ABSTRACT
The Indo-Aryan languages are commonly assigned to three major groups—Old, Middle and New Indo-Aryan -, a linguistic and not strictly chronological classification as the MIA languages are not younger than (‘Classical’) Sanskrit. And a number of their morphophonological and lexical features betray the fact that they are not direct continuations of R̥gvedic Sanskrit, the main base of ‘Classical’ Sanskrit; rather they descend from dialects which, despite many similarities, were different from R̥gvedic and in some regards even more archaic.
