SV: Classical languages of India

[Swaminathan Madhuresan]

--- Prof. Sudalaimuthu Palaniappan <Palaniappa at AOL.COM> wrote:
> But such a direct acknowledgement by  ancient non-Tamil Sanskritists  may be
> hard to come by from Sanskrit sources because of the linguistic attitudes
> prevailing among the orthodox Sanskritists. (These attitudes have been
> discussed by Madhav Deshpande in "Sociolinguistic Attitudes in India' and
> "Sanskrit and Prakrit". ) Discussing the silence of the Gadyas of rAmAnuja
> regarding the AzvArs, Vasudha Narayanan says, "ramAnuja intended his
> philosophical works to be convincing to an audience of Brahmin scholars
> outside the community, who might have been shocked by ascribing authority to
> Tamil poems composed by poets of various castes. The Gadyas, however, have
> always been used within the zrIvaiSNava community and are little known
> outside it. It appears, therefore, that rAmAnuja was such a conservative
> Brahmin that when he was writing in Sanskrit he did not make any explicit
> reference to anything not written in Sanskrit."

Is this not an attitude described by the IA expert Thieme?
It is likely that this non-acknowledgement of foreign words
is a major policy of the early Indo-Aryans by which they
effected a language shift amidst Non-Aryans.

Best regards,
SM



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