Ancient Indian Education (Brahmanical and Buddhist) c9.65

c9.65

**Achievements of Rigvedic Education: (a) In Language.** We may now comment upon the language and literature that were developed in these Rigvedic Schools as the result of their system of education. The language of the Rigvedic hymns represents the earliest stage of a literary language of which the latest stage is classical Sanskrit as stereotyped and standardized in the epoch-making work, the grammar of Pāṇini who had flourished earlier than 500 B.C. But Rigvedic Sanskrit does not show itself to be a language that is growing. Its entire grammatical mechanism is perfected; every tense, mood, every number and person of the verb, is fixed, and all the terminations of the cases are firmly established; pointing to the later and more advanced inflectional stage in the life-history of a language. The Rigvedic Sanskrit exhibits a much greater variety of forms than Classical Sanskrit, more numerous case-forms in both nominal and pronominal inflexion, more participles and gerunds, greater evolution of verbal forms as illustrated in the frequent use of the subjunctive, and the infinitive, which alone has twelve forms, of which only one has survived in Classical Sanskrit, and, lastly, a greater elaboration in respect of accent. The Rigvedic accent, like ancient Greek, is of the nature of music, depending upon the pitch of the voice, unlike the stress accent of later Sanskrit, which depends on quantity. Thus Rigvedic Sanskrit is of great importance to Comparative Philology. Indeed, as Bunsen truly remarks, " even these earliest specimens of Vedic poetry belong to the modern history of the human race." Macdonell also states: "Considering their great antiquity, the hymns are composed with a remarkable degree of metrical skill and command of language." He also points out that the Rigveda contains "much genuine poetry", "much beautiful and noble imagery", shows a "remarkably high average of literary merit", and considers that "its most poetical hymns, those addressed to Ushas, are equal, if not superior, in beauty to the religious lyrics of any other literature."