Number of words: 159

I have no idea of the number of people who understood Latin in the Europe of Dante’s time; nor do I know how many under- stand Sanskrit in India to-day; but the number of these latter is still large, especially in the south. Simple spoken Sanskrit is not very difficult to follow for those who know well any of the present-day Indo-Aryan languages—Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Gujrati, etc. Even present-day Urdu, itself wholly an Indo-Aryan language, probably contains 80 per cent words derived from Sanskrit. It is often difficult to say whether a word has come from Persian or Sanskrit, as the root words in both these languages are alike. Curiously enough, the Dravidian languages of the south, though entirely different in origin, have borrowed and adopted such masses of words from the Sanskrit that nearly half their vocabulary is very nearly allied to Sanskrit.

Excerpted from pages 174 of ‘Jawaharlal Nehru The Discovery of India, by Jawaharlal Nehru