Sanskrit

(sănˈskrĭtˌ)

noun

Related Forms:

• Sanˈskritˌist noun

Word History: Like Latin in Europe and elsewhere, Sanskrit has been used by the educated classes in India for literary and religious purposes for over two thousand years. It achieved this status partly through a standardization that resulted from a long tradition of grammatical theory and analysis. This tradition reached its height around 500 B.C. in the work of the grammarian Panini, who composed an intricate and complex description of the language in the form of quasi-mathematical rules reminiscent of the rules of generative grammar in modern times. The language thus codified was called saṃskṛtam, “put together, artificial,” to distinguish it from prākṛtam or the “natural, vulgar” speech of ordinary people. Sanskrit thus became a fixed literary language, while Prakrit continued to develop into what are now the modern spoken languages of northern and central India, such as Hindi and Bengali.