Central Board of Secondary Education wanted the state directorates of education to celebrate Sanskrit week from Aug 7th to 14th. One of the objectives is to increase the awareness about the close relationship between Sanskrit and other languages. In this article, Sanskrit’s relationship with Spoken Persian and Written Tamil has been explored.

Ethnologue is the living languages catalogue of the world. It has 225 family trees for languages. Both Persian and Sanskrit languages are branches in Indo-Iranian language cluster.

Languages have a spoken and a written component. The structure of spoken component stays broadly static, with a gradual change, as the languages are in use by people in their day-to-day life. But, the written components have changed abruptly. New alphabet creation was once a fashion and the alphabets became an identity of individual cultures. Spoken Sanskrit has a remarkable relationship with the Old Persian language. Written Sanskrit has close relationship with Tamil language.

The following table provides the resemblances on ‘Spoken’ words between Persian and Sanskrit.

As you see from above, some of the Sanskrit words exactly match the Old Persian equivalents. Indus valley has seen many more migrations and the Sanskrit language grew by borrowing words from Greek, Latin and Tamil too.

The following tables provide the resemblances on ‘Written’ script between Tamil and Sanskrit.

Transformation of script from Tamil to Sanskrit utilized following three morphological changes. First change is to remove many of the dots and circles, to bring in convenience in palm leaf writing. Second change is cutting/trimming of shapes which happened in course of time due to the natural method of writing. Third change is a line on the top to connect letters into word, since ‘space’ was not an identified character in those days. Some of the letters have been reformed too.

Sanskrit added more letters for various sounds of the letters – Ka, Cha, Ta, Tha, Pa into its alphabets list and thus looks like a phonetic superset. Modern Tamil hesitantly accepted few extra sounds like ha, sa, sha, ja and kept them outside the standard set of alphabets. In contrast, English language is the real disruption which did not add more alphabets, instead brought in various sounds through pronunciation.

Current script of Sanskrit that resembles Tamil script is called Devanagari. Sanskrit in its earlier avatar was written with Brahmi scripts. Then, Sanskrit would have been much closer to written Tamil.

Interestingly, Rig Veda was written in the Kharosthi script which is written from right to left like Persian. Kharosthi is the ancient language of present day Afghanistan and Pakistan. Many argue that ‘Avesta’, sacred text of Zoroastrianism from Iran as being similar to Vedas.

Simplistic evidences given above prove that Sanskrit never had a script of its own and the spoken too originated outside India.

If one has to infer from this article, it seems like CBSE wants to celebrate a Spoken Persian Week or a Written Tamil week or a Kharosthi language week in India. Objective of an education board should be to open up the inner self to the facts rather than to promote a propaganda that hides the truth.