Sanskrit was not a natural spoken language. I was created as a language for worship. Although Sanskrit was spoken among the educated circles in India, but not in a natural setting. The example that our language teacher gave us, was of couple of students speaking French (say) who are learning it as a foreign language.
I think what he means is that what people actually spoke every day was as different from our bookish notions of what Sanskrit is as the language of a poor farmer or a slave in Ancient Rome was from the writings of Cicero. You really can't equate the two things.
I completely agree here. The moment common people start speaking a language - any language - there will be irregularities and native elements introduced into the spoken variant. This will especially be true if the language is as tough to learn as Sanskrit or even Classical Chinese and Latin.
Yeah, this is what I was going at. As well, when a language like sanskrit is spoken as vernacular, then you end up with exactly what we have now: a bunch of related languages that have all developed their own changes and quirks over the last few thousand years.
And there is no formalization of Sanskrit in Devanagari - We (Keralites) still use Grantha script to write Sanskrit - And a lot of late Sanskrit works have their origin in Kerala. Infact Malayalm script was invented to write Sanskrit with ease on palm leaves.
