the archaic form of Sanskrit preserved in the Vedic hymns which is not, strictly speaking, a direct ancestor of the Sanskrit of the , but something like a parallel dialect to the ancestor language of the . Therefore some philologists call it Old Indian...

Vedic Sanskrit is an ancient Indian language, the language of the Vedas, the oldest shruti texts of Hinduism. It is an archaic form of Sanskrit, an early descendant of Proto-Indo-Iranian, attested during the period between roughly 1000 BC (early...