Origin of Sanskrit

Sanskrit (meaning 'perfected', 'refined', or 'polished') is the ancient sacred language of India. An official language of India, it is believed to be the oldest language of the world.

By 400BC a Hindu Indian grammarian by the name of Pāṇini had formally recorded rules of Sanskrit grammar. This is known as the Ashtadhyayi.

The Ashtadhyayi consists of eight chapters, each divided into four sections, or ‘padas’. It characterises the difference between the language of the sacred texts and that of common street language. 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology have been set out, much in the way of a mathematical function, to define the basic elements of the language including sentence structure, vowels, consonants, nouns, and verbs. Pāṇini’s work is still used in the teaching of Sanskrit today.

Classical Sanskrit, as opposed to its more archaic ancestor Vedic Sanskrit, was in its height in the centuries AD. From it came a vast body of philosophical, scientific and religious knowledge, as well as Hindu scriptures and classical literature. These include works such as the Gita and Ramayana.