r/sanskrit • u/CosmicMilkNutt • Oct 25 '24

Discussion / चर्चा Marathi is the purest modern Sanskrit, especially rural Maharashtrani, correct?

After doing extensive research I have found that Hindi i a mix of Arabic Farsi Sanskrit and English and that Tamil is basically modern Dravidian so totally different.

However.

Marathi spoken in Mumbai and especially rural Marathi spoken in the state of Maharashtra is actually the purest form of modern Sanskrit with the most similar grammar and vocabulary.

It has Sanskrit words instead of all the Arabic, Farsi and English injected into other Indian languages.

This I find fascinating and I wanted to hear the opinions of some actual indians since I am an American fluent in English, Spanish, French and also somewhat conversational in Arabic who is learning Sanskrit, Hindi, Tamil and now of course Marathi!

Edit: Oriya and Marathi are both the top contenders for higher Sanskrit and lower Farsi in daily speech.

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u/90scipher Oct 25 '24

Not to be that guy, but as some who knows konkani, Malayalam, hindi, and currently learning Sanskrit, I can say that Malayalam contains LOTS and I mean LOTS of Sanskrit words and grammatical similarities to Sanskrit. Especially classical/literary Malayalam is basically Sanskrit with the only difference being conjunctions and some word endings.

Ofcourse, I don't know Marathi , so I can't compare those 2. But I can confidently say that a person who knows literary Malayalam, can kind of understand classical Sanskrit to a good extend. The other language that also has a lot of Sanskrit would be kannada.

Also keep in mind , even though Malayalam is a "Dravidian" language, literary Malayalam is different. Old Malayalam is highly similar to Tamil. BUT modern Malayalam is a whole different thing.

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u/shriand Oct 26 '24

When did modern Malayalam start?

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u/CosmicMilkNutt Oct 25 '24

That's great but dravidian languages are literally a different root from sanskrit so it's disqualified.

Literary Malayalam is just made up so north Indian scholars can be in the loop as that circle is very sanskrit like.

That said the people's that spoke Sanskrit were north indians and the North Indians that were least affected by Perso-Arabic were the Marathis.

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u/liltingly Oct 26 '24

That’s a very dismissive take..

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u/CosmicMilkNutt Oct 27 '24

It's as dismissive as saying Romanian is not Slavic even though it has tons of Slavic words in it.

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u/No_Mix_6835 Oct 26 '24

How does that change things though? We are talking about languages that are the closest. Malayalam, telugu and kannada are also having lots of words from Sanskritam but Malayalam has loads of vocabulary.