit (original) that the Sanskrit (refined) language was made. This also is in tune with the Jain religion, where the first Tirthankar is Adinath himself." It is not at all clear what the relation of the second sentence to the first is. Could someone in the know clarify this please?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Sundaryourfriend (talk • contribs) 22:51, 26 February 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  What is this Jain Tirthankar reference? 

message: Sorry for criticism, but nothing in the article talks of the language, all material is about and around the language. Neither morphology, nor phonology, nor typology are even mentioned. Anybody knows anything about the language to add meat to the bluff? Barefact (talk) 20:30, 27 March 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Prakrit  is more of a language classification than a single language (though Magadhi can be considered the most important prakrit by Hindus, and Pali by Buddhists). There's some discussion at Magadhi Prakrit... AnonMoos (talk) 17:05, 23 October 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Where is the language? 

message: 1. When were the Prakrit languages spoken? 
2. If Sanskrit was never written down until "way after the Prakrits" (as the Sanskrit article claims), then what alphabet were the Vedas written in?
Thanks! BigSteve (talk) 21:26, 7 February 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Bigzteve -- You can say very roughly 500 B.C - 500 A.D.  Anything before about 500 B.C. would be more of an (unattested) precursor to Prakrit than a Prakrit as such, while anything much after 500 A.D. would be called "Apabhramsa".  Of course, some prakrits remained in literary use long after 500 A.D. And the Vedas were originally transmitted orally.  Writing was unknown in India until many centuries after the Vedas started to take shape, and Brahmins scorned writing as a medium for preserving sacred texts for additional centuries after Indic alphabets came into use... AnonMoos (talk) 01:05, 8 February 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Wow, that's great! Now that you explain it I have found the relevant passages in the articles. Thank you! BigSteve (talk) 12:17, 9 February 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Timescale! 

message: Why is "Prakrit" capitalized in this article? Isn't it a common noun akin to "dialect" or "variety"? Largoplazo (talk) 02:13, 9 February 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: It only applies to a select group of languages.  If "Middle Indic" is capitalized, then "Prakrit" probably should be also. AnonMoos (talk) 09:50, 10 September 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: It seems the term is a very special case. One doesn't normally speak of Middle Indic languages as "the Middle Indics" or of one of them as "a Middle Indic". I see your point if one thinks of them as a family called Prakrit, which I guess is pretty much the case given the definition in the article, but the primary usage gives the impression that it's a common noun comparable to "language", "dialect", "tongue", though the scope of its use is limited to that particular family. Largoplazo (talk) 11:22, 10 September 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Capitalization 

message: It has already been established in the talk section(not just in this article) that Vedic Sanskrit is not an ancestor of Prakrit and yet there is an image of a language tree in the article that still shows the same misconception. Hope someone will rectify it.
Bodhiupasaka (talk) 08:39, 6 December 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: restored the graphic today, claiming that it isn't inaccurate. I removed it for a different reason: less than 10% of the graphic has anything to do with the Prakrits, which I explained in my edit summary, but The Witty Warrior restored it. Witty Warrior, why do you believe the graphic is suitable for this article? Largoplazo (talk) 16:17, 12 April 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: I've been a little busy. Will reply to you regarding this as soon as possible. The Witty Warrior (talk) 12:29, 13 April 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: The language tree that was recently included again is simply inaccurate since the relationship between Vedic(Sanskrit) and the Prakrits is hotly contested with some scholars stating that Vedic and Prakrit are sister languages , they don't have the relationship of being mother and daughter languages respectively. And this was also discussed in previous sections of this talk page . That's why I removed that misleading image.Bodhiupasaka (talk) 15:37, 23 April 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: Vedic and Prakrit are NOT "sister languages" in the sense of showing the same degree of archaism, or being equally useful in reconstructing Indo-European, so that part of your remarks is factually incorrect.  As discussed in great deal previously, Vedic is not technically the direct ancestor of Prakrit, but it's a fairly close collateral ancestor, and depicting Vedic as the ancestor of Prakrit in a language tree is not any more inaccurate than other slight simplifications of linguistic trees which appear on a number of other Wikipedia articles (such as Classical Latin being the ancestor of modern Romance, etc etc).  You take the prize for repeatedly forcefully insisting on something which is technically linguistically correct (Vedic is not the direct ancestor of Prakrit) but actually fairly irrelevant for practical article improvement.   When you go beyond this into the "sister" stuff, then you're wrong (since "aunt" would be much more accurate). AnonMoos (talk) 16:18, 24 April 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: @Bodhiupasaka The Attested Vedic Sanskrit is not claimed to be the direct ancestor of Prakrits.. But Prakrits are indeed derived from some unattested archaic form of Sanskrit, that can be a more closer to Indo-Iranian dialect too.. Since Mittani-Aryan, a dialect of Vedic Sanskrit retains all the features of Prakrits, including 'Double Consonantal joint between words' like 'Sapta' = 'Satta'.. 
but saying that 'Prakrits' are as archaic as Vedic Sanskrit, is laughable Hahahaha.. cuz no Prakrits existed at the time of Vedic period and it's already clear, people spoke The Vedic Language and not venicular corrupt speech languages like 'prakrits', Prakrits came to existence after 700BCE.. Arkam Knight (talk) 14:38, 14 March 2022 (UTC)

text: It isn't corrupt per se, just more divergent from the Old Indo-Aryan dialects than, say, Pali. 98.179.127.59 (talk) 19:32, 15 March 2022 (UTC)

text: First, just typing the literal characters "@AnonMoos" does not notify me in any way.  Second, I don't want to get into extended debate about genealogical metaphors,  but the plain and simple fact is that when comparative linguists take into account Indic languages in order to help reconstruct Proto-Indo-European, then Sanskrit is their starting point, and usually the more archaic the better.  Some specific details of some later languages are certainly taken into account, but such details supplement the main picture which has already been established from Sanskrit.  Panini's "classical" Sanskrit was more or less contemporary with somewhat early Pali, but at that time, Pali was probably close enough to the ordinary spoken language of some regions of India that it could be fairly easily understood, while "classical" Sanskrit was a slightly streamlined version of an ancient language.  If Vedic Sanskrit is like Latin, then the prakrits are best analogized to Spanish, Italian, etc of roughly 1000 A.D. AnonMoos (talk) 09:43, 1 May 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Inaccurate Language Tree Image 

message: The article currently says that Prākṛta literally means "natural". This is a common enough modern misinterpretation (not to be found in any ancient or medieval source and goes against the etymology of the name "prākṛta"), it also goes directly against the native definitions of the word Prākṛta (normally anglicized as Prakrit).
The word Prākṛta is a nominal derivative (called taddhita) i.e. a noun showing relationship to another noun, "Prakṛti". In other words, "Prākṛta" is something that is derived from "Prakṛti" (original). 
Both sanskrit and prakrit grammarians (many of who wrote grammars of both sanskrit and prakrit) explain that Sanskrit is the Prakṛti (original language from which the prakrits are derived - for citations from these native ancient and medieval scholars see the etymology section.
Most of the native Prākṛta (prakrit) grammars take Sanskrit as the starting point and indicate the departures of each Prakrit therefrom. On the other hand, every singly native Sanskrit grammatical text treats Sanskrit as a pre-existing language and makes no attempt to derive-from or associate it with any prakrit.
Therefore while some modern scholars say Prakrit (i.e. prākṛta) means "natural" - that is an incorrect statement. Prākṛta etymologically means "originating from the natural/source (language)", and that original/natural language has been identified by most pre-modern native scholars as Sanskrit. 
The point of terming one group as Prākṛta and its source as Prakṛti is to distinguish them from each other - so that the relations between the natural/original language and the languages derived from the natural/original language are understood properly.
This explanation of the premodern scholars broadly in line with mainstream modern philological research which also considers Sanskrit (including the dialects of Vedic Sanskrit) as Old-Indic, and Prakrits and other similar forms as direct descendants of Old-Indic (which are therefore termed Middle-Indic). Therefore I have marked the statement Prākṛta literally means "natural" as dubious, but it is not just dubious, it is diametrically the opposite of the correct meaning. However I didnt remove the statement because while it's a misunderstanding, the misunderstanding is expressed by some modern scholars in their works - so a two-sided view is required about why that is wrong.  Srkris (talk) 12:07, 5 November 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Prākṛta literally means "natural"?