How can we know that? Well, we can see the pattern pretty clearly when you look at the languages all over the world as a whole instead of as separate oceans of words and grammars.
There are enough eerie similarities out there to make it quite clear that all of our languages come from a single source, however distant and clouded by time it might be. For example, consider Sanskrit and … well, most Indo-European languages. In Sanskrit, which we might believe is a wholly different language from English, the word is pitar. Now we see the connection.
Examples like this often make it seem like you could read Sanskrit if you concentrated. Which is, in a word, amazing. Knowing Without Proof How can we know that? Foods that are good for menstrual health. Study reveals the best time to sleep for a healthy heart. Samantha Ruth Prabhu's revenge dressing game is on point.
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There are dozens and dozens more correspondences like these, where features disappeared in one branch but survived in another, or were innovated in one branch but not in another, and so on.
So while it's clear that Ancient Greek, Sanskrit, Hittite, and so on are related , it's also clear that none is "mother" to the others: they're more like "siblings" or "cousins", with a common ancestor. The techniques I mentioned above, called the "comparative method", are really useful for reconstructing languages that must once have existed but aren't directly attested. But this method can only go back so far.
Past a certain point, the comparative method just can't say anything particularly meaningful. So while we know that there was an ancestor to all Indo-European languages, and an ancestor to all Afro-Asiatic languages "Proto-Afro-Asiatic" , and an ancestor to all Sino-Tibetan languages "Proto-Sino-Tibetan" …we can't really say anything definite about what came before those.
They might all descend from an ancient sort of "Proto-World", or they might have all come about independently. There's just not enough evidence to say one way or the other. Sanskrit is not the mother of all languages. Sanskrit is not even the mother of the modern Indo-Aryan languages of the Northern India.
Neither it is their father or grandfather. In fact, no language is a direct descendant of Sanskrit. Saying that Sanskrit to the modern Indo-Aryan languages is the same as Latin to the modern Romance languages is absolutely wrong.
The Romance languages are direct descendants of Latin, but the modern Indo-Aryan languages are not direct descendants of Sanskrit. The best European analogy is the role Ancient Greek played for the modern European languages: Ancient Greek affected them all, filled them with lots of words and syntactic structures, but none of those languages is a direct descendant of Ancient Greek, naturally with the exception of modern Greek.
To continue the family analogy, to the modern Indo-Aryan languages Sanskrit is a cousin grandfather who was their teacher, their guru. The Indo-Aryan languages descend from grandfather's siblings, but grandfather himself had no children. Speaking more linguistically, there are actually two languages called Sanskrit : the Vedic Sanskrit aka the Vedic language ca.
The Vedic language was once a vernacular, but since the texts in it were holy and highly revered, the language was later standardized and it underwent polishing by Indian sages and philosophers giving rise to Sanskrit whose name can be translated as "well prepared, pure and perfect, polished".
But apart from Sanskrit proper, the Vedic language gave rise to its sister languages, not so refined, not so polished, but which were really vernacular languages in the times when Sanskrit became the language of educated philosophers, brahmins, and poets. Those sister languages are called Prakrits, "natural, original, unpolished", the main ones being Maharashtri, Gandhari, Shauraseni, and Magadhi.
Pali can also be considered a Prakrit, although later they did polish it very much. Sanskrit, Latin and a few other languages had a common ancestor called Proto-Indo-European , which was prevalent around BC on the southern steppes of Russia.
It is a fact that Sanskrit has enriched most Indian Languages including the Dravidian Languages such as Telugu as Latin enriched some languages like English. Do you think that there must be a common language for our ancestors who might have spoken a language though it might not be Sanskrit? Sign up to join this community.
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