Journey
Grammar, script and the first vernacular inscriptions
Two grammars written before anyone in Europe had attempted the problem, and the dated moments when four Indian languages first appear in writing. Pānini described Sanskrit in about four thousand ordered rules of a formal system; the Tolkāppiyam did the same for Tamil; the rest is evidence of when a spoken language began to be written at all.
Stops (6)
- Pānini · Pānini — Śalātura, about the fourth century BCE
The Ashtādhyāyī describes Sanskrit in 3,959 rules written in a technical metalanguage with its own abbreviations, ordered so that later rules override earlier ones — a generative formal system built two thousand three hundred years before anyone else attempted one. Twentieth-century linguists and computer scientists have studied it as exactly that.
- Tolkāppiyar · Tolkāppiyar — the Tolkāppiyam
The oldest surviving Tamil work: a grammar covering sounds and words and then, unusually, poetics and the conventions of love and war poetry, so it describes a literary culture as well as a language. Its date is argued between the second century BCE and the fifth CE, and it assumes a developed tradition already behind it.
- Hemachandra · Hemachandra — the grammar of a dynasty
The Siddha-Hema-Śabdānuśāsana, written for the Solanki king Siddharāja Jayasimha, covers Sanskrit and six Prakrits including Apabhramsha, which makes it the principal source for the stage between Prakrit and the modern north Indian languages. Jayasimha is said to have paraded the finished book through Anahilavāda on an elephant.
- Kalamalla · Kalamalla — Telugu, 575
A small Kadapa-district temple inscription of the Renati Chola period, and the earliest dated record written in Telugu rather than Sanskrit or Prakrit. Nothing about it is grand; it records a grant. What makes it matter is the date at which a spoken language was judged fit to carry a permanent public document.
- Shravanabelagola · Shravanabelagola — Kannada in stone
The hill carries several hundred inscriptions from the seventh century onward, including some of the earliest substantial Kannada, and among them Chāmundarāya's commission and a memorial in Kannada verse composed by a woman. Jain sites hold a disproportionate share of early Kannada because the tradition wrote on rock and kept recopying.
- Charyāpada tradition · The Charyāpadas — three literatures at once
Buddhist Sahajiyā songs of about the tenth to twelfth centuries, found in a Nepalese royal library in 1907, and claimed as the earliest literature by Bengali, Assamese and Odia speakers alike — because at that date the three had not separated. One manuscript is the origin point of three modern literatures and the last trace of eastern tantric Buddhism.