How much will it cost to learn Sanskrit in South India?
The pre-Classical form of Sanskrit is known as Vedic Sanskrit. The earliest attested Sanskrit text is the Rigveda, a Hindu scripture from the mid-to late-second millennium BCE. No written records from such an early period survive if any ever existed, but scholars are generally confident that the oral transmission of the texts is reliable: they are ceremonial literature, where the exact phonetic expression and its preservation were a part of the historic tradition. The primary source for this argument is internal evidence of the text which betrays an instability of the phenomenon of retroflexion, with the same phrases having sandhi-induced retroflexion in some parts but not others. This is taken along with evidence of controversy, for example, in passages of the Aitareya-Āraṇyaka (700 BCE), which features a discussion on whether retroflexion is valid in particular cases.
The formalization of the Sanskrit language is credited to Pāṇini, along with Patanjali’s Mahābhāṣya and Katyayana’s commentary that preceded Patañjali’s work. Panini composed Aṣṭādhyāyī (“Eight-Chapter Grammar”). The century in which he lived is unclear and debated, but his work is generally accepted to be from sometime between the 6th and 4th centuries BCE.