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Extensive ancient literature in the Vedic Sanskrit language has survived into the modern era, and this has been a major source of information for reconstructing Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Indo-Iranian history.
The separation of Proto-Indo-Iranian language into Proto-Iranian and Proto-Indo-Aryan is estimated, on linguistic grounds, to have occurred around or before 1800 BCE.
The date of composition of the oldest hymns of the Rigveda is vague at best, generally estimated to roughly 1500 BCE. Both Asko Parpola (1988) and J. P. Mallory (1998) place the locus of the division of Indo-Aryan from Iranian in the Bronze Age culture of the Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC). Parpola (1999) elaborates the model and has "Proto-Rigvedic" Indo-Aryans intrude the BMAC around 1700 BCE. He assumes early Indo-Aryan presence in the Late Harappan horizon from about 1900 BCE, and "Proto-Rigvedic" (Proto-Dardic) intrusion to Punjab as corresponding to the Gandhara grave culture from about 1700 BCE. According to this model, Rigvedic within the larger Indo-Aryan group is the direct ancestor of the Dardic languages.
The early Vedic Sanskrit language was far less homogeneous compared to the language defined by Pāṇini, i.e., Classic Sanskrit. The language in the early Upanishads of Hinduism and the late Vedic literature approaches Classical Sanskrit. The formalization of the late form of Vedic Sanskrit language into the Classical Sanskrit form is credited to Pāṇini's Aṣṭādhyāyī, along with Patanjali's Mahabhasya and Katyayana's commentary that preceded Patanjali's work.
Five chronologically distinct strata can be identified within the Vedic language:
The first three are commonly grouped together, as the Saṃhitās[A] comprising the four Vedas:[B] ṛk, atharvan, yajus, sāman, which together constitute the oldest texts in Sanskrit and the canonical foundation both of the Vedic religion, and the later religion known as Hinduism.
Many words in the Vedic Sanskrit of the Ṛg·veda have cognates or direct correspondences with the ancient Avestan language, but these do not appear in post-Rigvedic Indian texts. The text of the Ṛg·veda must have been essentially complete by around the 12th century BCE. The pre-1200 BCE layers mark a gradual change in Vedic Sanskrit, but there is disappearance of these archaic correspondences and linguistics in the post-Rigvedic period.
This period includes both the mantra and prose language of the Atharvaveda (Paippalada and Shaunakiya), the Ṛg·vedaKhilani, the Samaveda Saṃhitā, and the mantras of the Yajurveda. These texts are largely derived from the Ṛg·veda, but have undergone certain changes, both by linguistic change and by reinterpretation. For example, the more ancient injunctive verb system is no longer in use.
An important linguistic change is the disappearance of the injunctive, subjunctive, optative, imperative (the aorist). New innovations in Vedic Sanskrit appear such as the development of periphrastic aorist forms. This must have occurred before the time of Pāṇini because Panini makes a list of those from the northwestern region of India who knew these older rules of Vedic Sanskrit.
In this layer of Vedic literature, the archaic Vedic Sanskrit verb system has been abandoned, and a prototype of pre-Panini Vedic Sanskrit structure emerges. The Yajñagāthās texts provide a probable link between Vedic Sanskrit, Classical Sanskrit and languages of the Epics. Complex meters such as Anuṣṭubh and rules of Sanskrit prosody had been or were being innovated by this time, but parts of the Brāhmaṇa layers show the language is still close to Vedic Sanskrit.
Vedic had a retroflex lateral approximant ([ɭ])[iii] as well as its breathy-voiced counterpart ([ɭʱ]),[iv] which are not found in classical Sanskrit, with the corresponding plosives ḍ(/ɖ/)and ḍh(/ɖʱ/) instead; it was also metrically a cluster, suggesting Proto-Indo-Aryan pronunciations of *[ʐɖ] and *[ʐɖʱ] (see Mitanni-Aryan) before the loss of voiced sibilants, which occurred after the split of Proto-Indo-Iranian.
The vowels e and o were actually realized in Vedic as diphthongsai and au, but they became pure monophthongs in later Sanskrit, such as daivá- > devá-and áika->ekā-. However, the diphthongal behaviour still resurfaces in sandhi.
The vowels ai and au were correspondingly realized in Vedic as long diphthongsāi and āu, but they became correspondingly short in Classical Sanskrit: dyā́us > dyáus.
The Prātiśākhyas claim that the "dental" consonants were articulated from the root of the teeth (dantamūlīya, alveolar), but they became pure dentals later, whereas most other systems including Pāṇini designate them as dentals.
The Prātiśākhyas are inconsistent about [r] but generally claim that it was also a dantamūlīya. According to Pāṇini it is a retroflex consonant.
The pluti (trimoraic) vowels were on the verge of becoming phonemicized during middle Vedic, but disappeared again.
Vedic often allowed two like vowels in certain cases to come together in hiatus without merger during sandhi, which has been reconstructed as the influence of an old laryngeal still present in the Proto-Indo-Iranian stage of the language: PIE*h₂weh₁·nt- → va·ata-.[C]
Vedic had a pitch accent which could even change the meaning of the words, and was still in use in Pāṇini's time, as we can infer by his use of devices to indicate its position. At some latter time, this was replaced by a stress accent limited to the second to fourth syllables from the end.[a]
Since a small number of words in the late pronunciation of Vedic carry the so-called "independent svarita" on a short vowel, one can argue that late Vedic was marginally a tonal language. Note however that in the metrically-restored versions of the Rig Vedaalmost all of the syllables carrying an independent svarita must revert to a sequence of two syllables, the first of which carries an udātta and the second a so-called dependent svarita. Early Vedic was thus definitely not a tonal language like Chinese but a pitch accent language like Japanese, which was inherited from the Proto-Indo-European accent.
Pitch accent was not restricted to Vedic: early Sanskrit grammarian Pāṇini gives both accent rules for the spoken language of his (post-Vedic) time as well as the differences of Vedic accent. We have, however, no extant post-Vedic text with accents.
a3i (e3) (ए३)
a3u (o3) (ओ३)
Pluti, or prolation, is the term for the phenomenon of protracted or overlong vowels in Sanskrit; the overlong or prolated vowels are themselves called pluta. Pluta vowels are usually noted with a numeral "3" (३) indicating a length of three morae (trimātra).
A diphthong is prolated by prolongation of its first vowel.Pāṇinian grammarians recognise the phonetic occurrence of diphthongs measuring more than three morae in duration, but classify them all as prolated (i.e. trimoraic) to preserve a strict tripartite division of vocalic length between hrasva (short, 1 mora), dīrgha (long, 2 morae) and pluta (prolated, 3+ morae).
Pluta vowels are recorded a total of 3 times in the Rigveda and 15 times in the Atharvaveda, typically in cases of questioning and particularly where two options are being compared. For example:
adháḥ svid āsî3d upári svid āsī3t
"Was it above? Was it below?"
idáṃ bhûyā3 idâ3miti
"Is this larger? Or this?"
The pluti attained the peak of their popularity in the Brahmana period of late Vedic Sanskrit (roughly 8th century BC), with some 40 instances in the Shatapatha Brahmana alone.
^Michael Witzel (2006). "Early Loanwords in Western Central Asia: Indicators of Substrate Populations, Migrations, and Trade Relations". In Victor H. Mair (ed.). Contact And Exchange in the Ancient World. University of Hawaii Press. p. 160. ISBN 978-0-8248-2884-4.
^ abcPhilip Baldi (1983). An Introduction to the Indo-European Languages. Southern Illinois University Press. pp. 51–52. ISBN 978-0-8093-1091-3.
^ abChristopher I. Beckwith (2009). Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present. Princeton University Press. pp. 363–368. ISBN 978-0-691-13589-2.
^Mallory, J.P. (1989). In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology, and Myth. London: Thames & Hudson. p. 38f.
^J. P. Mallory; Douglas Q. Adams (1997). Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture. Taylor & Francis. p. 306. ISBN 978-1-884964-98-5.
^Parpola, Asko (1999), "The formation of the Aryan branch of Indo-European", in Blench, Roger & Spriggs, Matthew, Archaeology and Language, vol. III: Artefacts, languages and texts, London and New York: Routledge.
^Richard Gombrich (2006). Theravada Buddhism: A Social History from Ancient Benares to Modern Colombo. Routledge. pp. 24–25. ISBN 978-1-134-90352-8.
^Gérard Huet; Amba Kulkarni; Peter Scharf (2009). Sanskrit Computational Linguistics: First and Second International Symposia Rocquencourt, France, October 29–31, 2007 Providence, RI, USA, May 15–17, 2008, Revised Selected Papers. Springer. pp. v–vi. ISBN 978-3-642-00154-3.
^Strunk, Klaus (1983). Typische Merkmale von Fragesätzen und die altindische "Pluti". München. ISBN 3769615271.
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Delbrück, Berthold; Windisch, Ernst Wilhelm Oskar (1878). Syntaktische Forschungen: III. Die Altindische Wortfolge aus dem Çatapathabrâhmaṇa, Dargestellt von B. Delbrück (in German). ISBN 978-0-543-94034-6.
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