Sant Bhasha (Gurmukhi: ਸੰਤ-ਭਾਸ਼ਾ; romanized: Sant Bhāṣā; lit. 'language of saints') is a liturgical and scriptural language composed of vocabulary common to northern Indian languages, which was extensively used by saints and poets to compose religious verses.[13][14] It can be understood by readers with a background in either Punjabi, Hindi-Urdu and its dialects.[citation needed]
Sant Bhasha | |
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ਸੰਤ-ਭਾਸ਼ਾ | |
Region | Northern Indian subcontinent |
Era | Medieval-period to present-day |
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Early forms | |
Gurmukhi (including Anandpur Lipi) | |
Sources | |
Language codes | |
ISO 639-3 | – |
Sant Bhasha is notable for its high usage of inherited tadbhava vocabulary in-comparison to Sanskritic tatsama borrowings.[15]
Sant Bhasha is most prominently used in the central Sikh scripture, the Guru Granth Sahib.[16][17][18][19] The languages used include Punjabi and its dialects, Lahnda, regional Prakrits, Apabhramsa, Sanskrit, Hindustani languages (Brajbhasha, Bangru, Awadhi, Old Hindi, Deccani), Bhojpuri, Sindhi, Marathi, Marwari, Bengali, Persian, and Arabic. While vocabulary from all of these languages is used, Sant Bhasha is only written in the Gurmukhi script.[20][21]
The age of Old Punjabi: up to 1600 A.D. […] It is said that evidence of Old Punjabi can be found in the Granth Sahib.
As an independent language Punjabi has gone through the following three stages of development: Old Punjabi (10th to 16th century). Medieval Punjabi (16th to 19th century), and Modern Punjabi (19th century to Present).
Surpassing them all in the frequent subtlety of his linguistic choices, including the use of dialect forms as well as of frequent loanwords from Sanskrit and Persian, Guru Nanak combined this poetic language of the Sants with his native Old Punjabi. It is this mixture of Old Punjabi and old Hindi which constitutes the core idiom of all the earlier Gurus.
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Remarkably, neither is the Qur'an written in Urdu language, nor are the Hindu scriptures written in Hindi, whereas the compositions in the Sikh holy scripture, Adi Granth, are a melange of various dialects, often coalesced under the generic title of Sant Bhasha.
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