‘Prakrit is, like Sanskrit, a literary language’

[Snowbird]

‘Prakrit is, like Sanskrit, a literary language’: Infosys Prize 2025 winner...

Previously from the same author: "Pāli ain't a Prakrit" ~ Ollett

More about the author on his InfoSys prize page: https://www.infosysprize.org/laureates/2025/andrew-ollett.html

From the interview:

And your work on Prakrit departs, you say, from the Natural History framework. What is the Natural History framework, and why should we study Prakrit differently?

There are lots of ways of thinking about language that are all legitimate in their own ways, and one of them is to say that language is like an organism, and it evolves. It speciates. Foucault wrote a book about this: it’s not a coincidence that the way that we represent species evolution and the way that we represent language evolution is the same. These trees of relations and inheritance. That captures one reality of language, which is that language changes over time, and those changes are inherited by and propagated to later generations of speakers. But it fails to capture a lot, of course.

Anyone who works with South Asian languages realises that this sense of a neat tree that starts with Indo-European, and then goes to Sanskrit, and then Prakrit, then Apabhramsa, and then Hindi is a joke. There’s no way that model can have any type of explanatory role when we’re trying to understand how these languages are used and cultivated and learned. There are so many examples that this hypothesis has to confront. People in Indonesia learning to compose Sanskrit, and then composing inscriptions in Sanskrit verse – and it has nothing to do with the language that they speak, or the languages of inheritance around them. We then are told that Prakrit is ostensibly derived from Sanskrit by way of phonological changes, but, in fact, it is, like Sanskrit, a literary language that comes to be used towards the beginning of the Common Era, for certain literary, religious, and philosophical purposes.

[srkris]

In his site (Introduction to Prakrit) he has a fair bit to add about what he means by Prakrit. He makes a distinction between Middle-Indo-Aryan and Prakrit:

This course is an introduction to Prakrit , the literary language that was cultivated from the beginning of the first millennium ce, and continued to occupy an important place in the imagination of language, and the practice of literature, in South Asia for many centuries afterwards. During this time, Prakrit was Sanskrit’s other, and the two languages were constantly used in opposition and complementarity to each othe. This course will begin with a brief overview of the Prakrit literary tradition, and then of Prakrit grammar and metrics. We will then commence reading a selection of texts representing three main genres: lyric poetry , courtly epic , and the story .

No experience with Prakrit, but experience with Sanskrit or Pali. After the introduction to Prakrit grammar in week two, it should be possible to make sense of most of the readings, although it will probably not be possible to prepare all of the readings thoroughly; hence the translations may prove useful. The glossaries are intended for those with a background in Sanskrit.

Prior experience with Sanskrit or Pali, accordingly, is highly recommended but not absolutely required. Some of the assignments will depend on a reading of the original texts that is possible for those with a background in Sanskrit or Pali and less possible for those without

As we will discuss in class, “Prakrit” is not the same a “Middle Indic.” We will not be reading any inscriptions in Middle Indic. Nor will we be reading any Pali, Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit, or Gandhari texts. Given, however, that Prakrit is a Middle Indic language, learning to read Prakrit will probably help with learning to read those languages. Similarly, we will not read any stage-plays, nor will we discuss the language economy of the classical stage-play in any great detail; we will not focus on the minute differences between the so-called “dramatic Prakrits.” Nor, finally, will we deal in any depth with the religious literature of the Jains, including that portion of it that is written in Prakrit. These exclusions are partly motivated by concerns of time, partly by my desire to avoid the dry and pointless exercise of categorization that the study of Prakrit is so persistently afflicted with, and partly by my ceterum censeo that Prakrit was the deliberately-adopted language of a coherent literary tradition which deserves to be experienced and studied as such.

This session begins a three-week engagement with the literary genre with which the Prakrit language is most closely associated: the single-verse lyric , or the gāthā , as it is usually called. We will begin, in this session, by thinking about how to read the gāthā . To this end we will look at a number of premodern commentaries and analyses of individual Prakrit verses.

Also see Premodern Prakrit Grammars

[BethL]

One can read a significant preview of his book Languages of the Snakes on Amazon. It gives me enough to appreciate this nice distillation of the question What is Prakit?

@Vstakan

I would agree that dyachronical linguists should use the narrow definition. The text of the Ashokan pillars as well as the Pali canon belong to an era where Sanskrit as the codified and streamlined Vedic was still in its infancy (or maybe even non-existent yet). The Prakrit of Jain scriptures is undisputedly a product of a much later linguistic development than Pali or Ashokan. So, the use of Pali and Ashokan most likely pre-dates the tri-partite or bi-partite division of IA languahes by native grammarians. That means that historical linguistics would do well by steering away from simplistic and all too broad definition of Pali as Prakrit.

At the same time, for us as Buddhists , for the general public, etc. there is nothing wrong with using the broad definition. Most of the time they don’t need all the fine details if the linguistic history of India. Most don’t even realize that Sanskrit may be younger than Pali.

[srkris]

Most don’t even realize that Sanskrit may be younger than Pali.

Sanskrit (as a language) is not younger than Pali, however there are Sanskrit texts which have been composed since the Vedic (pre-Buddhist) period, and perhaps the newest Classical Sanskrit original text was published by me on my website as recently as yesterday. So individual texts in Sanskrit can be earlier or later than the Pali canon.

Anyways, my view of Indo-Aryan linguistic history looks much like this:

[BethL]

@srkris

looks much like this

Wow, is this spreadsheet publicly available?

[srkris]

Sure.

Indo-Iranian.xlsx

[josephzizys]

for those wondering what

@srkris

my ceterum censeo that Prakrit was the deliberately-adopted language of a coherent literary tradition which deserves to be experienced and studied as such.

means:

Ceterum (autem) censeo Carthaginem esse delendam (“Furthermore, I think that Carthage must be destroyed”), often abbreviated to Carthago delenda est or delenda est Carthago (“Carthage must be destroyed”), is a Latin oratorical phrase attributed to Cato the Elder, a politician of the Roman Republic. The phrase originates from debates held in the Roman Senate prior to the Third Punic War (149–146 BC) between Rome and Carthage. Cato is said to have used the phrase as the conclusion to all of his speeches to push for the war, even when the speech was otherwise unrelated to Carthage or foreign affairs.

Carthago delenda est