Sanskrit

Assembled from 23 blocks · 2 evidence · 20 related

1. Story
2. The Old Indo-Aryan language of the Vedas and of the classical literature of South Asia, and the language whose resemblance to Greek and Latin set the whole enterprise in motion. Two properties made it decisive rather than merely interesting. Its archaism: the Vedic language preserves grammatical distinctions lost elsewhere, including a mobile pitch accent which is marked in the transmitted text and which supplied Verner with the conditioning factor for his law almost a century later. And its description: Pāṇini's grammar, composed in the middle of the first millennium BCE, analyses the language into roots, affixes and ordered rules with a rigour European philology did not approach until the nineteenth century, so when Sanskrit reached Europe it arrived already formally analysed. Sanskrit's role has also been persistently misread. It is not the ancestor of Greek and Latin but their cousin, and the early assumption that it stood closest to the proto-language distorted reconstruction for decades until Hittite and a better understanding of Indo-Iranian innovation corrected the picture.
3. Knowledge
4. Indo-European
5. Sanskrit
6. Connections
7. Verner's Law — the exception that rescued the rule
8. Indo-European
9. Jones states the Indo-European hypothesis in Calcutta
10. Verner explains the exceptions to Grimm's Law
11. Proto-Indo-European
12. Uralic
13. Trans-New Guinea
14. Dravidian
15. Hittite
16. Sanskrit
17. Jones states the Indo-European hypothesis in Calcutta
18. Hrozný identifies Hittite as an Indo-European language
19. Proto-Indo-European is spoken
20. Phylogeography puts the Indo-European homeland in Anatolia
21. Evidence
22. Supports the statement that Jones argued in 1786 for a common lost source of Sanskrit, Greek and Latin on the evidence of verb roots and grammatical forms. V55 verification basis: this session had no access to any source — WebFetch was egress-blocked for every host attempted and the WebSearch budget was exhausted before authoring — so the cited work was not retrieved, and no page, volume or figure quoted from it was re-checked. The discourse is paraphrased, never quoted verbatim, and the delivery date of 2 February 1786 is taken from the standard accounts rather than from the publication itself.
23. Supports the finding that the apparent exceptions to Grimm's Law are conditioned by the position of the inherited Proto-Indo-European accent. V55 verification basis: this session had no access to any source — WebFetch was egress-blocked for every host attempted and the WebSearch budget was exhausted before authoring — so the cited work was not retrieved, and no page, volume or figure quoted from it was re-checked. The article is cited without pagination deliberately: the page range is not held reliably and inventing one would be worse than omitting it.