BANGALORE: Challenging the popular belief that Sanskrit is the mother of all languages, linguist Shikaripur N Sridhar from the State University of New York (SUNY) on Tuesday said the ancient language originated from an undiscovered language which was in use about 6,000 years ago.
“Sanskrit is the origin of only a few languages in North India, such as Hindi, Marathi, Kashmiri, Oriya and so on. It is neither the origin of the 26 Dravidian languages spoken in the south of India nor of all the world’s languages. The origin of Sanskrit is a 6,000-year-old language,” the director of Center for India Studies at SUNY said while delivering a lecture at Maharani Women’s Arts, Commerce and Management College.
Linguists propounded that the four ancient languages — Sanskrit, Latin, Persian and Greek — have a single origin, Sridhar said. “This revolutionary theory, known as the Indo-European Hypothesis, puts forth an argument that the four languages belong to one family, whose source is a language that is still undiscovered,” he added.
Sridhar is a distinguished service professor and professor of linguistics and India studies at SUNY, Stony Brook.