Vedic Grammar
Where the Vedic language of this site's chants differs from Classical Sanskrit grammar.
Vedic Sanskrit is the language of the Ṛgveda and the other three Vedas, composed and passed on orally from roughly 1500 to 1000 BCE, centuries before writing reached the language. It is the language of the Chamakam and Namakam, which belong to the Krishna Yajurveda. The Soundarya Lahari is a later hymn, closer to Classical Sanskrit. As Vedic speech changed, a grammatical tradition arose to protect the hymns from corruption. It reached its peak in Pāṇini's Aṣṭādhyāyī (~4th century BCE), the point usually taken as where "Vedic" ends and "Classical" begins. This page assumes you have read the Grammar page and covers only what differs in the older language.
Declension: root nouns were the norm
Classical Sanskrit is dominated by thematic (a-stem) nouns like देव (deva), where the endings follow an inserted "theme vowel". Vedic leans heavily on the older athematic pattern instead: the endings attach directly to a consonant-final root, with no theme vowel and heavier sandhi where they meet. पाद् (pā́d-, "foot") declines pā́t (nom.), pad-ā́ (instr.), pad-é (dat.). Compare devena, devāya, where the root is far less exposed. Classical Sanskrit still keeps some root nouns, but thematic stems became the overwhelming default.
A finer feminine ī-stem distinction
Vedic separates two kinds of feminine ī-stem noun that Classical Sanskrit merges: the vṛkī́s-type (the accent stays on the -ī, and the nominative singular keeps its -s) and the devī́-type. The difference is only in which of two inherited accent and ending patterns a given word follows. By the Classical period one pattern had absorbed the other.
Three past tenses with different meanings
Classical Sanskrit keeps the imperfect, perfect and aorist as grammatical categories, but their meanings have merged into one general past. In Vedic they were distinct. The imperfect was the general narrative past. The perfect worked as a present perfect ("has done") and sometimes as a plain present. The aorist marked a recent present perfect ("just now did"). The perfect also had distinct strong and weak stems (singular active versus everything else) and, beyond the indicative, its own subjunctive, optative and imperative. Classical lost all of these and forms only perfect indicatives.
A fifth mood
Alongside the indicative, optative and imperative, Vedic had a living subjunctive/injunctive mood. The injunctive survives into Classical only in prohibitions with mā (mā bhūḥ, "don't be"). The "conditional" mood in the four-mood Classical list on the Grammar page is a later, separate development.
A dozen infinitives, not one
Classical Sanskrit has exactly one infinitive, built from the accusative. Vedic could form infinitives from at least four cases (dative, accusative, ablative-genitive and locative), with more than a dozen suffix patterns attested overall, most of them rare. Classical kept only the accusative type.
Accent was still alive
The udātta, anudātta and svarita pitch-accent marks, listed on the Characters page and visible throughout the Rudram text, were a full part of Vedic. Accent placement decided whether a root took guṇa, vṛddhi or zero grade (see Grammar). The system was still active in Pāṇini's own time, but it had faded from everyday speech within a few centuries of the Classical standard being fixed.
Shorter compounds, looser sandhi
The same four compound types described on the Grammar page already existed in Vedic, but they were used far more sparingly. The Ṛgveda and Atharvaveda have no compounds longer than three members, and even three-member compounds are rare (pūrva-kāma-kṛ́tvan, "fulfilling former wishes", is one of the longest). Later Classical literature went on to chain a dozen or more members into one compound. External sandhi was also more variable in Vedic than in the standardized Classical rules.
Not covered here because they barely differ: the core numeral words (see Numerals) and the basic set of sounds (see Characters) are essentially the same in both stages of the language.