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| The Hindu Phenomenon |
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Appendix 1 - Resolving the Ancient Language Problem |
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to Telageri the Vedic dialects disappeared in course of time and
their speech area (Punjab and its environs) was taken over by the
Inner-Indo-European dialects. But long before that, they had set in
motion a cult movement which covered the entire country. This Vedic
cult finally also gave way but continued to remain in force as the
elite layer of a pan-Indian religion of the Inner-Indo-Europeans and
Dravidians. Vedic hymns still dominate Hindu rituals but have little
impact on the lives of Hindus.
Classical Sanskrit was created by ancient grammarians (Panini was preceded by hundreds of others, many of whom are named by him in his Astadhyayi) to serve as a via media between the Vedic language and the Inner-Indo- European dialects which and developed together with the Dravidian languages over the course of millennia and were therefore structurally different from the Vedic, and also had their own roots and words. Later the Prakrits came into vogue. Finally, the Inner dialects came into their own in the form of the new Indo-Aryan languages, as heavily Sanskritized as the Dravidian languages. India's cultural history thus beings with a grand synthesis. Telageri's summing up is important. He says: "In short, the linguistic structure of the present Indo-Aryan languages is not a change from an originally Vedic-like linguistic structure; it is a linguistic structure which developed, in the course of millennia, in the Inner-Indo- European speech family, in conjunction with the Dravidian languages."
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| About Appendix 1 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
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