Soul Meets Body: An initial examination of the Samkhya school

* In addition, Advaita is not a "non-sentient God", but that's a separate discussion. *

One of the Advaitin Mahavakyas (Great sentence/quote) from Aitareya Upanishad is: "Prajnanam Brahma", which translates to: "Knowledge/Consciousness is God". One of the fundamental ontological dichotomies in Hinduism is the difference between "Chit" (things that are conscious) and "Achit" (things that are not conscious). Essentially, the distinction between sentient and non-sentient objects. Although consciousness is a trait of "chit" or sentient objects, consciousness itself is not sentient (that'd be a circular definition). We don't even have to go that far if you interpret it as knowledge, because knowledge by definition non-sentient. Extending from that, if God is consciousness and consciousness is non-sentient, then God is non-sentient.

I know that the Adviatins try very hard to paper over this philosophical wrinkle, but that's what drew me to their school of philosophy. A religion with a non-beneficent and non-sentient God is beyond cool, IMO. One of the taunts that Ramanuja (a Vishistadwaita philosopher) had for Advaitins was to call them "Prachanna Bouddhar" (Closet Buddhists). Because from his theistic perspective, the Advaitins with their non-sentient God are only a hop skip and a jump away from the Buddhists (who were originally atheists).

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.