Is Sanskrit the mother of all languages?
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Sanskrit is related to Greek, Latin, Persian and English. But linguists see it as an elder sister in that family, not the mother.
Indian claim not supported by evidenceCulture, games, language & ideas
Indian claim
Sanskrit is the mother of all languages, or at least of the European languages.
Evidence for the Indian claim
- In 1786 Sir William Jones, a judge in Calcutta, noticed the deep resemblance of Sanskrit to Greek and Latin; this discovery founded comparative linguistics.
- Vedic Sanskrit preserves many very old features, which made it central to reconstructing the parent language.
Commonly credited to
Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Persian, the Germanic and Celtic languages all descend from an older lost language, Proto-Indo-European.
Evidence for the other claim
- Jones himself said the three languages sprang from a common source 'which, perhaps, no longer exists'.
- Sanskrit shows changes that other branches did not make; for example, it merged the old vowels e and o into a, which Greek and Latin kept separate. A mother language cannot be younger in such features than its daughters.
- Hittite (in Anatolia, from about the 17th century BCE) is written down earlier than any Sanskrit text.
- Most of the world's languages (Chinese, Arabic, Tamil and the other Dravidian languages, African and American languages) are not related to Sanskrit at all.
What historians and scientists say
Sanskrit is one of the oldest and best-preserved members of the Indo-European family and was key to discovering that family. It is a sister of Greek and Latin, not their mother, and it is unrelated to most other language families.