What is it about?
“We know that Middle Indian (Middle Indo-Aryan) makes its appearance in epigraphy prior to Sanskrit: this is the great linguistic paradox of India.” In these words Louis Renou (1956: 84) referred to a problem in Sanskrit studies for which so far no satisfactory solution had been found. I will here propose that the perceived “paradox” derives from the lack of acknowledgement of certain parameters in the linguistic situation of Ancient India which were insufficiently appreciated in Renou’s time, but which are at present open to systematic exploration with the help of by now well established sociolinguistic concepts, notably the concept of “diglossia”. Three issues will here be addressed in the light of references to ancient and classical Indian texts, Sanskrit and Sanskritic. A simple genetic model is indadequate, especially when the ‘linguistic area’ applies also to what can be reconstructed for earlier periods. The so-called Sanskrit “Hybrids” in the first millennium CE, including the Prakrits and Epics, are rather to be regarded as emerging “Ausbau” languages of Indo-Aryan with hardly any significant mutual “Abstand” before they will be succesfully “roofed,” in the second half of the first millennium CE, by “classical” Sanskrit.
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Why is it important?
The history of (classical) Sanskrit, of Prakrit, of the so-called "hybrid" Sanskrits, of Vedic poetry and prose, and of the related Avestan and old Persian languages is of central importance for the cultural history of ancient India, ancient Iran and Asia.
Perspectives
Since the discovery of the Vedas and of the Avesta and since the decipherment of old Persian inscriptions and of the royal inscriptions of Asoka, modern scholarship has made efforts to distinguish and separate well-defined ancient languages and has tried to link these as discrete units or "particles" in a genetic tree. This has been only partly succesful and we are left with several problems, for instance a considerable amount of linguistic evidence that has to be arranged in the category of "hybrid". To study linguistic phenomena the view points of "particles", "waves" and "fields" may all have their value. Recent scholarship in emerging languages -- such as romance languages, standard Dutch -- has reached a level of maturity which makes it now possible to place the linguistic evidence of some of the most ancient testimonies of Indo-European ritual, religious and philosophical poetry and literature in an entirely different perspective which does justice both to the differences and overlaps between what scholarship has been trying to see as entirely distinct ancient "languages".
Johannes Houben
Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes
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This page is a summary of: Linguistic Paradox and Diglossia: the emergence of Sanskrit and Sanskritic language in Ancient India, Open Linguistics, January 2018, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1515/opli-2018-0001.
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