There were a language family of ancient India; usually this family is called Indic by modern linguists. There were a number of dialects. This language was preserved in epics and ritual incantations that were carefully memorized and passed down through the generations. Because of the religious nature of these pieces there was a religious devotion to preserving them exactly.
About the fifth or sixth century BCE a grammarian named Panini carried out a program of regularizing Indic. In effect, he created a dialect of Indic in which the irregularities were eliminated. He formulated nearly four thousand rules concerning grammar and morphology (the formation of words) for this dialect. Thus this dialect of Indic was called the perfected or refined language. That is the meaning of Sanskrit, the perfect language.
The period of Classical Sanskrit is designated as c. 500 BCE to 1000 CE.
Observing some of the quotes, one can infer that the western society had high regard to Sanskrit
"Sanskrit is the original source of all the European languages of the present day." (By Mons. Dubois)
"Sanskrit is the mother of all languages" (By Francois Gautier)
In 1980 NASA declared it to be "The most unambiguous of all human speech and best suited for Computer processing and artificial intelligence".
There are 51 letters in the Sanskrit alphabet. These are properly arranged and alphabets are spoken from particular part of mouth or throat or nose. Due to this scientific nature of the method of pronunciation of the vowels and consonants in the Sanskrit, every part of the mouth is exercised during speaking. This results into speakers of Sanskrit being able to pronounce words from any language.
“Every one of its vowels and consonants has a particular and inalienable force which exists by the nature of things and not by development or human choice… its (Sanskrit’s) basis is universal and eternal.” ~ Sri Aurobindo
It is said that the language of Sanskrit itself arises from these very root sounds or vibrations of the Universe. The various vowels and consonants that make up Sanskrit words represent these core sounds, known as beejah. Whilst in states of deep resonance with the cosmos (in other words, while in meditation), the Rishi could perceive these beejah sounds; and from this profound sense of perception, they recognized the inherent sounds of each and every thing. A Sanskrit word is not randomly chosen to name something, in fact, proper, or rather, perfect, pronunciation of Sanskrit words, it is told, can replicate the exact nature, or essence, of that which it is referring too.
In July 1987, Forbes magazine published news that, "Sanskrit is the most convenient language for computer software programming".
Well-known linguists and computer-scientists have expressed the opinion that Sanskrit is the best language for use with computers. Based on the paper by Rick Briggs, published in AI Magazine that talks about using Sanskrit in natural language processing (NLP). The idea of using natural language for computer programming is to make it easier for people to talk to computers in their native tongue and spare them the pain of learning a computer friendly language like assembly/C/Java! So in that way Sanskrit speakers would be almost ready made computer programmers!
What you write is what you speak.
Sanskrit is phonetic language so unlike other crude languages where every word has different spelling and pronunciation, here in Sanskrit you speak what you write!
And the whole aim of developing a language is wasted if we need to remember two versions, one for writing and one for speaking!
Also every word can be broken into sub parts by using rules of Viched (separation). If you use rules of Sandhi-Viched (combination-separation) then even if you know only thousand words, you will develop your vocabulary of several thousands of words!
Grammatically Perfect & Rock Solid!!
Sanskrit grammar (Panini) is perfect without exceptions so you would not have sentences with ambiguous meanings.
Pāṇini's grammar is the world's first formal system, developed well before the 19th century innovations of Gottlob Frege and the subsequent development of mathematical logic. In designing his grammar, Pāṇini used the method of "auxiliary symbols", in which new affixes are designated to mark syntactic categories and the control of grammatical derivations. This technique, rediscovered by the logician Emil Post, became a standard method in the design of computer programming languages.
In Optimality Theory, the hypothesis about the relation between specific and general constraints is known as "Panini's Theorem on Constraint Ranking”
Pāṇini, and the later Indian linguist Bhartrihari, had a significant influence on many of the foundational ideas proposed by Ferdinand de Saussure, who is widely considered the father of modern structural linguistics.
Saussure himself cited Indian grammar as an influence on some of his ideas. In his Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européennes (Memoir on the Original System of Vowels in the Indo-European Languages) published in 1879, he mentions Indian grammar as an influence on his idea that "reduplicated aorists represent imperfects of a verbal class." In his De l'emploi du génitif absolu en sanscrit (On the Use of theGenitive Absolute in Sanskrit) published in 1881, he specifically mentions Pāṇini as an influence on the work.
Noam Chomsky has always acknowledged his debt to Panini for his modern notion of an explicit generative grammar. In Chomsky and Morris Halle's 1968 text The Sound Pattern of English, the authors give an implicit nod to the Ashtadhyayi by formulating their final rule "ā → ā", which echoes the final Pāṇini's final rule, "a a iti".
“Panini's work was the forerunner to modern formal language theory (mathematical linguistics) and formal grammar, and a precursor to computing.” Ref: O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Panini", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews
“Panini used the method of "auxiliary symbols", in which new affixes are designated to mark syntactic categories and the control of grammatical derivations. This technique, rediscovered by the logician Emil Post, became a standard method in the design of computer programming languages.”Ref: Kadvany, John (2007), "Positional Value and Linguistic Recursion", Journal of Indian Philosophy 35: 587–520.
"The Panini grammar reflects the wondrous capacity of the human brain, which till today no other country has been able to produce except India" (By Sir Monier Williams).
"The grammar of Panini is one of the most remarkable literary works that the world has ever seen, and no other country can produce any grammatical system at all comparable to it, either for originality of plan or analytical subtlety” (By Bilas Sarda)
The most Structured Language in the world (even today)
Sanskrit is such intelligently structured that there are special six branches called Vedanga to learn various aspects of language namely Vyakaran, Nirukti, Kalpa, Chandas etc. In these you learn various aspects of language like pronunciation, grammar, etymology, sentence structuring etc. Only after studying these subjects can a person actually able to understand various works of Sanskrit, which are otherwise not understandable. Such an engineering of a language is unseen in any ancient or contemporary language of the world.
It’s all revealed through Sanskrit through Sanskrit alone
The whole new world of Vedic Mathematics hidden in Vedas
The highest philosophy of Darshanas and Upanishds.
The supernatural powers of Yoga
The complex mathematical formulas from Jyotish (Vedic astronomy) and Sulba Sutra which contains differentiation and integration methods along with lot of infinite series,
The complex computational mathematics in Vastu Shastra with the help of which the great buildings like Taj Mahal (Tejo mahalaya) were built.
The immutable science of Ayurveda, the superior science of Music (Gandhrv Veda), the science of Politics (Artha-Shastra), the science of Metallurgy (Iron pillar of India) and innumerable others, the very common works just like grammar proves the unparalleled superiority of Sanskrit amongst other languages around the world.
A comparative study:
Words represent objects/entities.
Words represent properties of objects/entities and not objects/entities themselves. For eg: Tree
A Sanskrit dictionary is really redundant (in most of the cases), if one is well-versed in Sanskrit grammar!
At any given time, there will always be a finite/fixed number of words in English. Currently, it is 5 lakh words. But, in Sanskrit, there are as many words as properties in the universe.
Whenever you think of an object, you actually think of the properties of that object, since it is the properties that distinguish that object from rest of the universe.
The Sanskrit grammarians realized that grammar and semantics are not separate water-tight entities, but rather, are one coherent unit. In probably all the other languages, Grammar and Semantics are independent entities, but not so in Sanskrit.