On Fri, Nov 25, 2011 at 3:14 PM, CTb Sivakumaran wrote:
> **
>
>
> Yes.
> And I suppose all these Prakrit ‘languages’ including Tamil were basically
> vernaculars while Sanskrit was the scholastic.Guess this is what Mr.KSS is
> saying in his earlier mail too. Would that be so?
>
Pretty much; though not exactly… There are many scholastic works in the
Prakrits too – though mostly Buddhist/Jain ones, and in Tamil, we have
things like the Kural or the Thevaram, and so on.
But Sanskrit was a kind of link-language for scholars from different parts
of the country to communicate, and was specifically designed and
constructed for this purpose – the very word “Samskritam” means something
like “Refined” or “Constructed”. It was a distillation of the grammatical
and semantic systems, and the vocabulary, of the Prakrits. If you wanted
your work to be read and discussed by many scholars across the length and
breadth country (and beyond, for that matter), you had to write in Sanskrit.
Languages have been used in this way all through history – Latin in Europe,
classical Arabic in the Islamic empires, English today, German by the late
19th century and early 20th century physicists,…
Shash
