Sanskrit

Sanskrit (संस्कृत) is an ancient Indo-European language. Many languages in the Indian subcontinent today are derived from Sanskrit. Today, only about 14,000 people use it as their daily language.

Sanskrit is a standardized dialect of Old Indo-Aryan and has a linguistic ancestry that can be traced back to Proto-Indo-European. The Indo-European Aryan migration theory proposes that the Indo-Europeans migrated from the Central Asian steppes into the Indian subcontinent during the early 2nd millennium BC and brought the Indo-European language Sanskrit with them.Witzel, Michael 2005. Indocentrism. In Bryant, Edwin & Patton, Laurie L. The Indo-Aryan controversy: evidence and inference in Indian history. London: Routledge. The main script used to write Sanskrit today is Devanāgarī. Historically, it was also written in the Kharoshti and Brahmic scripts.

William Jones, working as a judge in India in the 18th century, studied Sanskrit and recognised its similarities to Latin, Greek and other European languages. That led to the Indo-European languages being recognised as a group of related languages stretching from Europe to India.

It is also one of the 22 officially recognised languages of India. 

Literature
Sanskrit literature includes poetry and drama and has also scientific, technical, philosophical and religious texts. Sanskrit continues to be widely used as a sacred language in Hindu religious rituals, and also some Buddhist and Jain practice in the form of hymns and chants.

Grammar
Sanskrit  has a very complex grammar, with eight grammatical cases, three grammatical genders, and three grammatical numbers. Words are also described based on their qualities. Sanskrit is considered highly scientific, words in a sentence can describe the subject's number, gender and action.

References


Category:Indo-Aryan languages
Category:State symbols of Uttarakhand