Indo Aryan Languages

"During the period before printing was introduced the major part of written Marathi literature consisted of long poems written in simple meters."

"Literature was communicated to the rest of the population through oral religio-cultural presentations. Marathi prose literature was smaller in volume and restricted to historical chronicles, administrative correspondence, accounts, etc. It was also written and copied by professional scribes."

"[Marathi] is a language less regular and less definite than English and being only a spoken language inconceivably less apprehensible and less susceptible of rigid interpretation."

"During the pre-printing era, Marathi was written in two scripts : Modi (Moorh) and Balbodh (Devnagri). Balbodh was mainly used for writing poetry and Modi for writing prose. When books were printed in Marathi, the selection of one of the scripts became a problem. In the beginning both scripts were used. The types of devnagri were cut and applied to the Sanskrit and Hindi languages but Modi script was in use for Marathi."

"As reading and writing were restricted to only high caste people who were either Sanskrit scholars, professional scribes, or rulers.... literature was accessible only to them and despite a thousand years of tradition of writing, newly arrived foreigners got the impression that Marathi is merely a spoken language without a serious literature... When books were printed in Marathi, the selection of one of the scripts became a major problem."

"Books in the Maratha language are generally written in Devnagri character, but the character commonly used in business is the Moorh. The system of that alphabet and Devnagri is the same."

"Although in the Maharatta country the Devnagri character is well known to men of education yet a character is much smaller and varies considerably in form, from the Nagari, though the number and power of the letters nearly correspond."

"Conscious efforts of evolving a uniform standard variety of Marathi were made by both Marathi scholars and British officers. Dadoba's concern about a uniform standard can be seen in the preface of his grammar."

"Before printing and the advent of the British, variations of language on all levels of language use were not felt to be a problem. The print media, and the preparation of school books under central governmental control according to precise criteria were the most important forces in the creation of uniform norm which in turn stabilized the spoken norm of Marathi."

"Although there are many scripts and languages in India but not much research work is done for handwritten Marathi characters. Marathi handwritten character recognition is the challenging task in the pattern recognition field."

"Marathi is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by about 71 million people mainly in the Indian state of Maharashtra and neighbouring states. Marathi is also spoken in Israel and Mauritius. Marathi is thought to be a descendant of Maharashtri, one of the Prakrit languages which developed from Sanskrit."

"Marathi first appeared in writing during the 11th century in the form of inscriptions on stones and copper plates. Marathi was written in Modi script — a cursive script which minimizes the lifting of pen from paper while writing. Most writings of the Maratha Empire are in Modi script. However, Persian based scripts were also used for court documentation."

"With the advent of large scale printing, Modi script fell into disuse, as it proved very difficult for typesetting. Currently, due to the availability of Modi fonts and the enthusiasm of the younger speakers, the script is far from disappearing."

"Now, Marathi is written in the Devnagri script, a set consists of 16 vowels"

"'Modi' was in use till the time of the Peshwas (18th century). This script was introduced by HemadPanta, a minister in the court of the Yadava kings of Devgiri (13th century). This script looked more like today's dravidian scripts and offered the advantage of greater writing speed because the letters could be joined together. Today only the Devnagari script is used which is easier to read but does not have the advantage of faster writing."

"From the 13th century until the mid-20th century, it was written with the Modi alphabet. Since 1950 it has been written with the Devnagri alphabet."

"Modi script is a Brahmi based script used primarily for writing Marathi and in some cases other languages like Hindi, Gujarati, Konkani, Tamil and Telugu."

"Modi script derives from Nagari family of script. Importance of Modi is because it was the official script for all administrative purposes in the 16th century. When the Maratha dynasties came in power they adopted also continued it as official script through the 17th century and it remained so until the middle of the 20th century. Changing socio-political conditions gradually pushed Modi out of its official use and was replaced by the Devnagri script, known as Balbodh"

"In recent years interest in Modi script has increased and researchers and enthusiasts are reinventing this cultural and historical heritage. There are many of Modi documents preserved not only in India but also in other Asian and European countries. While the majority of Modi documents are official records, land records and other administrative documents, the script is also used in education, journalism and other routine activities before the 1950s."

"Modi script has only single “eekar I” and “ookar u”, which minimize grammatical mistakes."

"The Modi letters are syllables as they cannot be drawn without the inherent vowel sign “Kana”."

"Modi has undergone a series of changes and it reflects the socio-political and cultural changes that occurred in the period when Modi was prominently used. The earliest form is of the 12th century, known as "Adyakalin (आद्यकालीन)‟. It underwent a change during the 13th century and is known as “Yadavakalin (यादवकालीन)” followed by “Brahmhkalin (ब्रह्मकालीन)” of the 14th-16th century. The well-known “Chitnis” form developed during the “Shivakalin (शिवकालीन)” of the 17th century. In the 18th century the “Peshvekalin (पेशवेकालीन)”, style of Modi gained prominence and had variations like “Chitnisi, Bilavalkari, Mahadevapanti, and Ranadi”. The final stage of Modi is associated with English rule and is called “Anglakalin (आंग्लकालीन)”. These forms were used from 1818 until 1952."

"I called up the Devil and he appeared .... He is an able diplomat and speaks eloquently of Church and State. He is somewhat pale but small's the wonder. for he is now studying Sanskrit and Hegel."

"The literature of the Sanskrit language incontestably belongs to a highly cultivated people, whom we may with great reason consider to have been the most informed of all the Epics. It is, at the same time, a scientific and a poetic literature. Hindu literature is one of the richest in prose and poetry."

"Old India had a high rate of literacy, particularly because of its educational system, its Sanskrit and its gurukulams."

"Macaulay's policy was implemented and became a resounding success. The pre-Macaulayan vernacular system of education was destroyed, even though British surveys had found it more effective and more democratic than the then-existing education system in Britain. The rivalling educationist party, the so-called Orientalists, had proposed a Sanskrit-based system of education, in which Indian graduates would not have been as estranged from their mother civilization as they became through English education, and in which they could have selectively adopted the useful elements of Western modernity, more or less the way Japan modernized itself."

"A university teaches. What does it teach? It must obviously teach all the languages in which the great literatures which have been preserved were written — Hebrew, Arabic, Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, French, Italian, German, Scandinavian, and English."

"The introduction of the use of Sanskrit as the lingu-franca is a turning point in the mental history of the Indian people. The causes that preceded it, the changes in the intellectual standpoint that went with it, the results that followed on both, are each of them of vital importance."

"The majesty and grandeur of the Sanskrit language, the sonorousness of the word music, the rise and fall of the rhythm rolling in waves, the elasticity of meaning and the conventional atmosphere that appears in it have always made it charming to those for whom it was written. ...The wealth of imagery, the vividness of description of natural scenes, the underlying suggestiveness of higher ideals and the introduction of imposing personalities often lead great charm to Sanskrit poetry."

"The creation of Sanskrit, the “refined” language, was a prodigious work on a grand scale. Grammarians and semanticists of genius undertook to create a perfect language, artificial and permanent, belonging to no one, that was to become the language of the entire culture. Sanskrit is built on a basis of Vedic and the Prakrits, but has a much more complex grammar, established according to a rigorous logic. It has an immense vocabulary and a very adaptable grammar, so that words can be grouped together to express any nuance of an idea, and verb forms can be found to cover any possibility of tense, such as future intentional in the past, present continuing into the future, and so on. Furthermore, Sanskrit possesses a wealth of abstract nouns, technical and philosophical terms unknown in any other language. Modern Indian scholars of Sanskrit culture have often remarked that many of the new concepts of nuclear physics or modern psychology are easy for them to grasp, since they correspond exactly to familiar notions of Sanskrit terminology."

"Sanskrit was a complete success and became the language of all cultured people in India and in countries under Indian influence. All scientific, philosophical, historical works were henceforth written in Sanskrit, and important texts existing in other languages were translated and adapted into Sanskrit. For this reason, very few ancient literary, religious, or philosophical documents exits in India in other languages. The sheer volume of Sanskrit literature is immense, and it remains largely unexplored. .... Sanskrit is constructed like geometry and follows a rigorous logic. It is theoretically possible to explain the meaning of the words according to the combined sense of the relative letters, syllables and roots. Sanskrit has no meanings by connotations and consequently does not age. Panini's language is in no way different from that of Hindu scholars conferring in Sanskrit today."

"[Sanskrit is] the great spiritual language of the world."

"Lord Monboddo, (1774), for example, felt that he would "be able clearly to prove that Greek is derived from the Shanscrit" (322). Halhed stated: "I do not ascertain as a fact, that either Greek or Latin are derived from this language; but I give a few reasons wherein such a conjecture might be found: and I am sure that it has a better claim to the honour of a parent than Phoenician or Hebrew (Letter to G. Costard, quoted in Marshall 1970, 10). Schlegel, (1977 [1808]), who played a leading role in stimulating interest in Sanskrit, especially in Germany, developed the concept of comparative grammar wherein "the Indian language is older, the others younger and derived from it" (429). Vans Kennedy (1828) felt the evidence demonstrated that "Sanscrit itself is the primitive language from which Greek, Latin, and the mother of the Teutonic dialects were originally derived" (196). These ideas were picked up by intellectuals outside the halls of academia: Blavatsky (1975), the theosophist, claimed that "Old Sanskrit is the origin of all the less ancient Indo-European languages, as well as of the modern European tongues and dialects" (115)."

"Sanskrit, “serving as an available and localized medium in each and every region separately, participated along with the vernaculars in the project of inventing and elaborating distinctive regional cultures and identities. Far from occluding such regional distinctiveness or uniqueness, Sanskrit was now employed precisely to articulate it”"

"“… Sanskrit still allows a poet to transcend his or her parochial context and reach out to a space shaped by a wider, inherited discourse. At the same time, Sanskrit enables a skilled poet to condense into the space of a single work— even a single verse — an entire world of specific associations, contents and meaning… It is clear, at least to me, that Sanskrit did not share Latin’s fate. Intense regionalization in the literary realm tended to go hand in hand with highly innovative “Sanskritization”, to use an old term— that is, continuous experimentation with both new forms of Sanskrit literary production and the canonical terms, categories and modes of Sanskrit-informed culture and theory more generally. There were, of course, tensions, rivalries, and all kinds of exotic combinations, many of them internal to the emerging vernaculars themselves; but far from contributing to the demise of Sanskrit as a powerful imaginative vehicle, these very tensions provide acute evidence of its continuous cultural vitality.”"

"Of Sanskrit, Sri Aurobindo writes: Every one of its vowels and consonants has a particular inalienable force which exists by the nature of things and not by development or human choice; these are the fundamental sounds which lie at the base of the Tantric bija-mantras and constitute the efficacy of the mantra itself. Every vowel and every consonant in the original language had certain primary meanings which arose out of [some] essential Shakti or force, and [these] were the basis of other derivative meanings."

"The richness of Sanskrit language is almost beyond belief. Many centuries ago that language contained words to describe states of the conscious and the subconscious and the unconscious mind and a variety of other concepts which have been evolved by modern psychoanalysis and psyche-therapy. Further, it has many a word, of which there is no exact synonym even in the richest modern languages. That is why some modern writers have been driven occasionally to use Sanskrit words when writing in English."

"There is at least one language, Sanskrit, which for the duration of almost 1000 years was a living spoken language with a considerable literature of its own. Besides works of literary value, there was a long philosophical and grammatical tradition that has continued to exist with undiminished vigor until the present century."

"It was in India, however, that there rose a body of knowledge which was destined to revolutionize European ideas about language. The Hindu grammar taught Europeans to analyze speech forms; when one compared the constituent parts, the resemblances, which hitherto had been vaguely recognized, could be set forth with certainty and precision."

"The attempt to render in a European tongue the grand panorama of the ever periodically recurring Law -- impressed upon the plastic minds of the first races endowed with Consciousness by those who reflected the same from the Universal Mind -- is daring, for no human language, save the Sanskrit -- which is that of the Gods -- can do so with any degree of adequacy."

"A language, Sanskrit or another, should be acquired by whatever method is most natural, efficient and stimulating to the mind and we need not cling there to any past or present manner of teaching: but the vital question is how we are to learn and make use of Sanskrit and the indigenous languages so as to get to the heart and intimate sense of our own culture and establish a vivid continuity between the still living power of our past and the yet uncreated power of our future, and how we are to learn and use English or any other foreign tongue so as to know helpfully the life, ideas and culture of other countries and establish our right relations with the world around us. This is the aim and principle of a true national education, not, certainly, to ignore modern truth and knowledge, but to take our foundation on our own being, our own mind, our own spirit...."

"The Ancient and classical creations of the Sanskrit tongue both in quality and in body and abundance of excellence, in their potent originality and force and beauty, in their substance the height and width of the reach of their spirit stand very evidently in the front rank among the world's great literatures."

"Sanskrit should be deleted from the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution because it is a foreign language brought to the country by foreign invaders - the Aryans."

"There is no language in the world, even Greek, which has the clarity and the philosophical precision of Sanskrit. India is not only at the origin of everything she is superior in everything, intellectually, religiously or politically and even the Greek heritage seems pale in comparison."

"I believe that the influence of the Sanscrit literature will penetrate not less deeply than did the revival of Greek literature in the fifteenth century."

"Our Gods spoke in Sanskrit; our sages thought in Sanskrit, our poets wrote in Sanskrit. All that is best in us—the best thoughts, the best ideas, the best lines—seeks instinctively to clothe itself in Sanskrit. To millions it is still the language of their Gods; to others it is the language of their ancestors; to all it is the language par excellence; a common inheritance, a common treasure that enriches all the family of our sister languages."

"The Sanskrit shall be our "devabhasha" (Deva Bhasha) our sacred language and the "Sanskrit Nishtha" Hindi, the Hindi which is derived from Sanskrit and draws its nourishment from the latter, is our rashtrabhasha (Rashtra Bhasha) our current national language—-besides being the richest and the most cultured of the ancient languages of the world, to us Hindus the Sanskrit is the holiest tongue of tongues. Our scriptures, history, philosophy and culture have their roots so deeply imbedded in the Sanskrit literature that it forms veritably the brain of our Race. Mother of the majority of our mother tongues, she has suckled the rest of them at her breast. All Hindu languages current today whether derived from Sanskrit or grafted on to it can only grow and flourish on the sap of life they imbibe from Sanskrit. The Sanskrit language therefore must ever be an indispensable constituent of the classical course for Hindu youths."

"Proposals to include Sanskrit in the course offerings were rejected numerous times by scholars who wanted to protect JNU from what they considered to be a majoritarian or Hindu Nationalist agenda. When I questioned Romila Thapar, a well known historian from JNU, about this issue in July 2000, she explained that if students want to learn Sanskrit, “there are so many Maths and Piths around where they can go”. She added that “most of the regional colleges have some kind of Sanskrit program”."

"Sanskrit (meaning "cultured or refined"), the classical language of Hinduism, is the oldest and the most systematic language in the world. The vastness and the versatility, and power of expression can be appreciated by the fact that this language has 65 words to describe various forms of earth, 67 words for water, and over 250 words to describe rainfall."

"Sanskrit has many virtues that attract. Its grammar has been rigorously analyzed, but not in a doctrinaire way – there is room for intellectual debate. The classical Indian culture in which Sanskrit first flourished offers an immense variety of material, from romantic comedy and sensual poetry to epic, massive-word play, political science and philosophy. It embodies a contradiction, that a language whose literature is so lithe, should be indigenously analyzed as a sort of architectural structure. And I suppose I like the fact that it is so difficult (coming from English, certainly), yet so familiar in another way (coming at it from Latin, Greek and Russian)."