| > And I was proved entirely wrong when I started reading The Upanishads, which are part of the Vedic literature. Their being classified a part of the "Vedic" literature is not borne out by linguistic analysis, even though tradition claims it to be. They post-date the actual Vedas themselves by centuries. The language used in most of them does not contain nearly as much irregularity as the Vedic language nor its pitch accent system - it's on its way to being a refined liturgical language, not a common man's language as the Vedic language was. And the subject matter contained in them reflect that of the elites of a far more settled and stratified society (vs the more nomadic tribal culture of the Vedas). They are no more representative of Hinduism than their contemporary folk traditions, just as St. Augustine is no more representative of Catholicism than folk Catholicism where blessings are sought for mundane topics like health and prosperity. No doubt, both groups of literature are incredible, but to lump them into one is incorrect, even if that is the tradition. |
More generally the Vedāṅgas are also considered part of the Veda, etc. When Pāṇini (whom you allude to in one of the replies here) distinguishes the older language, he uses terms like “chandasi” not "in the Vedas”. Even today when a certain practice or person is called “Vaidika” obviously it doesn't mean a certain time period, belonging to several centuries BCE.
Ultimately, to consider linguistic analysis relevant to the definition of “Vedic” and to say “to lump them into one is incorrect, even if that is the tradition” is simply saying “let's make up a definition of ‘Vedic’ different from the traditional definition, under which the traditional definition can be termed incorrect” — no traditional scholar thinks of “Vedic” as referring to “the Vedic language” as referring to the language of the saṃhitās.
Edit: I have a theory for how this state of affairs came about: Western interest in Sanskrit texts took off in a big way after William Jones's (much-quoted) pronouncement of the relation between Sanskrit and Persian and Greek and Latin. So the interest started with linguists and philologists, who were naturally more interested in the oldest texts / the texts whose language was closest to the rest of the Indo-European family, and that has become the frame by which these texts are still talked about (rather than say the framing used by traditional Vaidika paṇḍita-s). This is why we see someone confidently deciding that linguistic analysis can tell us something about what “Veda” means or should mean, rather than only telling us about the language of a certain subset of texts.