[gngeal]

I think what he means is that what people actually spoke every day was as different from our bookish notions of what Sanskrit is as the language of a poor farmer or a slave in Ancient Rome was from the writings of Cicero. You really can't equate the two things.

[yati]

I completely agree here. The moment common people start speaking a language - any language - there will be irregularities and native elements introduced into the spoken variant. This will especially be true if the language is as tough to learn as Sanskrit or even Classical Chinese and Latin.

[redofrac]

Yeah, this is what I was going at. As well, when a language like sanskrit is spoken as vernacular, then you end up with exactly what we have now: a bunch of related languages that have all developed their own changes and quirks over the last few thousand years.