Sacred language
These include Latin in Roman Catholicism, Hebrew in Judaism, Arabic in Islam and Sanskrit and Tamil (to some extent) in Hinduism, and Punjabi in Sikhism.
[1][2][3][4] (An exception to this is Lucumí, a ritual lexicon of the Cuban strain of the Santería religion, with no standardized form.)
For instance, 17th-century elements of the English language remain current in Protestant Christian worship through the use of the King James Bible from 1611, or older versions of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer.
The Chinese and Tibetan canons mainly derive from the Sarvastivada, originally written in Sanskrit, of which fragments remain.
The three most important languages in the early Christian era were Latin, Greek, and Syriac (a dialect of Aramaic).
Gradually, the Roman Liturgy took on more and more Latin until, generally, only a few words of Hebrew (e.g. Dominus Deus sabaoth) and Greek (e.g. Kyrie eleison) remained.
In the mid-16th century the Council of Trent rejected a proposal to introduce national languages as this was seen, among other reasons, as potentially divisive to Catholic unity.
This change occurred because Church Slavonic, which had been used in the Glagolitic liturgical books published in Rome, was becoming increasingly difficult to understand.
Jesuit missionaries to China initially obtained permission to translate the Roman Missal into Classical Chinese, a scholarly form of the language.
In contrast, among the Algonquin and Iroquois peoples, missionaries were allowed to translate certain parts of the Mass into their native languages.
[19] In the 20th century, Pope Pius XII granted permission for a few vernaculars to be used in a few rites, rituals, and ceremonies.
The Catholic Church, long before the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II), had accepted and promoted the use of the non-vernacular liturgical languages listed above; while vernacular (i.e. modern or native) languages were also used liturgically throughout history; usually as a special concession given to religious orders conducting missionary activity.
[citation needed] Liturgical languages used in the Eastern Orthodox Church include (but are not limited to): Koine Greek, Church Slavonic, Romanian, Georgian, Arabic, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Serbian, English, German, Spanish, French, Polish, Portuguese, Italian, Albanian, Finnish, Swedish, Chinese, Estonian, Korean, Japanese, and multiple African languages.
[21] Sanskrit is the language of the Vedas, Bhagavad Gita, Puranas like the Bhagavatam, the Upanishads, the epics like Ramayana and Mahabharata, and various other liturgical texts such as the Sahasranama, Chamakam, and Rudram.
Most Hindu theologians of later centuries continued to prefer to write in Sanskrit even when it was no longer spoken as a day-to-day language.
Sanskrit remains as the only liturgical link language which connects the different strains of Hinduism that are present across India.
Its structural and grammatical analysis played a key role in studying Indus script by Iravatham Mahadevan.
Apart from Sanskrit, several Hindu spiritual works were composed in the various regional languages of India such as Hindi, Assamese, Awadhi, Bhojpuri, Bengali, Odia, Maithili, Punjabi, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tulu, as well as Old Javanese,[28] and Balinese of Southeast Asia.
According to the four accepted Sunni schools of jurisprudence, it is a requirement for sermons (khutbah) to be delivered completely in classical Arabic.
Hebrew (and in the case of a few texts such as the Kaddish, Aramaic) remains the traditional language of Jewish religious services.
