Sanskrit was the standard written language of ancient India. It was originally the language of the upper-class intellectuals in northwest India. Compared with the common language (Prakrit) used by ordinary people, it is also called elegant language. Our country and Japan call this language Sanskrit based on the legend that it was created by Brahma (one of the main gods of Hinduism). Its name is originally sanskrit, derived from samskrta, which literally means "completely organized", that is, well-organized language.
In a broad sense, Sanskrit includes three types: Vedic Sanskrit, Epic Sanskrit and Classical Sanskrit, while Sanskrit in a narrow sense only refers to Classical Sanskrit. Among all the ancient languages ??in the world, the number of Sanskrit documents is second only to Chinese, far exceeding Greek and Latin, and the content is extremely rich. Sanskrit literature in a broad sense includes: the four Vedas, the holy scriptures of ancient Brahmanism in India: "Rig Veda", "Sama Veda", "Yajur Veda" and "Atharva Veda", as well as a large number of Brahma books, Sutras, Upanishads, etc.; two major epics: Mahabharata and Ramayana, as well as a large number of ancient records. In addition, it also includes a large number of grammar books, collections of fables, as well as works on medicine, natural science, literary theory, etc.; Indian classical literary works written in classical Sanskrit, that is, Sanskrit in a narrow sense, are of great literary talent and influence. Profound. Among them, the Mahayana classics of Buddhism are the most well-known examples. The original Buddhist scriptures were originally written in common language, and later they were gradually converted into Sanskrit, forming a special kind of Buddhist Sanskrit or mixed Sanskrit. However, after the tenth century, due to the development of various dialects in modern India and the invasion of India by Muslims, Sanskrit gradually lost its actual power and existed only as a classical language.
The script used in publishing Sanskrit texts today is called "Devanagari" (Devanagari). It is based on the Nagari script produced in Central India in the seventh century and developed into the eleventh century. font suitable for writing. In fact, there were many kinds of scripts popular in ancient India. Any script derived from Brahmi (Brahmi or Brahmilipi) letters, such as Siddhant, can be called Sanskrit.
Since ancient times, there have been many legends about the creator of Sanskrit characters. Volume 2 of Tang Xuanzang's "Records of the Western Regions of the Tang Dynasty" says: "The detailed text was made by Brahma, the original vertical rules, forty-seven words" (47 letters). "The Brahma kings and the heavenly emperors wrote their own writings at any time, and the immortals of different ways made their own writings." The oldest writings used in India are based on those unearthed in modern times from Harappa and Mohenjodaro in the Indus River Basin. Judging from the materials, it should be hieroglyphics from prehistoric times. However, it is still unclear what system its origin belongs to. Sanskrit and Phoenician writing (the prototype of modern European writing) are both Semitic writing systems and have been recognized by modern academic circles. Around 700 BC, Indian traders came into contact with people from Mesopotamia (a branch of the Semitic tribe) and spread the twenty-two letters of the Semitic tribe to India. After sorting out by the Indians, about 400 BC, about 40 letters were finally produced. With different times and places, calligraphy and fonts gradually differ. Around the first century AD, Sanskrit characters in the north gradually changed into square fonts, and Sanskrit characters in the south gradually changed into round fonts. By the fourth century, the differences between the two were extremely clear. Among them, the Gupta script developed in the north from the fourth to fifth centuries, and the Siddham script was derived from the Gupta script in the sixth century. The Sidtan alphabet was later introduced to China, Japan and other places. At the same time, the Gupta script was also spread to Kucha, Khotan and other places to form special alphabets, which were adopted by various ancient Central Asian languages.
The grammar of Sanskrit is similar to that of other ancient Indo-European languages ??(such as Latin and Greek), with complex inflections. Nouns have three genders (masculine, feminine and neuter), three numbers (singular, even and plural) and eight cases (nominative, accusative, instrumental, dative, ablative, genitive, person and avocative). grid). Verb conjugations include singular, even, and plural; person includes first, second, and third person; time includes present tense, imperfect tense, perfect tense, aorist tense, future tense, and hypothetical tense; voice includes active and middle , passive; the mood is divided into declarative, subjunctive, imperative, and imperative (subjunctive mood in the aorist tense); in addition, the ending is also divided into two types: other position and autoposition.
In addition, Sanskrit also has a characteristic that is different from other Indo-European languages, that is, the rule of continuous sound changes (sandhi). That is to say, in a sentence, the last letter of a certain word and the first letter of a certain word are together. When the time comes, corresponding changes will occur; in a word, if a certain letter and a certain letter meet a certain positional relationship, corresponding changes in pronunciation, etc. will also be made. However, there are many and long compound words in Sanskrit, and they must be basically connected together when writing. When writing consecutively, the letters must be changed into a continuous form, and with the diacritical marks in the middle, the difficulty of reading can be imagined.
Europeans became interested in Sanskrit starting in the 16th century. When European missionaries, businessmen, etc. began to learn Sanskrit, they gradually realized that there were extensive similarities between Indian Sanskrit and European Latin, Greek and other languages. From the end of the 18th century to the beginning of the 19th century, Sanskrit literary works attracted the attention of European scholars, who began to use modern scientific methods to study Sanskrit. In fact, the ancient Indian grammarian Panini analyzed and summarized the linguistic characteristics of Sanskrit as early as the 4th century BC.
Pornini's life is generally believed to be in the 4th century BC, and his birthplace was near Peshawar, present-day Pakistan. The earliest existing record of him can be found in the second volume of "Records of the Western Regions of the Tang Dynasty" written by the eminent monk Xuanzang of the Tang Dynasty in my country. Xuanzang said that Jian Tuo Luo Guo's town "was the birthplace of Bo Ni Immortal in the "Shengshenglun". ” He went on to say that in ancient times, the writing system was vast and diverse, and various immortals from different sects made their own writings, making it difficult for learners to study them in detail. When he reached the age of 100, Immortal Bonani "compiled a group of words and used them as a calligraphy book to prepare a thousand poems, thirty-two words of poems, which are the ultimate modern and ancient, summarizing classical Chinese". But Bonini's life is not discussed in detail.
Before Bonini, Indian grammar had a long history, and Bonini was the master of it. He left behind a book: "The Panini Sutra", because it contains eight chapters, it is also called "The Book of Eight Chapters", which is what Xuanzang called "The Theory of Statements", and he was Guigao who learned Sanskrit. The nearly 4,000 formulas in the Pā?ini Sutra contain a complete and scientific grammar system. The arrangement of letters is also very scientific. Vowels first, then consonants, arranged according to place of pronunciation and pronunciation method (this is also the order in current Sanskrit dictionaries). This order is more reasonable than the alphabets of Greek, Latin, Arabic and all Western languages ??that are independent of the language system.
As for the grammatical structure of Sanskrit, Panini is characterized by analysis. He started with phonetic analysis, not analyzing sentences, only analyzing words; regardless of semantics, he focused entirely on grammatical form as the object of analysis. He analyzes roots, stems, endings, prefixes, suffixes, derivatives, compounds, and more. The final analysis is the root word, which is the so-called "boundary". What is added to "jie" to make it a word, or makes it show all the relationships such as nouns and verbs, is called "yuan", that is, a direct suffix. Therefore, the basic formula of word formation is boundary + edge = word. In this analysis, all the final roots are verbs. It can also be said that only the root of the verb is the final component. Nouns come from verbs. The process of an action is expressed by verbs. Once the action is completed and the action is fixed, it becomes a thing, and it is expressed by nouns.
In modern times, the emergence of Indo-European historical comparative linguistics is also closely related to the study of Sanskrit, and its research focuses on the phonetic systems of Indo-European languages. Sir William Jones, a British Orientalist scholar in the 18th century, proposed the famous "Indo-European hypothesis" to explain the similarities between Indo-European languages. In an academic lecture at the Asiatic Research Society in 1786, he pointed out the connection between Sanskrit, Greek and Latin. He said: "The verb roots and grammatical forms of Sanskrit... are very similar to those of Greek and Latin. This is by no means accidental. Any linguist who has examined these three languages ??cannot help but think that they all come from the same source. But first The original language is probably no longer extant. It is also reasonable to assume (although the reasons are not sufficient) that Gothic, Celtic and Sanskrit, although very different in appearance, are still related to Sanskrit, and Persian is also the same. Belonging to the same language family." This "original language" is what people later called Proto-Indo-European.
Later, European linguists elevated Jones' empirical insights to scientific demonstrations. Denmark's R.K. Lasker explored "The Origin of Old Norse and Icelandic" (1818); German scholar F. Bopp's "On the Sanskrit Verb Conjugation System and Greek, Latin, Persian and Germanic" "Comparison of Languages" (1816) was the first to conduct detailed research on the fact that Sanskrit, Persian, Greek, Latin, and German languages ??have the same origin.
What Jones called "similarities" had by this time developed into correspondences. In his "German Grammar" (1819-1837), the German linguist J. Grimm (also known as the brother of the Brothers Grimm) proposed the law of phonetic change of Indo-European languages. After modification, this law made Phenomena that were originally thought to be exceptions were uniformly explained. The above three people are the founders of historical comparative linguistics. The German scholar A. Schleicher is a master of historical comparative linguistics. He absorbed Hegel's philosophy of history and Darwin's evolutionary thoughts and wrote "Introduction to the Comparative Grammar of Indo-European, Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin" (1874～1877), was the first person to propose the view of language genealogy. The five-volume "Comparative Grammar of Indo-Germanic Languages" (1886~1900) co-authored by K. Brueggemann and B. Delbrück is a masterpiece in this subject. The above-mentioned scholars all started with field investigations of languages, especially ancient languages ??such as Sanskrit, Persian, and Lithuanian.
It can be said that the emergence and development of Indo-European comparative linguistics benefited from the study and research of Sanskrit. Its greatest achievement is that it has a relatively clear understanding of the genetic relationship between languages, especially in the genealogical classification of Indo-European languages, and has obtained quite conclusive evidence. Furthermore, it helps people understand the expression form and usage area of ??the original mother tongue. For example, European scholars now generally believe that the original Indo-European mother tongue originated in the area north of the Black Sea. In terms of literature, the oldest surviving direct material is written in cuneiform dating to the 14th century BC or earlier in Hittite, before the discovery of Hittite and the interpretation of Mycenaean Linear B in the early 20th century , the Rigveda, one of the Vedic classics written in Sanskrit, is generally considered to be the oldest document in the Indo-European language family.