Shiksha
[3][5] Each ancient Vedic school developed this field of Vedanga, and the oldest surviving phonetic textbooks are the Pratishakyas.
[2] This field helped preserve the Vedas and the Upanishads as the canons of Hinduism since the ancient times, and shared by various Hindu traditions.
[1] It also refers to one of the six Vedangas, which studies sound, Sanskrit phonetics, laws of euphonic combination (sandhi), and the science of making language pleasant and understood without mistakes.
|| 1 || Annette Wilke and Oliver Moebus date the Shiksha text of the Taittiriya Vedic school to be from 600 BCE at the latest.
[10] The ancient Vedic schools developed major treatises analyzing sound, vowels and consonants, rules of combination and pronunciation to assist clear understanding, to avoid mistakes and for resonance (pleasing to the listener).
Having intellectually determined the object to be communicated to others, the soul urges the mind in order to give expression, i.e., to vocalize the thought rising within.
Shiksha, states Hartmut Scharfe, was the first branch of linguistics to develop as an independent Vedic field of study among the Vedangas.
[6] The earliest Brahmanas – a layer of text within the Vedas, include some terms of art in the Vedic phonetics, such as Varna and Avasana.
[6] According to Scharfe, and other scholars, the insights developed in this field, over time, likely also influenced phonetic scripts in parts of East Asia, as well as Arabic grammarian Khalil in 8th-century CE.
[20] The methodical phonetic procedure developed by Shiksha helped preserve the Vedas without the slightest variants in the most faithful way possible.
[21] However, state Wilke and Moebus, the Shiksha methodology has been not just highly technical, it has strong aesthetic "sensuous, emotive" dimension, which foster thinking and intellectual skills in a participatory fashion.
[23] Individual sounds in the Sanskrit have independent personalities, and the reciter helps develop their character and their timbre, state Wilke and Moebus.
Naradiya Siksa, a phonetics treatise on the Sama Veda explains this aspects of phonology with various similes, such as, Just as a tigress takes her cubs tightly in her teeth without hurting them, whilst fearing that she might drop them and injure them, so one should approach the individual syllables.
[26] The Pratishakhyas, which evolved from the more ancient Vedic Texts padapathas (padapāṭha) around 800 BCE, deal with the manner in which the Vedas are to be enunciated.
Several Pratishakhyas have survived into the modern era, and these texts refine the structure of sound at different levels of nuance, some adding many more letters to the basic set in the Sanskrit alphabet:[27] The Shiksha Texts and the Pratishakhyas led to great clarity in understanding the surface structure of language.
Certain styles of recitation (pāṭha), such as the jaṭāpāṭha, involved switching syllables, repeating the last word of a line at the beginning of the next, and other permutations.
It was extended and completed with fricatives and sibilants, semi-vowels, and vowels, and was eventually codified into the Brahmi alphabet, which is one of the most systematic sound-to-writing mappings.
