[quote]florin wrote:
The Aryan Invasion model provided an easy explanation for the similarities between Sanskrit and the European languages.
How does the other model explain those similarities?
(not criticizing, just asking)[/quote]
Regarding Sanskrit…
It was the first language on earth, now you have to speak sanskrit to understand the significance of what Im going to say properly.
I speak Sanskrit, Hindi, Urdu, Marathi, Punjabi, Gujurati and English (and I can understand Bengali and Sindhi). I am learning German and Spanish now because I need to know two European languages to ensure I get a job offer after my placement at Goldman Sachs.
Since the very first day the linguists have learned about the existence of the Sanskrit language, they have seen it in the same perfect form. No sound shift, no change in the vowel system, and no addition was ever made in the grammar of the Sanskrit in relation to the formation of the words. It is in its totally perfect form since it was discovered with its 52 letter alphabet.
There is no other example of the same kind in the world; and, in the last 5,000 years, since the Sumerians twittered the communicating words in a very limited scope and their wedge-shaped cuneiform writing came into existence, there was no such genius born who could produce a grammar as perfect as Sanskrit.
Whereas all the languages of the world started from scratch with incomplete alphabet and vowels, not altogether of their own, borrowed from others to improve it, had only a few words in the beginning which were just enough for the people to communicate with each other, and it took a very long time to establish a proper literary form of that language.
Even the advanced international language of today, the English language, when it took its roots from the West Germanic around 800 AD, it was in an absolutely primitive form. As it developed, it assimilated about 30% of its words from Latin and a lot of words from French and Greek. Slowly developing and improving its vocabulary, the style of writing and the grammar, from Old English (which had only two tenses) to Middle English, to Early Modern English, and then to Modern English, it took a very long time.
As late as the beginning of the seventeenth century when its first dictionary was published in London in 1604 it had only 3,000 words
Somewhat similar is the story of all the ancient and modern languages when they started from a very primitive stage of their literal representation with no regular grammar, because the proper grammar was introduced at a much later date when they reached to a significant level of communication.
Now regarding it bieng similar to european languages…
In every society there are many classes of people. Some are educated, some are less educated and some are much less educated. Accordingly, the quality of their speech differs. Thus, during the time of Ved Vyas, when Sanskrit was the spoken language of India, there may have been some people who spoke a localized form of less perfect Sanskrit. As time went on a new language developed in the Bihar area of North India which was a combination of the localized dialect with the apbhransh words of Sanskrit.
The pronunciation of the Sanskrit word changes when it is spoken by the people who are less educated or not educated in the Sanskrit language, and then such words permanently enter into their locally spoken language. These, partly mispronounced words, are called the apbhransh. Still, Sanskrit remained the spoken language of the literary class of India at least up to the time of Shankaracharya.
All over India Shankaracharya debated in Sanskrit language wherever he went. It was around 500 BC. That was the time when the Greek and Latin languages were in the course of their development. Trade communications between India, Persia, Mesopotamia, Syria and Greece were already well established.
Later on India developed colonies, in Cambodia (Kambuja in Sanskrit) in Java, (Chavakam or Yava dwipa) in Sumatra, in Borneo, Socotra (Sukhadhara) and even in Japan. Indian traders had established settlements in Southern China, in the Malayan Peninsula, in Arabia, in Egypt, in Persia, etc., Through the Persians and Arabs, India had cultivated trade relations with the Roman Empire.
The stories of the Puranas and the Bhagwatam had already reached, in a broken form, into those countries which they then adopted in their society and incorporated into their religious mythology. The Iliad and the Odyssey in their earliest and incomplete forms were composed around 600 BC, and later on certain Sanskrit apbhransh words were added in the Greek and Latin languages .
