Sanskrit

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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.