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Sanskrit

In the context of this site this article is in no way supposed to be complete, and only mentioned for demonstational purposes.

The Sanskrit language (Skt. saṃskṛtā vāk संस्कृता वाक्) is an Indo-Aryan language, and a classical language of India. It has a similar position in India to that of Latin and Greek in Medieval Europe, and is a central part of Hindu/Vedic traditions. Much like Latin, it is a dead language in the sense that there is no community of native speakers, although it is fluently used as a learned secondary languge, and some 6000 Brahmins even identify it as their mother tongue, and according to recent reports, it is being revived as a vernacular in the village of Mathoor, near Shimoga, Karnataka. Sanskrit is, rather, mostly used as a ceremonial language, and Hindu religious rituals use Sanskrit in hymns and mantras. In its pre-classical form, Vedic Sanskrit, Sanskrit is one of the earliest attested members of the Indo-European language family, the most archaic Sanskrit text being the Rigveda. The scope of this article is the Classical Sanskrit language as laid out in the grammar of Panini, roughly around 500 BC. Most Sanskrit texts available today were transmitted orally for several centuries before they were written down in medieval India.

Phonology and writing system

Classical Sanskrit has 48 phonemes (Vedic Sanskrit has 49).

The sounds are described here in their traditional order: vowels, stops and nasals (starting in the back of the mouth and moving forward), and finally the liquids and sibilants.

(Note: The long vowels are held about twice as long as their short counterparts. Also, there exists a third, extra-long length for most vowels, which is used in various cases, but particularly in the vocative.)

Simple vowels

Unlike in English, ṛ, ṝ, and ḷ are treated as vowels. Some grammarians mention ॡ ḹ, a longer version of ḷ, but this does not actually occur in Sanskrit and seems to have been created by analogy with the other vowels.

Diphthongs (combinations of simple vowels)

Vowels can be nasalized.

Consonants

There is also the anusvāra (ṃ (M) ं), which often appears as nasalization of the preceding vowel or as a nasal homorganic to the following consonant.

Pitch

Sanskrit is a pitch accent language. Native grammarians define three tones (svara): udātta 'raised', anudātta 'not raised', and svarita. In transliteration udātta is marked with accute accent (´) and anudātta with a grave accent (`). Svarita occurs only as a product of euphonic vowel combination and is less freqently encountered than the other two tones.

Sandhi

Sanskrit has an elaborate set of phonological rules called sandhi and samaas which are expressed in its writing (except in so-called pada texts). Sandhi refers to combination of words when they are spoken with each other without a gap. Since, the word scheme is based on verbal pronunciation, this is no exception. Sandhi rules define the how the whole word will sound like when two words are combined (or, merged). Almost always, the new word sounds like the two words spoken one after other except for distortions at the point where the first word ends and the second one starts. This distortion depends on the sound with which the first word ends and the sound with which the second word starts. These sounds also form the basis of classification of Sandhis. The effect of these sounds on the distortion has been carefully observed and described as rules of sandhi, which are sort of documentation how a person trying to speak two words back to back will pronounce them. for example, when we are speaking two words back to back one ending with sound of 'i' as in 'fringe' and second one starting with any other sound (say, that of u in 'pull'), then i will be pronounced as y in 'yup' and i and u will combine to sound like 'yu'. You can try it yourself. Samaas is a combo-word which like 'newborn' is for 'newly born'. Meaning of a samaas is normally clear from the samaas itself, while some of the samaas have a meaning very different from its constituent words. These are normally used to refer to some personality, deity or something by one of it's well known characteristics. Samaas are also categorized into various categories according to the kind of meaning they have and the constituent word that dominates the meaning. Samaas plays a key role in many cases, especially while expressing certain expressions. Samaas does not have any distortion in the words, while sometimes some prefixes and suffixes are used to impart certain type of meanings to the words. A sandhi always consists of two meaningful words while all constituent words of a samaas may not be meaningful individually. A sandhi may be difficult to understand for a person who is inexperienced in Sanskrit or has poor vocabulary. The case is same with samaas, but they are much easier to understand as they are mostly used in some fixed formats and meanings. Sandhi and Samaas add beauty to the language and extensively used by poets. When a sandhi can be broken in more than one ways or a samaas can be interpreted in more than one ways, they can be used as a pun. There are many examples of such uses in the Sanskrit literature.

Script

Sanskrit historically has had no single script associated with it. Ashoka used the Brahmi script for his pillar inscriptions (which were not in Sanskrit, but in PraKrishna.htmlit dialects and other languages). Roughly contemporary with the Brahmi, the Kharosthi script was used. Later (ca. 4th to 8th centuries AD) the Gupta script, derived from Brahmi, became prevalent. From ca. the 8th century, the Sharada script evolved out of the Gupta script, and was mostly displaced in its turn by Devanagari from ca. the 12th century, with intermediary stages such as the Siddham script. Other scripts used include Kannada in the South, and Bengali and other North Indian scripts in other regions.

From the late Middle Ages, and especially in modern times, the Devanagari (meaning "as used in the city of the Gods") script has become the most widely used and associated with Sanskrit. Occasionally, in regions of India where Devanagari is not the script of the vernacular (as it is with Hindi or Marathi) one will find texts still written in the local script.

Writing was introduced relatively late to India, and it did not immediately become important since oral learning was the primary means of transmitting knowledge. Rhys Davids suggests that writing may have been introduced from the Middle East by traders, but Sanskrit, which had been used exclusively in sacred contexts, remained a purely oral language until well into India's classical age. It is interesting to note the importance that Sanskrit orthography and Vedic philosophy of sound play in Hindu symbolism, as the varnamala, or sound-garland/alphabet, of 51 letters is also seen to be represented by the 51 skulls of Kali. In the Upanishads, the transcendent-immanent nature of Brahman is represented by the half-matra, or sphota of sound that is inherent to a beat of sound in the Sanskrit system.

Since the 19th century, Sanskrit has also been transliterated using the Latin alphabet. Most commonly used today is the IAST (International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration), which has been the academic standard since 1912. Other transliteration schemes have evolved due to difficulties representing Sanskrit characters in computer systems. These include Harvard-Kyoto that was used earlier, and ITRANS, a lossless transliteration scheme that is used widely on the Internet (especially Usenet).

For scholarly work, Devanagari has generally been preferred for the transcription and reproduction of whole texts and lengthy excerpts; however, references to individual words and names in texts composed in European languages are usually represented using Roman transliteration.

Grammar

Grammatical tradition

Panini (scholar), Shiva Sutra, Astadhyayi, Dhatupatha, Patanjali, Varadaraja, Laghukaumudi.

Verbs

Classification of verbs

Sanskrit has ten classes of verbs divided into in two broad groups: athematic and thematic. The thematic verbs are so called because an a, called the theme vowel, is inserted between the stem and the ending. This serves to make the thematic verbs generally better-behaved. Exponents used in verb conjugation include prefixes, suffixes, infixes, and reduplication. Vowel gradation is also very common; every root has (not necessarily all distinct) zero, guṇa, and vṛddhi grades. If V is the vowel of the zero grade, the guṇa-grade vowel is traditionally thought of as a + V, and the vṛddhi-grade vowel as ā + V.

Tense systems

The verbs tenses (a very inexact application of the word, since more distinctions than simply tense are expressed) are organized into four 'systems' (as well as gerunds and infinitives, and such creatures as intensives/frequentatives, desideratives, causatives, and benedictives derived from more basic forms) based on the different stem forms (derived from verbal roots) used in conjugation. There are four tense systems:

Present system

The present system includes the present and imperfect tenses, the optative and imperative moods, as well as the remnant forms of the old subjunctive. The tense stem of the present system is formed in multiple ways.

For athematic verbs, the present tense stem may be formed through:

For thematic verbs, the present tense stem may be formed through:

The tenth class described by native grammarians refers to a process which is derivational in nature, and thus not a true tense-stem formation.

Perfect system

The perfect system includes only the perfect tense. The stem is formed with reduplication as with the present system.

The perfect system also produces separate "strong" and "weak" forms of the verb — the strong form is used with with the singular active, and the weak form with the rest.

Aorist system

The aorist system actually has three different formations: the simple aorist, the reduplicating aorist, and the sibilant aorist. The simple aorist is taken directly from the root stem. The reduplicating aorist involves reduplication as well as vowel reduction of the stem. The sibilant aorist is formed with the suffixation of s to the stem.

Future system

The future system is formed with the suffixation of sya or iṣya and guṇa.

Verbs: Conjugation

Each verb has a grammatical voice, whether active, passive or middle. There is also an impersonal voice, which can be described as the passive voice of intransitive verbs. Sanskrit verbs have an indicative, an optative and an imperative mode. Older forms of the language had a subjunctive, though this had fallen out of use by the time of Classical Sanskrit.

Basic conjugational endings

Conjugational endings in Sanskrit convey person, number, and voice. Different forms of the endings are used depending on what tense stem and mood they are attached to. Verb stems or the endings themselves may be changed or obscured by sandhi.

Primary endings are used with present indicative and future forms. Secondary endings are used with the imperfect, conditional, aorist, and optative. Perfect and imperative endings are used with the perfect and imperative respectively.

Present system conjugation

Conjugation of the present system deals with all forms of the verb utilizing the present tense stem (explained under Tense Stems above). This includes the present tense of all moods, as well as the imperfect indicative.

Athematic inflection

The present system differentiates strong and weak forms of the verb. The strong/weak opposition manifests itself differently depending on the class:

The present indicative takes primary endings, and the imperfect indicative takes secondary endings. Singular active forms have the accent on the stem and take strong forms, while the other forms have the accent on the endings and take weak forms.

The optative takes secondary endings. yā is added to the stem in the active, and ī in the passive.

The imperative takes imperative endings. Accent is variable and affects vowel quality. Forms which are end-accented trigger guṇa strengthening, and those with stem accent do not have the vowel affected.

Nominal inflection

Sanskrit is a highly inflected language with three grammatical genders (masculine, feminine, neuter) and three numbers (singular, plural, dual). It has eight cases: nominative, vocative, accusative, instrumental, dative, ablative, genitive, and locative.

The number of actual declensions is debatable. In this article they are divided into five declensions. Which declension a noun belongs to is determined largely by form.

a-stems

A-stems comprise the largest class of nominals. As a rule nouns belonging to this class are either masculine or neuter.

i- and u-stems

Long Vowel-stems

undocumented, to be edited ...

ṛ-stems

ṛ-stems are predominantly agental derivatives like dātṛ 'giver', though also include kinsmanship terms like pitṛ́ 'father', mātṛ́ 'mother', and svásṛ 'sister'.

Personal Pronouns and Determiners

The first and second person pronouns are declined for the most part alike, having by analogy assimilated themselves with one another.

Note: Where two forms are given, the second is enclitic and an alternative form. Ablatives in singular and plural may be extended by the syllable -tas; thus mat or mattas, asmat or asmattas.

Compounds

One other notable feature of the nominal system is the very common use of nominal compounds, which may be huge (10+ words) as in some modern languages such as German. Nominal compounds occur with various structures, some examples of which are:

1. Dvandva (co-ordinative)

2. Bahuvrihi (possessive)

3. Tatpurusha (determinative)

4. Karmadharaya (descriptive)

5. Amredita (iterative)

Syntax

Word order is free with tendency toward SOV.

Numerals

The numbers from one to ten are:

The numbers one through four are declined. Éka is declined like a pronomial adjective, though the dual form does not occur. Dvá appears only in the dual. Trí and catúr are declined irregularly:

Influences

Modern-day India

Sanskrit's greatest influence, presumably, is that which it exerted on languages that grew from its vocabulary and grammatical base. Especially among elite circles in India, Sanskrit is prized as a storehouse of scripture and the language of prayers in Hinduism. Like Latin's influence on European languages, Sanskrit has influenced most Indian languages. While vernacular prayer is common, Sanskrit mantras are recited by millions of Hindus and most temple functions are conducted entirely in Sanskrit, often Vedic in form. Most higher forms of Indian vernacular languages like Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, Telugu and Hindi, often called 'shuddha' (pure, higher) are much more heavily Sanskritized. Of modern day Indian languages, while Hindi tends to be, in spoken form, more heavily weighted with Arabic and Persian influence, Bengali and Marathi still retain a largely Sanskrit vocabulary base. The national anthem, Jana Gana Mana is higher form of Bengali, so Sanskritized as to be archaic in modern usages. The national song of India Vande Mataram which is originally a poem - composed by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay and taken from his book called 'Aanandmath', is in pure Sanskrit. Malayalam, which is spoken in the Kerala state of India, also combines a great deal of Sanskrit vocabulary with Tamil (Dravidian) grammatical structure. Kannada, another South Indian language, also contains Sanskrit vocabulary. But as a medium of spiritual instruction for Hindus in India, Sanskrit is still prized and widespread.

Sanskrit is spoken natively by the population in Mattur, a village in central Karnataka. Inhabitants, of all castes, learn Sanskrit starting in childhood and converse in the language. Even the local Muslims speak and converse in Sanskrit. Historically, the village was given by the Vijayanagara Empire to Vedic scholars and their families.

Sanskrit words are found in many other present-day non-Indian languages. For instance, the Thai language contains many loan words from Sanskrit. For example, in Thai, the Raavana - the emperor of Sri Lanka is called 'Thoskonth' which is clearly a derivation of his Sanskrit name 'Dashakanth' (of ten necks). And ranged as far as the Philippines, e.g., Tagalog 'gurò' from 'Guru', or 'teacher', with the Hindu seafarers who traded there.

Interactions with Sino-Tibetan languages

Sanskrit and related languages have also influenced their Sino-Tibetan-speaking neighbors to the north through the spread of Buddhist texts in translation. Buddhism was spread to China by Mahayanist missionaries mostly through translations of Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit and classical Sanskrit texts, and many terms were transliterated directly and added to the Chinese vocabulary. (Although Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit is not Sanskrit, properly speaking, its vocabulary is substantially the same, both because of genetic relationship, and because of conscious imitation on the part of composers. Buddhist texts composed in Sanskrit proper were primarily found in philosophical schools like the Madhyamaka.)

Attempts at revival

Of late, there have been attempts to revive the speaking of this ancient tongue among people, so that vast literature available in Sanskrit can be made easily available to everyone. The CBSE (Central Board of Secondary Education) in India has made Sanskrit a third language in the schools it governs. In such schools, learning Sanskrit is an option for grades 5 to 8. An option between Sanskrit and Hindi(or many other local languages) as a second language exists for grades 9 and 10. Many organizations like the SamsKrishna.htmlta Bharati are conducting Speak Sanskrit workshops to popularize the language. About four million people are claimed to have acquired the ability to speak Sanskrit. (See link.)

Computational linguistics

There have been suggestions to use Sanskrit as a metalanguage for knowledge representation in e.g. machine translation, and other areas of natural language processing because of its highly regular structure (The AI Magazine, Spring, 1985 #39). This is due to Classical Sanskrit being a regularized, prescriptivist form abstracted from the much more irregular and richer Vedic Sanskrit. This levelling of the grammar of Classical Sanskrit occurred during the Brahmana phase, after the language had fallen out of popular use, arguably qualifying Classical Sanskrit as an early engineered language. Modern logical languages like lojban however are even better suited for purposes of natural language processing.

External links

• Online Sanskrit Dictionary
• Spiritual Sanskrit-English Dictionary
• Sanskrit Discussion Forum
• Sanskrit Documents Documents in ITX format of Upanishads, Stotras etc. and a metasite with links to translations, dictionaries, tutorials, tools and other Sanskrit resources.
• Free Sanskrit Word Processor: Madhyam developed by Balendu Sharma Dadhich
• Sanskrit fonts and Sanskrit texts
• GiirvaaNi - Sanskrit Classical Literature with translation
• The earliest dated illustrated Sanskrit manuscript in the world
• A list of Chinese words originated from Sanskrit
• Monier-Williams Dictionary - Searchable
• Monier-Williams' Sanskrit-English Dictionary: DICT & HTML Downloadable Versions
• Monier-Williams Dictionary - Searchable Digital Facsimile Edition Freeware CD
• Monier-Williams Dictionary - Printable
• SamsKrishna.htmlita Bharati
• Sanskrit Studies, Links and Information
• pAnini’s Grammar and Computer Science
• Ethnologue's Sanskrit report
• American Sanskrit Institute
• A brief Sanskrit Glossary Lists commonly used words in spiritual writings
• Tranliterator Transliterates from romanized to Unicode Sanskrit transliterator.
• Sanskrit Translations
• A Sanskrit Tutor
• Sanskrit & Sánscrito Sanskrit language, Yoga, Indian philosophies, blog, names, names of hatha yoga postures, Directory of Free Sanskrit Links, translations and much more (English-Spanish).

Sources