Borrowed Words, and What They Brought With Them

Sanskrit as it is described by the grammarians is a language with sharply defined boundaries, and one of the interesting things the letter table records is the traffic across them. The retroflex series is the clearest instance. It has no counterpart in the languages Sanskrit is related to outside India, it does have counterparts in the Dravidian languages of the subcontinent, and a substantial share of the Sanskrit words containing retroflex stops are either loans or words of no established derivation.

The letters are therefore evidence in an argument about contact. Whatever the ultimate explanation, and there is more than one position on it among linguists, a language that develops a full second series of stops and keeps it distinct for the whole of its recorded history has done something its relatives did not, and the script records the outcome without commenting on the cause.

Buddhist Sanskrit adds a further layer. The Buddhist literature includes a great deal of vocabulary from the spoken languages of northern India, personal and place names from many regions, and terms taken in from outside the Sanskrit tradition entirely, so a Buddhist text uses a wider inventory of shapes than a classical literary one. A scribe copying such material in Siddham met letters and clusters that a copyist of court poetry might rarely have written.