When Theology Changed Language

Lessons 46 to 52 were conducted entirely in Sanskrit, by specialists, for an audience of other specialists. This lesson asks what was happening in the same centuries for everyone who could not follow that conversation, and finds that the answer is legible in the names of the languages themselves.

Saṃskṛta and prākṛta are not neutral labels. They are a matched pair, and the pair encodes a judgement.

Saṃskṛta is the past participle of the verb behind saṃskāra — Lesson 37's word for the rites that take a person and bring them to their finished state, and whose lexicon entry gave dressing food, refining metals and polishing gems among its senses. A saṃskṛta language is a worked language: regularised, purified, made correct.