Heinz-Murray 2E.book

46 Part I: Land and Language

encountered a civilization in decline (the “empty cities” of Harappa and

Mohenjo-daro; see chapter 5) and speakers of a wholly different language fam-

ily, Dravidian. Conquering and intermarrying, they spread across the northern

half of the subcontinent, where their language, Sanskrit, began to undergo its

inevitable regional transitions into such modern languages as Punjabi, Hindi,

Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, and Nepali.

The language that gave Sir William Jones his great insight, Sanskrit, pro-

vides the oldest known samples of an Indo-European language. It continues to

be both written and spoken to this day, but it has not been a “mother tongue”—

the first language learned by children in a language community—since some

time in the first millennium B.C.E. Already by Buddha’s time in the sixth cen-

tury B.C.E. it was archaic, for Buddha insisted on preaching in the vernaculars,

the actually spoken languages, and most of the Buddhist texts are written in

such a language, Pali. But early Sanskrit and even earlier “Vedic” were pre-

served by the oral transmission of the most sacred compositions of the Hindus,

the Vedas. These four works are regarded by all Hindus as the source of their

religion, given directly to humans as “revealed” truth.

Ural

Mountains

Arabian

Sea

Caspian

Sea

Mediterranean Sea

Black Sea

Baltic Sea

Red Sea

Presumed

Indo-European

Homeland

EUROPE

ASIA

Atlantic

Ocean

9

(^21)
(^43)
6 5
7
8
10
Him
alayas
1
2
3
4
5
Indo-Iranian
Hittite
Thraco-Phrygian
Greek
Illyrian
6
7
8
9
10
Italic
Celtic
Germanic
Slavic
Baltic
Map 2.1 Distribution of Indo-European languages.