Hinduism: What Really Happenned in India (PDF) - Oration

Hinduism: What Really Happened in India – M. M. Ninan
“Sanskrit on the other hand is not the direct descendant of Vedic, as
some may suppose. If Vedic was used only as a dialect of North-Western
India, Sanskrit was born in the north, in the Gang valley, and was used at
the time when Vedic still existed. Sanskrit early became the language of
the literature and fell out of use as a colloquial tongue. It was proclaimed
a divine language in India, and all classical works in science, verse or
history were written only in this language. … Many words in the
language are not Indo-European and were borrowed from aboriginal
Dravidian and Munda languages. This makes it farther from Iranian and
other Indo-European languages than was Vedic.”
(http://www.geocities.com/indoeurop/tree/indo/sanskrit.html)
The first epigraphic evidence of Sanskrit is seen in 150 AD and this
inscription is in the Brahmi script. (Encyclopedia Britannica, 1982).
From the fifth century A.D., classical Sanskrit is seen to be the dominant
language in the inscriptions.
Earlier documents used Pali and Prakrit.
Asoka who took every care to make his messages intelligible to the
common man used all existing scripts and languages. These 3 rd Centaury
inscriptions do not include Sanskrit. It included Prakrit, Greek and even
in Aramaic. But no Sanskrit is found because it was not in existence at
that time.
Sanskrit was developed out of Prakrit and other existing languages
during the interval of 100 AD to 150 AD “The first evidence of classical
Sanskrit is found as an inscription dating around A.D.150 in the Brahmi
script. It records the repair of a dam originally built by Chandragupta
Maurya, and contains a panegyric in verse, which can be regarded as the
first literary composition in classical Sanskrit. It is at Girnar in
Kathiawar and was inscribed by Rudradamana, the Saka Satrap of
Ujjayini, on the same rock on which the Fourteen Rock Edicts of Asoka
were also found.
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