Bruce Morrison, age 15, of Jackson, Miss., for his question:
IS SANSKRIT A COMMON LANGUAGE?
The Sanskrit language is not a common language. Rather, it is the classical, sacred literary language of the Hindus of India. It belongs to the Indic branch of the Indo Iranian languages, a subfamily of the Indo European languages.
Since roughly the beginning of the Christian era, Sanskrit has been more or less artificially maintained as the literary language of the priestly, learned and cultivated castes of India and it retains this position in the 20th century.
Sanskrit is distinguishable trom the oldest preserved forms of Indian speech, in the Vedic religious scriptures, the Vedas and Upanishads.
Collectively referred to as Vedic (or as Vedic Sanskrit in contrast to classical Sanskrit), these forms of speech show dialectical, stylistic and chronological differences from one work to another Vedic, however, like Sanskrit, was a more or less artificial "high tongue" based on popular idioms but handed down through generations of priestly singers.
Vedic and Sanskrit are both dialects of the Old Indic speech, which also existed in many nonliterary vernacular dialects. These vernaculars, over time, underwent modifications, some of which are observable in the differences between Verdic and Sanskrit.
Vedic differs from classical Sanskrit about as much as the Greek Homer differs from classical Greek.
In grammatical forms, Vedic was richer and less settled than Sanskrit, which gave up much of the early grammar without supplying substitutes. By the Middle Ages, Sanskrit had lost the Vedic system of pitch or tonal accent.
Notwithstanding these losses, Sanskrit is a complex language, not only highly inflected but also subject to certain alterations of vowels and context influenced modifications of sounds.
Sanskrit has, on the whole, preserved the linguistic conditions of the supposed Indo European speech better than any other Indo European language, except possibly ancient Greek.
After the 16th century, European missionaries acquired some familiarity with Sanskrit language and literature. The first Sanskrit grammar was published in Europe in 1790.
The discovery by Western scholars of the existence of Sanskrit, and of Indian methods of teaching it, led to both the identification of the Indo European language family and, under the stimulation of Panini's methodology, to the establishment of the science of comparative linguistics or comparative philology. Panini, by the way, was an Indian grammarian from about 400 B.C.
Sanskrit writings profoundly influenced the study of comparative mythology and religion and that of comparative jurisprudence.