Ramayana and Sanskrit

The Ramayana Dashartha, King of Ayodhya, has three wives and four sons of which Rama is the eldest. Rama’s brothers are named Bharata, and the twins Lakshman and Shatrughna. Rama and Bharata are both blue skinned, perhaps indicating they were dark skinned or even originally south Indian deities. There is a sage that takes the boys out to train them in archery, and Rama proves his excellence by hitting an apple that was hanging …

…tonal accent, which was still in full force in Panini's time. Notwithstanding these losses, Sanskrit is a complex language, not only highly inflected but also subject to certain alternations of vowels and context-influenced modifications of sounds. It has three genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter) and three numbers (singular, dual, and plural). Sanskrit has, on the whole, preserved the linguistic conditions of the supposed Indo-European speech better than any other Indo-European language, except possibly ancient Greek.