a few months ago I posted a video on this channel entitled writing systems of the world in that video I talked about the five main categories of writing systems as well as the fact that many of the scripts used in the world today evolved from a single source the ancient Phoenicians abjad I also mentioned that a very old script from India known as Prommy may have evolved from aramaic which if true would mean that all of the modern South Asian scripts are also part of this family tree well since posting that video I've received many comments from viewers questioning this theory first of all many people asked why I didn't mention Sanskrit considering that Sanskrit is one of the world's oldest languages and is the basis for most of the languages used in North India today also several commenters claimed that because Sanskrit is around four thousand years old but Aramaic is only three thousand years old there is no way that Indian scripts could have evolved from Middle Eastern scripts so today I'm going to respond to these comments and explore the question how old is Sanskrit [Music] [Music] okay the first thing you need to know is that a language and a writing system are two different things a language is a method of communication that can be either spoken or written in most cases though human languages originated first in a spoken form and only later in a written form a writing system on the other hand is a set of symbols that can be used to represent the spoken sounds of a language sometimes the name of a language and the name of the writing system used write that language are the same so for example the Greek language is usually written using Greek letters but sometimes the two things are different for example the Hindi language is written using Devanagari letters Russian is written using Cyrillic letters and English is written using Latin letters and one writing system can be used to write many different languages so don't confuse a language with a writing system which brings me to Sanskrit Sanskrit is a language it is not a writing system in order to write Sanskrit you need to use a writing system nowadays Devanagari is most often used but the earliest known writing system used to write Sanskrit was Brahmi this is why I talked about brah me and Devanagari in my video about writing systems but I did not talk about Sanskrit but let's talk a little more about Sanskrit now the oldest surviving example we have of the Sanskrit language is the Rig Veda the Rig Veda is a collection of ancient Hindu hymns scholars have concluded that the rig Vedas were composed somewhere around the Year 1500 BCE so that would be approximately 3,500 years ago experts are able to come up with dates like this through linguistic analysis which involves comparing a bunch of related languages and figuring out how they are actually branches originating from a single original language in this case we know that Sanskrit is one of the many branches that evolved from proto-indo-european which happens to be the ancestor of English as well anyway we know that the northern Indian languages diverged from Iranian languages around 4,000 years ago and that's why Vedic Sanskrit is dated to a little bit after this and I should point out that whatever language was spoken before the divergence can't really be called Sanskrit it's more accurately called proto-indo-iranian so once again let me state that the Rig Veda was composed in Sanskrit around 3,500 years ago now the problem with statements like this is that they lead some people to assume that somewhere in India probably in a museum is a very dusty 3,500 year old book which is the original version of the Rig Veda and that all modern copies are based off of that original but here's the thing note that I said that the Rig Veda was composed 3,500 years ago I didn't say that it was written 3,500 years ago as far as we know the Rig Veda was originally passed down orally only so 3,500 years ago people were speaking Sanskrit but they weren't writing in Sanskrit if they were no copies have survived and therefore we have no way of knowing what writing system they used the oldest physical copy of the Rig Veda we have today is actually only about 600 years old and the oldest written examples we have of anything written in Sanskrit are only about 2,100 years old these include the haughty bada Ghassan D inscriptions which were carved into stone using the Brahmi script so they date to around 100 BCE and that's about as far back as written Sanskrit it goes now we actually have examples of the Brahmi script that are even older than this the edicts of Ashoka which date to around 250 BCE but the edicts of emperor Ashoka were not written in Sanskrit remember a writing system can be used to record more than one language in this case the language is Procrit by the time of ashoka Vedic Sanskrit was only used in religious settings and a newer version of Sanskrit known as classical Sanskrit was only used by the upper class among common everyday folk Sanskrit had evolved into many different vernacular languages called prophets and Ashoka chose one of these everyday languages for his edicts so we know that Brahmi dates to at least 250 BCE but we don't have any surviving examples of writing in India before this date well there is the Indus Valley script but I'll come back to that on the other hand we have inscriptions in Aramaic that go back as far as 500 BCE so based on the dates it is possible that the Brahmi script evolved from the Aramaic script but did it well the honest answer is we simply don't know in my video on writing systems I did not actually claim that Brahmi definitely came from Aramaic I simply mentioned it as a possibility this is because it is one of the major theories that have been put forward by people who study such things and in a lot of ways the theory does make sense just prior to the time of Ashoka contact between North India and the Middle East had greatly increased thanks to a guy named Alexander the Great this is also why Buddhist sculptures from this period suddenly start looking a lot like classical Greek sculptures the Greeks obviously spoke Greek use the Greek alphabet but in Persia which is right next to North India the Aramaic language and writing system was still used in fact Ashoka wrote some of his edicts in Greek and Aramaic using the Greek and Aramaic scripts so we definitely know that Indian scholars at the time were familiar with them and then there's the physical similarities some of the Brahmi letters look very similar to the Aramaic letters and the sound values match pretty closely as well but on the other hand Brahmi has many features that do not correspond to Aramaic and other Phoenician descended scripts like Greek and Latin the most important being that it is an abugida rather than abjad or alphabet if you want to know the difference between these three things you'll have to watch my writing systems video another difference between Brahmi and Aramaic is that Brahmi has way more consonants this is because Sanskrit and it's descendants like Hindi have aspirated and non aspirated versions of most consonants I'm pretty bad at pronouncing the differences but trust me they are there and whereas the letters in most abjads and alphabets have a seemingly random order Brahmi and the many South Asian scripts that descend from it are arranged very logically for example all the COO and good sounds go together because they are all made with the back of the tongue and all the paw and both sounds go together because they are all made with the lips so even if Brahmi did borrow a few letter shapes from aramaic it's clear that whoever developed the script added a lot of new features to it based on unique aspects of the Sanskrit and Procrit languages so if Brahmi didn't come from aramaic where did it come from well there are three possibilities one is that it was simply a brand new invention sort of like the Hangul alphabet in Korea second is that it descends an unknown script that didn't survive perhaps because it was mostly written on perishable surfaces like leaves instead of on stone third is that it might be a distant descendant of the Indus Valley script the Indus Valley script dates from around the same time as Egyptian hieroglyphics and Sumerian cuneiform but unfortunately unlike Egyptian and Sumerian it has never been deciphered the indus valley civilization flourished around 2500 BCE but then it completely disappeared and was replaced with vedic civilization it's likely that the Indus Valley people spoke a language unrelated to Sanskrit however it is possible that they did have some sort of influence on later Indian societies so how old is Sanskrit well the spoken version dates back to at least 1500 BCE but the written version is no older than about 250 BCE that means that the writing systems used in India today could in fact be distantly related to other Phoenician decended writing systems such as Latin Hebrew and Greek let me know in the comments what you think thanks for watching you
