We were discussing scripts, Venkat.
One spoken language can have many scripts. In Bihar they used Devanagri for
Santali, in Bengal they use Bengali, in Orissa they used Oriya in the past, in
other non-Jharkhand areas Roman is common, while now Ol Chiki is becoming quite
popular in many states.
Similarly the older spoken languages ( you could call them Sanskrit- but that
is a bit like calling Maithili language "Hindi") were written in scripts like
Kharoshti and later Brahmi (which is the origin of Bengali, Tamil, Telegu.
Oriya, Tibetan, Burmese, Lao, Sinhala, Thai, Khmer, Java, Bali and a majority
of current Indian scripts) and most recently Devanagri (also descended from
Brahmi).
So the pre-Buddhist epics like Ramayana and Mahabharata which were first
written in Sanskrit words were originally written in pre-Brahmi scripts.
Prabir
