Is Sanskrit really the mother of all languages?

Question

Hindus believe that "Sanskrit is the mother of all Languages".

It is a fact that Sanskrit has enriched most Indian Languages including the Dravidian Languages such as Telugu, as Latin enriched some languages like English.

Since Hinduism is believed by some people to be the oldest recorded religion in the world and Sanskrit was the language of the people those days, do linguists agree that Sanskrit is the mother of all languages, or do they consider it a myth?

Do you think that there must be a common language for our ancestors who might have spoken a language though it might not have been Sanskrit?

It is not, it is just an older one that has much influence on contemporary and dead languages, but it has comparatively little/no influence on, say, afro-asiatic / berber / japonic languages — Carly, Sep 04 '19 at 17:09
Hinduism is not the "oldest recorded religion in the world". The ancient Sumerians and Egyptians had "recorded" religious texts long before anything was "recorded" in Sanskrit. But this has nothing to do with linguistics. This is a bogus question and I have voted to close it. — fdb, Sep 04 '19 at 17:47
@fdb.Instead of closing it discuss the facts so that people learn the facts — Jvlnarasimharao, Sep 04 '19 at 17:56
@fdb. why do you get irritated? as a linguist you should discuss the facts. — Jvlnarasimharao, Sep 04 '19 at 18:01
Don't close it. This is such a common claim on the internet that explaining why it's bogus would be a public service. — Nardog, Sep 04 '19 at 18:06
@Nardog.You are spot on.As linguists you should enlighten the facts and drive out the myths.I did not say that sanskrit is the mother of all languages but I wanted to know the facts.I am impartial and rational — Jvlnarasimharao, Sep 04 '19 at 18:11
Sanskrit is the mother of all North Indian languages, just as Latin is the mother of all Romance languages. But Sanskrit is not related to Dravidian, except where Dravidian languages have borrowed Sanskrit words -- and where Sanskrit borrowed consonants series from Dravidian. And Latin is not related to Basque, though Basque has borrowed many Latin words. That's all. The indo-European language family contains Latin and Sanskrit and their descendants, but not all the languages of the world. Latin and Sanskrit are cousins, though -- neither is "mother" to the other one. — jlawler, Sep 04 '19 at 18:36
I would also suggest keeping this open. This is a widespread claim, even promoted by some "linguists", and it's worth debunking. — Draconis, Sep 04 '19 at 18:50
@fdb yes. i delineated it here because it spawned its own languages, like egyptian; so i think of it like a Latin and afro-asia as like a PIE — Carly, Sep 04 '19 at 20:19
Doesn't this imply that the spoken words of non-Hindus are not really languages? It really seems like a hateful, xenophobic statement. — Astor Florida, Sep 05 '19 at 03:09
Self-evidently, native American and Australian languages can have had no infuence from Sanskrit. This alone should invalidate the premise. — Ross Thompson, Sep 05 '19 at 15:35
It's unlikely that any modern language is the mother of any other modern language, just as no modern animal species is an ancestor of another modern species. All languages and species continue to evolve over time. Humans aren't descended from apes, we're both descended from a common ancestor. — Barmar, Sep 05 '19 at 18:41
@axsvl77 No, not at all. It takes quite some mental gymnastics to arrive at that interpretation, and you rather have to be trying to be offended in order to exercise them. — Lightness Races in Orbit, Sep 06 '19 at 10:08
Isn't the claim more that Hinduism is the oldest religion still being practiced? Which is very different from the oldest religion full stop. Likewise for Sanskrit being among the oldest languages still in use, even though we definitely have examples of older, long-dead languages. (Note: I'm not claiming that either of these statements are correct, but these are what I hear claimed more often.) — Darrel Hoffman, Sep 06 '19 at 13:24
Each and every country on the planet has some nationalist extremists who claim that their language, their culture, or their religion is the oldest one on the planet. — vsz, Sep 06 '19 at 15:07

score 73 · Accepted Answer · edited Jun 17 '20 at 09:49

73

No, it is not.

First and foremost, there are many languages recorded long before the advent of Sanskrit, and many religions recorded long before the advent of Hinduism. The oldest surviving texts in Ancient Egyptian are from c. 3000 BCE, while the majority of the Rigveda (the oldest known Sanskrit text) was probably composed between 1500 and 1200 BCE. So that's a difference of a millennium and a half—and that's just between the oldest surviving written documents in Egyptian and the oldest oral traditions that were, much later, written down in Sanskrit! (While scholars think the Rigveda was composed sometime in the second millennium BCE, it wasn't written down until centuries later, and we don't have any actual artifacts with Sanskrit written on them from this period.)

Sanskrit is an Indo-European (sometimes called Indogermanic) language, which makes it a relative of English, Spanish, Russian, and many others. But Sanskrit isn't the ancestor of those languages, any more than the composers of the Vedas were the ancestors of all modern Europeans. Rather, Sanskrit and those other languages all share a common ancestor, called "Proto-Indo-European" (or "Proto-Indogermanic"), which was spoken somewhere between 4500 and 2500 BCE.

There are no surviving records of Proto-Indo-European (PIE for short), but scholars have been able to reconstruct it by comparing the languages that are attested, and working backward from there. There are some striking similarities, which make it clear that the languages are related. But:

Sanskrit preserves some features that disappeared in other branches: for example, the injunctive is well-attested in Vedic Sanskrit, but is uncommon in Homer's Greek, and disappears entirely by Plato's time.
And other branches preserve some features which have disappeared in Sanskrit: Hittite retains a phoneme that disappeared entirely in Sanskrit (but left plenty of traces showing that it must once have existed).

There are dozens and dozens more correspondences like these, where features disappeared in one branch but survived in another, or were innovated in one branch but not in another, and so on. So while it's clear that Ancient Greek, Sanskrit, Hittite, and so on are related, it's also clear that none is "mother" to the others: they're more like "siblings" or "cousins", with a common ancestor.

Do you think that there must be a common language for our ancestors[?]

Now this question is harder to answer.

The techniques I mentioned above, called the "comparative method", are really useful for reconstructing languages that must once have existed but aren't directly attested. But this method can only go back so far. Past a certain point, the comparative method just can't say anything particularly meaningful.

So while we know that there was an ancestor to all Indo-European languages, and an ancestor to all Afro-Asiatic languages ("Proto-Afro-Asiatic"), and an ancestor to all Sino-Tibetan languages ("Proto-Sino-Tibetan")…we can't really say anything definite about what came before those. They might all descend from an ancient sort of "Proto-World", or they might have all come about independently. There's just not enough evidence to say one way or the other.

edited Jun 17 '20 at 09:49

Community

1

answered Sep 04 '19 at 19:16

Draconis

65,972
3
141
215

3

for those keep score at home: "proto-" means here hypothesized. we do not have kindles or youtube channels from 5000 BC to "directly" "verify" the extrapolation (cf: how to pronounce latin). it is a "reasonable" "assumption" of the precursor to the INDO-EUROPEAN tongues – Carly Sep 04 '19 at 20:22
2

@Carly Why the scarequotes? It's true, we have no way to directly verify our reconstructions, and they're reasonably well-founded assumptions. – Draconis Sep 04 '19 at 21:35
20

That's not what "proto-" means though, even though it's definitely true we don't have direct evidence (written material). "Proto-" as a prefix comes from Greek and means "first" as well as being used to refer to "original" or "ancestral". It simply refers to the fact that we assume these languages to have the "first of their kind", as in, for instance, the first Indo-European language, all the others of which are derived from. If we had direct attestation, well, we'd probably use its own name, and not "Proto-Something", sure. It's just not what the "proto-" refers to. – LjL Sep 04 '19 at 22:18
10

It's also not automatically true that we can't verify our theories about protolanguages (I don't think this was claimed, but I just thought it was worth noting). Actual Proto-Indo-European is extremely unlikely to ever be attested, but for example, we suddenly found ourselves able to read Hittite and to suddenly verify some hypotheses about Indo-European that we had made. I think this shows that there is no need for scarequotes because in this way, comparative linguistics is or can potentially be an experimental science, although it's rare to find precious texts that verify our theories. – LjL Sep 04 '19 at 22:22
@LjL Agreed. I have also seen "proto-" used specifically for hypothetical reconstructions, and "common" used instead when talking about the actual language—as in, nobody ever spoke Proto-Indo-European, they spoke Common Indo-European, and Proto-Indo-European is our model of that. It doesn't seem like a very useful distinction, though. – Draconis Sep 04 '19 at 22:26
well put @LjL . – Carly Sep 04 '19 at 22:27
@Draconis scare quotes because those are such loaded terms that I am using them broadly for convenience so as to not unpack subtleties, not definitively – Carly Sep 04 '19 at 22:27
In your first paragraph you should have distinguished between the "surviving texts" in Egyptian, Sumerian, Akkadian, Mycenaean Greek etc., which are actual physical documents, and the Vedic texts, which were not written down until many centuries after their assumed time of composition. – fdb Sep 05 '19 at 10:45
@fdb Good point! – Draconis Sep 05 '19 at 14:11
Though the Vedic texts had inter-coder reliability, while surviving texts were riddled with scribal corruption. – jlawler Sep 05 '19 at 14:21
@LjL While proto- does not directly mean ‘reconstructed’, that is an inherent property of it. We do not call the ‘first of its kind’ language a proto-language if the split from a parent language (and thus the terminus post quem of a language with that name) happened within the recorded history of that language. We don’t speak of a ‘Proto-East Norse’ or ‘Proto-Brazilian Portuguese’, for example. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Sep 05 '19 at 17:04
If humans trace back to a single great-great...-great grandmother, and she spoke one language, then that would be it. – Kaz Sep 07 '19 at 12:26
since the rigveda contains myths that some are thought to reflect indo european myths, it is not meaningful to say when the "majority" was "composed" because that gives undue weight to an irrelevant measure of normalization (like, the majority of your extremities is under a meter, so it's fair to say you are probably between 1500 and 1250 mm tall) and it also lacks any understanding what "composition" means in the context of oral tradition (like, measuring your shaddow). – vectory Nov 08 '19 at 02:30
1

@vectory There's a difference between a myth and a specific sequence of words. While some myths are thought to go back to Proto-Indo-European times, the specific sequences of words relating those myths are not; when those specific words were put together in a specific sequence, we say the text was "composed". Normalization and redaction happened much later, but that's not what I'm talking about here. – Draconis Nov 08 '19 at 02:35
I could not give a better answer, but I can criticize. It should be economic to criticize only the accepted answer. It drew an argument from authority, merely implying that it amounts to evidence, which I understand rests mainly on phonologic. These aren't obvious, perhaps too complex for a short answer, but it would have been desirable to show, by example, that they don't have it all backwards. While, the distribution of IE people and later Indo-Iranian (whence Indo-Aryan whence Sanskrit) is not perfectly understood in Archeology, the textual comparison with the Avestas shows an ... – vectory Nov 08 '19 at 08:44
... important change in the Interpretation of Devas, small gods deemed bad in one branch, but good in another, so these devas might reflect or even embody the cause for the Indo-Iranian lineages to repell. So it's not only the phonology and a typologically more likely but nowhere certain direction of phonetic development, but the semantical and cultural artifacts. Nevertheless, I'm mainly asking for this evidence of the alleged developments as is used for reconstruction, that is, the sound laws, and why we a Family-tree with Sanskrit at the root would not be an invariant of the established one – vectory Nov 08 '19 at 08:58
@vectory As I said in my answer, "Sanskrit preserves some features that disappeared in other branches: for example, the injunctive is well-attested in Vedic Sanskrit, but is uncommon in Homer's Greek, and disappears entirely by Plato's time. And other branches preserve some features which have disappeared in Sanskrit: Hittite retains a phoneme that disappeared entirely in Sanskrit (but left plenty of traces showing that it must once have existed)." – Draconis Nov 08 '19 at 16:49
@vectory "There are dozens and dozens more correspondences like these, where features disappeared in one branch but survived in another, or were innovated in one branch but not in another, and so on. So while it's clear that Ancient Greek, Sanskrit, Hittite, and so on are related, it's also clear that none is "mother" to the others: they're more like "siblings" or "cousins", with a common ancestor." – Draconis Nov 08 '19 at 16:49
I assume that you've heard the sad news that Prof Lawler passed away a couple of weeks ago? They've got a meta post on EL&U about him. Don't know if you might want to link to that as a featured post here,or maybe do a more linguisticky post either on the site proper or on META, here? [Didn't know how best to ping you, but Sanskrit was one of JL's areas of interest, I believe. So maybe fitting. – Araucaria - him Dec 09 '23 at 12:23
@Araucaria-him Oh no, I hadn't! Yes, I think we should say something about that. – Draconis Dec 09 '23 at 17:04
@Draconis I don't know JL well enough, but maybe we could find a linguist who did to give us a v brief bio? Also am on hard deadline and won't be signing in for a couple of weeks. Can I hand this over to you folks? – Araucaria - him Dec 12 '23 at 10:20

score 31 · Answer 2 · edited Nov 08 '19 at 00:23

31

Sanskrit is not the mother of all languages. Sanskrit is not even the mother of the modern Indo-Aryan languages of the Northern India. Neither it is their father or grandfather. In fact, no language is a direct descendant of Sanskrit.

Saying that Sanskrit to the modern Indo-Aryan languages is the same as Latin to the modern Romance languages is absolutely wrong. The Romance languages are direct descendants of Latin, but the modern Indo-Aryan languages are not direct descendants of Sanskrit. The best European analogy is the role Ancient Greek played for the modern European languages: Ancient Greek affected them all, filled them with lots of words and syntactic structures, but none of those languages is a direct descendant of Ancient Greek, naturally with the exception of modern Greek.

To continue the family analogy, to the modern Indo-Aryan languages Sanskrit is a cousin grandfather who was their teacher, their guru. The Indo-Aryan languages descend from grandfather's siblings, but grandfather himself had no children.

Speaking more linguistically, there are actually two languages called Sanskrit: the Vedic Sanskrit aka the Vedic language (ca. 1500 to 500 BCE), and Sanskrit proper aka Classical Sanskrit (ca. 200 CE to 1300 CE), the latter being a refined and artistic, highly elaborate version of the former. The Vedic language was once a vernacular, but since the texts in it were holy and highly revered, the language was later standardized and it underwent polishing by Indian sages and philosophers giving rise to Sanskrit whose name can be translated as "well prepared, pure and perfect, polished". But apart from Sanskrit proper, the Vedic language gave rise to its sister languages, not so refined, not so polished, but which were really vernacular languages in the times when Sanskrit became the language of educated philosophers, brahmins, and poets. Those sister languages are called Prakrits, "natural, original, unpolished", the main ones being Maharashtri, Gandhari, Shauraseni, and Magadhi. Pali can also be considered a Prakrit, although later they did polish it very much. The Prakrits are the Middle Indo-Aryan languages, it is from them that the Modern Indo-Aryan languages developed.

edited Nov 08 '19 at 00:23

Community

1

answered Sep 04 '19 at 21:25

Yellow Sky

18,268
39
65

3

~~(Don't forget Paisācī!)~~ – Draconis Sep 04 '19 at 21:35
12

I think much of this is true for languages derived from Latin, too, in the sense that they are derived from Vulgar Latin, which was likely quite different from Classical Latin even during classical times. I'd say there is a close parallel between "Classical" and "Sanskrit" meaning literary and refined on one hand, and "Vulgar" and "Prakrit" meaning natural vernaculars on the other. – LjL Sep 04 '19 at 22:26
@LjL As long as you only use the meaning "common" for Vulgar, and not "unpolished" as most people would think nowadays. – CJ Dennis Sep 05 '19 at 07:58
6

Your analogy between Sanskrit and Greek is very misleading. European languages have borrowed extensively from Greek, but they do not descend from Greek (apart from Modern Greek, of course.) Modern Indo-Aryan languages descend genetically from proto-Indo-Aryan (which is close to, but not identical with, classical Sanskrit). – fdb Sep 05 '19 at 10:50
2

@fdb - So what is misleading? – Yellow Sky Sep 05 '19 at 10:59
You do know the difference between cognates and loanwords? – fdb Sep 05 '19 at 11:07
1

@fdb - Surely I do. And you surely know the difference between tatsama and tadbhava, do you? My analogy with Ancient Greek loanwords in European languages was about the tatsama words in the modern Indo-Aryan languages. E.g. in Bengali, tatsama is 40% of the lexicon. They are direct loanwords from Sanskrit. Tadbhava are cognates. European languages borrowed from Ancient Greek, Indo-Aryan languages borrowed from Sanskrit, and neither of them are descendants of the language they borrowed words from. Again: what's misleading in my analogy? – Yellow Sky Sep 05 '19 at 11:22
9

You seem to contradict yourself here. The Prakrits are absolutely descendants of Sanskrit – just not of Classical Sanskrit. ‘Sanskrit’ in English is, as you say, an underspecified term, and if you use it to refer to the Vedic language which was used (in a formulaic, poetic style) to compose the Vedas, then it’s not true that no languages are descended from Sanskrit. (Also, pedantically speaking, there are no languages called Sansktit, but I don’t have the rep here to make a single-character edit.) – Janus Bahs Jacquet Sep 05 '19 at 16:57
1

@JanusBahsJacquet - Thank you, corrected. As for the Vedic language and Prakrits, I really oversimplified it in my answer, to make the whole story shorter. In fact, the Vedic language was not the single Old Aryan language there in the times when it was still spoken, and some Prakrits descend not from the Vedic language, but from its sister languages/dialects of that time, like Paiśācī which Draconis mentioned in the first comment to this answer of mine. – Yellow Sky Sep 05 '19 at 17:03
Don't forget to mention Substrates in Prakrits, which, in my humble opinion, might play a role for changes in Sanskrit. – vectory Nov 08 '19 at 08:36

score 10 · Answer 3 · answered Sep 05 '19 at 10:23

Not at all.

Sanskrit, Latin and a few other languages had a common ancestor called Proto-Indo-European, which was prevalent around 2500 BC on the southern steppes of Russia.

It is a fact that Sanskrit has enriched most Indian Languages including the Dravidian Languages such as Telugu as Latin enriched some languages like English

Yes, this is true.

Do you think that there must be a common language for our ancestors who might have spoken a language though it might not be Sanskrit?

Yes, this is probably true but than common language existed at least 50,000 years ago.

If anyone is at all interested in this field, I highly recommend https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3328218-the-story-of-human-language or https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/story-of-human-language.html

Is Sanskrit really the mother of all languages?

3 Answers3

No, it is not.

Linked

Related