Abstract: The dethronement is traced of Sanskrit from its initial position as the original proto-language of all the Indo-Europeans in the opinion of the early linguists to its ongoing diminishing status as a secondary language containing a number of linguistic features that are considered to be more recent than those of other Indo-European cognate languages. The chapter has two main sections. The first looks at the law of the palatals (the primary linguistic formula arrived at by the comparative method that shattered Sanskrit’s pre-eminent status) and the discovery of the laryngeals in Hittite (based on an examination of Hittite documents in Anatolia). The second discusses linguistic objections from India (mainly from Satya Swarup Misra).

Keywords: history, Hittite, India, Indo-Europeans, laryngeals, law of the palatals, proto-language, Sanskrit, Satya Swarup Misra,