The oldest literary texts preserved in any Indo-European language are the Vedas or sacred books of India. These fall into four groups, the earliest of which, the Rig-veda, is a collection of about a thousand hymns, and the latest, the Atharva-veda, a body of incantations and ritual formulas connected with many kinds of current religious practice. These books form the basis of Brahman philosophy and for a long time were preserved by oral transmission by the priests before being committed to writing. It is therefore difftcult to assign definite dates to them, but the oldest apparently go back to nearly 1500 B.C. The language in which they are written is known as Sanskrit, or to distinguish it from a later form of the language, Vedic Sanskrit. This language is also found in certain prose writings containing directions for the ritual, theological commentary, and the like (the Brahmanas), meditations for the use of recluses (the Aranyakas), philosophical speculations (the Upanishads), and rules concerning various aspects of religious and private life (the Sutras).
The use of Sanskrit was later extended to various writings outside the sphere of religion, and under the influence of native grammarians, the most important of whom was Panini in the fourth century B.C., it was given a fixed, literary form. In this form it is known as Classical Sanskrit. Classical Sanskrit is the medium of an extensive Indian literature including the two great national epics the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, a large body of drama, much lyric and didactic poetry, and numerous works of a scientific and philosophical character. It is still cultivated as a learned language and formerly held a place in India similar to that occupied by Latin in medieval Europe. At an early date it ceased to be a spoken language.
Alongside of Sanskrit there existed a large number of local dialects in colloquial use, known as Prakrits. A number of these eventually attained literary form; one in particular, Pāli, about the middle of the sixth century B.C. became the language of Buddhism. From these various colloquial dialects have descended the present languages of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, spoken by some 600 million people. The most important of these are Hindi, Urdu (the official language of Pakistan), Bengali (the official language of Bangladesh), Punjabi, and Marathi. Urdu is by origin and present structure closely related to Hindi, both languages deriving from Hindustani, the colloquial form of speech that for four centuries was widely used for intercommunication throughout northern India. Urdu differs from Hindi mainly in its considerable mixture of Persian and Arabic and in being written in the Perso-Arabic script instead of Sanskrit characters. Romany, the language of the Gypsies, represents a dialect of northwestern India which from about the fifth century A.D. was carried through Persia and into Armenia and from there has spread through Europe and even into America.
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