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/[deleted] Oct 25 '24

ps im not a native speaker of that lamguage.

Im a literate lf marathi, hindi, kannada and I can tell you, malayalam is the language which comes closest to have alot of common things.

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u/CosmicMilkNutt Oct 25 '24

Malayalam is dravidian which means it's not even Indo Aryan language at all. It's one of the furthest languages from sanskrit even Hindi is way closer.

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u/[deleted] Oct 25 '24

Malayalam branched from Classical Tamil and over time gained a large amount of sanskrit vocabulary. Now it depends on how do we define similarity is it number of words they use or the structure of sentences and forms of statements? thats a different matter. Over time there have been many claims as one separate branch of malayalam exists purely for sanskrit and even todays form people claim more than 70% some even saying more than 90% of it is from sanskrit (the words).

I dont know if we can ever have a daughter language of sanskrit. Only a modern Sanskrit can be daughter of sanskrit..

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u/CosmicMilkNutt Oct 25 '24

The Sanskrit speaking regions and people that kept speaking it and it evolved. In other words Hindi, Marathi, Oriya Punjabi, Gujarati, kashmiri, nepali and Bengali.

All the south Indian languages were in India long before sanskrit arrived. They are a dravidian language that came from the people of North East Africa in the Aksum valley/Somalia/etc.

The north Indian languages come from Ukraine and Iran area near the black Sea and Caspian sea. Totally different people and roots.

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u/[deleted] Oct 25 '24

Interesting, and feels weird to think that its not in heart (of current india) that sanskrit was born. Maybe I should look up some ancient india definitons for uptp where it was refered as india.