भाषा-भेदः

उज्ज्वलाभिप्रायः

Have been deliberately avoiding reading too much of Vedic language outside of Rigveda (there too only Archaic-marked verses by Arnold mainly). Overall, I think Vedic Sanskrit is not one cross-intelligible language. And now I feel I can clearly tell the deviations and similarities of the brAhmaNa language from Rigvedic, and thus can read it without the fear of corrupting my understanding of the Rigvedic language and idiom.

Rudolph Roth, in the preface to the seven-volume Sanskrit Wörter- buch (1853-95), compiled jointly with Otto von Böhtlingk, had been clear that the poets of the Rigveda “speak a language divided from that of the Brahmaņas (which scarcely differs from the so-called classical Sanskrit) by a chasm as wide as that which separates the Latin of the Salic hymns from that of M. T. Varro”, but today’s indologists see it the other way round. As Wendy Doniger puts it in the introduction to her Penguin selection from the Rigveda: “one feels that the hymns them- selves are mischievous translations into a ‘foreign’ language”.