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Vedic Sanskrit

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Vedic Sanskrit

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Also known as Vedic, pre-Classical Sanskrit, sa-vaidika, Vedic language

archaic language in the Vedas (2nd millennium BCE)

Key facts

Native to
South Asia
Region
Northwestern Indian subcontinent
Era
c. 1500 – 600 BCE
Language family
Indo-European Indo-Iranian Indo-Aryan Vedic Sanskrit
Early forms
Proto-Indo-European Proto-Indo-Iranian Proto-Indo-Aryan
Iso 639 3
vsn
Glottolog
vedi1234

via Wikipedia infobox

~13 min read

Encyclopedic overview

Vedic Sanskrit, also simply referred as the Vedic language, is the earliest attested form of the Sanskrit and Prakrit languages: members of the Indo-Aryan subgroup of the Indo-European language family. It is attested in the Vedas and related literature compiled over the period of the mid-2nd to mid-1st millennium BCE. It is orally preserved, predating the local advent of writing by several centuries.

Extensive ancient literature in the Vedic Sanskrit language has survived into the modern era, and this has been a major source of information for reconstructing Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Indo-Iranian history.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Vedic Sanskrit” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.