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The Indian tradition, states Winternitz, has favored the learning and the usage of multiple languages from the ancient times. Sanskrit was a spoken language in the educated and the elite classes, but it was also a language that must have been understood in a wider circle of society because the widely popular folk epics and stories such as the ...
The Kharoṣṭhī script, also known as the Gāndhārī script, is an ancient abugida (a kind of alphabetic script) used by the Gandhara culture of ancient northwest India to write the Gāndhārī and Sanskrit languages. It was in use from the 4th century BCE until it died out in its homeland around the 3rd century CE.
Vedic Sanskrit, also simply referred as the Vedic language, is an ancient language of the Indo-Aryan subgroup of the Indo-European language family. It is attested in the Vedas and related literature [1] compiled over the period of the mid-2nd to mid-1st millennium BCE. [2] It is orally preserved, predating the advent of writing by several ...
Most ancient and medieval Hindu texts were composed in Sanskrit, either epic Sanskrit (the pre-classical language found in the two main Indian epics) or classical Sanskrit (Paninian Sanskrit). [42] In modern times, most ancient texts have been translated into other Indian languages and some in Western languages. [43]
The following criteria were set during the time Sanskrit was given the classical language status by the government of India: [3] I. High antiquity of its early texts/recorded history over a period of 1500-2000 years. II. A body of ancient literature/texts, which is considered a valuable heritage by generations of speakers. III.
Sanskrit epigraphy, the study of ancient inscriptions in Sanskrit, offers insight into the linguistic, cultural, and historical evolution of South Asia and its neighbors. Early inscriptions , such as those from the 1st century BCE in Ayodhya and Hathibada , are written in Brahmi script and reflect the transition to classical Sanskrit .
[125] [note 5] Ancient inscriptions have also been discovered in many North and Central Indian sites, occasionally in South India as well, that are in hybrid Sanskrit-Prakrit language called "Epigraphical Hybrid Sanskrit". [note 6] These are dated by modern techniques to between the 1st and 4th centuries CE.
Devanāgarī has been widely adopted across India and Nepal to write Sanskrit, Marathi, Hindi, Central Indo-Aryan languages, Konkani, Boro, and various Nepalese languages. Some of the earliest epigraphic evidence attesting to the developing Sanskrit Nāgarī script in ancient India is from the 1st to 4th century CE inscriptions discovered in ...