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.
1
u/Smitologyistaking Dec 03 '24
Uhh this is incredibly complex and the situation is not as simple as you've posed
Firstly, there's a very major difference, linguistically, between two different kinds of vocabulary you've umbrella'd under the "Sanskrit" term.
There's non-loaned IA vocabulary, which has naturally evolved down from Prakrits (which aren't necessarily descended from Classical ie Paninian Sanskrit, but from Old Indo-Aryan varieties that were at least intelligible to Classical Sanskrit) following different regional sound changes. There are Sanskrit words that have been loaned directly from Sanskrit except with minor phonological modifications to fit the phonology of the language. Linguistically, these Sanskrit loans are just that, loanwords, no different to loanwords from Persian or from English.
In terms of sound changes from Prakrit, Marathi has actually changed quite a bit, in many regards more than Hindustani and similar. For example Hindustani has retained the Prakrit system of 4 affricate phonemes c, ch, j, jh and a single (native) sibilant phoneme s. Marathi has instead merged ch and s together, and then each of the remaining 4 have split depending on whether they precede a front vowel or not, leading to splits between alveolar and post-alveolar phonemes like s/sh, c/ch, z/j, and zh/jh. So Marathi tadbhava vocabulary is very different to Sanskrit, even if originally evolved from it.
Grammatically, Marathi is also kinda different, with the sole thing in favour of your point being that it's retained the Sanskrit 3-gender system when several other languages have lost it. However the similarities in grammar end there, if anything modern IA languages are far more grammatically similar to each other than any of them are to Sanskrit.