Editing Sanskrit (section)

=== Dravidian influence on Sanskrit ===
Reinöhl mentions that not only have the Dravidian languages borrowed from Sanskrit vocabulary, but they have also affected Sanskrit on deeper levels of structure, "for instance in the domain of phonology where Indo-Aryan retroflexes have been attributed to Dravidian influence".<ref name=":02">{{cite book |last=Reinöhl |first=Uta |year=2016 |title=Grammaticalization and the Rise of Configurationality in Indo-Aryan |publisher=Oxford University Press |pages=120–121}}</ref> Similarly, Ferenc Ruzca states that all the major shifts in Indo-Aryan phonetics over two millennia can be attributed to the constant influence of a Dravidian language with a similar phonetic structure to Tamil.<ref>{{cite book |last=Ruzca |first=Ferenc |date=2013 |editor-last=Klein|editor-first=Jared S. |title=Indic Across the Millennia: from the Rigveda to Modern Indo-Aryans |publisher=Hempen Verlag|pages=145–152 |chapter=The influence of Dravidian on Indo-Aryan phonetics|url=https://www.academia.edu/472464|isbn=9783934106055}}</ref> Hock et al. quoting George Hart state that there was influence of [[Old Tamil]] on Sanskrit.<ref name=":11">{{cite book |first1=Hans Henrich |last1=Hock |last2=Bashir |first2=E. |last3=Subbarao |first3=K. V. |year=2016 |title=The languages and linguistics of South Asia a comprehensive guide |publisher=Berlin de&nbsp;Gruyter Mouton |pages=94–95}}</ref> Hart compared Old Tamil and Classical Sanskrit to arrive at a conclusion that there was a common language from which these features both derived – "that both Tamil and Sanskrit derived their shared conventions, metres, and techniques from a common source, for it is clear that neither borrowed directly from the other."<ref>{{cite book |last=Hart |first=George |year=1976 |title=The relation between Tamil and classical Sanskrit literature |place=Wiesbaden |publisher=O. Harrassowitz |isbn=3447017856 |pages=317–320}}</ref>

Reinöhl further states that there is a symmetric relationship between Dravidian languages like Kannada or Tamil, with Indo-Aryan languages like Bengali or Hindi, whereas the same relationship is not found for non-Indo-Aryan languages, for example, Persian or English:

{{blockquote|text=A sentence in a Dravidian language like Tamil or Kannada becomes ordinarily good Bengali or Hindi by substituting Bengali or Hindi equivalents for the Dravidian words and forms, without modifying the word order; but the same thing is not possible in rendering a Persian or English sentence into a non-Indo-Aryan language.|source=Reinöhl<ref name=":02"/>}}

Shulman mentions that "Dravidian nonfinite verbal forms (called {{Transliteration|ta|vinaiyeccam}} in Tamil) shaped the usage of the Sanskrit nonfinite verbs (originally derived from inflected forms of action nouns in Vedic). This particularly salient case of the possible influence of Dravidian on Sanskrit is only one of many items of syntactic assimilation, not least among them the large repertoire of morphological modality and aspect that, once one knows to look for it, can be found everywhere in classical and postclassical Sanskrit".<ref name=":8">{{Cite book |last=Shulman |first=David Dean |title=Tamil : a biography |publisher=The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press |year=2016 |location=London, UK |pages=12–14, 20}}</ref>

The main influence of Dravidian on Sanskrit is found to have been concentrated in the timespan between the late Vedic period and the crystallization of Classical Sanskrit. As in this period the [[Indo-Aryan peoples|Indo-Aryan]] tribes had not yet made contact with the inhabitants of the South of the subcontinent, this suggests a significant presence of Dravidian speakers in North India (the central Gangetic plain and the classical Madhyadeśa) who were instrumental in this substratal influence on Sanskrit.{{sfn|Burrow|1973|p=386}}