Introduction in Sanskrit
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Drago LicansIntroduction in Sanskrit
Uploaded by
Drago LicansClass 1
Monday, March 30, 2020
1. Sanskrit is one of the most ancient languages, and is of unknown origin.
We know it was there during the time of the Vedas, and we know the Vedas are one
of the most ancient texts in the world.
2. There are two styles of Sanskrit (a) Vedic - in which the Vedas are written
(b) Classic - in which most of the other texts are written.
3. Panini has written the most concise and reputed grammar of Sanskrit.
Panini's time was after Mahabharata and before about 2600 years ago. So he was
there in the period of 2600 years ago to 5000 years ago. At that time there were
many versions of the grammar, but Panini came up with such a perfect
masterpiece of the grammar that, grammarian stopped developing any newer
grammar of Sanskrit after that. His grammar is known as "Ashtadhyai" as it is
represented in 8 chapters. The entire work would roughly be about 20 printed
pages and consists only about 4000 rules. Many of the rules are multilevel if-then-
else statements. He also defines list variables and range variables. The work is so
precise that not even a single letter in the work is redundant. In India, in places
like Varanasi, students make a career out of Panini's grammar and they spend up
to 12 years to learn that.
4. Note, Sanskrit was in vogue for much before Panini. Panini just described
what rules were being followed. Languages start with the spoken language. The
script and the grammar follows later.
5. Like any other language, the Sanskrit language is a series of sounds. The
sounds are identified as words and sentences. Those words were then broken
down into units of sound which became the letters and that became the alphabet.
There are 50 of these units, and these are very precisely arranged, making this a
perfectly phonetic language. Any word that is pronounced can always be precisely
mapped to the script and vice-versa.
6. Most of the Indian languages have been derived from Sanskrit. However,
many of them have lost some of the phonetic aspects. For example, in Bengali,
even though the alphabet is same, the three "S" sounds all are pronounced the
same way.
7. The alphabet has vowels and consonants. These are arranged separately
(unlike in English where the vowels are scattered in the middle of the alphabet).
Vowels are those that can be chanted independently. Consonants themselves
cannot be chanted, they need the support of the vowels to be pronounced as
sounds.
8. The most common script for Sasnkrit is called Devnagari. There are two
main scripts to write Sanskrit using Roman characters...
a. IAST - International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration - this can
be used for handwritten in English with diacritic like markings
b. ITRANS - Indian languages TRANSliteration is used for typing in computer
http://www.learnsanskrit.org/tools/sanscript is the tool to allow the writing of scripts
in the above and convert from one to another
