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Sanskrit

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Sanskrit (संस्कृतम् in Devanāgarī) is perhaps the oldest attested member of the Indo-European language family, and an official language of India. Seen by many as the Asian equivalent of Latin, its vast religious and literary tradition is most famously seen in its Hindu or Vedic traditions.

The first Sanskrit text available is from the early canon of Hinduism from Vedic culture, the Vedas. Scholars have preserved far more Sanskrit texts than those in Latin and Greek combined.

Table of contents
1 History
2 Script
3 Influences
4 Phonology and writing system
5 Morphology and Syntax
6 See Also
7 External Links

History

The word Sanskrit means completed, refined, perfected. Sam (together) + krtam (created). Virtually every Sanskrit student in India learns the traditional story that Sanskrit was created and then refined over many generations (traditionally more than a thousand years) until it was considered complete and perfect. Sanskrit is considered a more refined linguistic strain of the Prakrit (Prototype. Pra (prime, first, pre-) + krt (created)) languages of India which include the lower vernaculars such as Pali and Ardhamagadhi.

The language underwent several stages of consolidation and modification. In its older Vedic form, it is a close descendant of Proto-Indo-European, the root of all later Indo-European languages. Vedic Sanskrit is also practically identical to Avestan, the language of Zoroastrianism. After the consolidation of its grammar and lexicon it turned into a classical language of strict esthetic rules and gave rise to considerable literature of drama, medicine, politics, astronomy, mathematics, alchemy, etc.

Its common origin with modern European and the classical languages of Greek and Latin can be seen, for instance, in the Sanskrit words for mother, matr, and father, pitr. European scholarship in Sanskrit, initiated by Heinrich Roth and Johann Ernest Hanxleden, led to the discovery of this language family by Sir William Jones, and thus played an important role in the development of linguistics. Indeed, linguistics (along with phonology, etc.) was first developed by Indian grammarians who were attempting to catalog and codify Sanskrit's rules. Modern linguistics, which arose much later in the rest of the world, owes a great deal to the grammarians, including key terms for compound analysis.

Sanskrit is the oldest member of Indo-Aryan sub-branch of Indo-Iranian. Vedic Sanskrit and Avestan are the oldest members of the Indo-Iranian sub-branch of the Indo-European family. Nuristani languages, spoken in roughly what has become Afghanistan, are grouped with Vedic and Avestan.

The oldest form of Sanskrit is Vedic, in which the Vedas, the earliest Sanskrit texts, were composed. The earliest of the Vedas, the Rîgveda, was composed in the middle of the second millennium BC. The Vedic form survived until the middle of the first millennium BC. Around this time, as Sanskrit made the transition from a first language to a second language of religion and learning, the Classical period began. The intense study of the structure of Sanskrit at this time led to the beginnings of linguistics. The oldest surviving Sanskrit grammar is Pāṇini's c. 500 BC Aṣṭādhyāyī ("8 Chapter Grammar"). A form of Sanskrit called Epic Sanskrit is seen in the Mahabharata and other Hindu epics.

Vernacular Sanskrit may also have developed into the Prakrits (in which, among other things, early Buddhist texts are written) and the modern Indic languages. There has also been much reciprocal influence between Sanskrit and the Dravidian languages.

Script

Sanskrit today is generally written in the syllabic Devanagari (meaning "as used in the city of the Gods") script composed of 51 letters or aksharas. Several Latin-alphabet transliterations of varying utility are also available. Sanskrit was earlier written in the Grantha script, in which occasional modern Sanskrit texts are still written. Earlier than that, the Brahmi script was used, for instance by Ashoka for his pillar inscriptions


Writing was introduced relatively late to India, and did not immediately become important since oral learning was the primary means of transmission of knowledge. Rhys Davids suggests that writing may have been introduced from the middle east by traders, but Sanskrit, which was used exclusively in sacred contexts, remained a purely oral language until well into the common era. It is, however, interesting to note the importance that Sanskrit orthography and Vedic philosophies of sound plays 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 transcendant-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, as one cannot conceptualize it but realizes it is the inherent base of all else.


Influences


Modern day India

Sanskrit's greatest influence, presumably, is that 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. 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, and Hindi, often called 'suddha' (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 two national songs, Jana Gana Mana (anthem) and Vande Mataram are both higher forms of Bengali, so Sanskritized as to be archaic in modern usages. But as a medium of instruction for Hindus in India, Sanskrit is still prized and widespread within the educated echelons of society.

The Sanskrit vocabulary, had some influence on the Chinese culture because Buddhism arrived in China largely in the form of texts composed in Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit, which was actually an ornamented Prakrit.  Many Chinese Buddhist scriptures were written with Chinese transliterations of Sanskrit words.  Some Chinese proverbs use Buddhist terms that originate from Sanskrit.

Sanskrit words are found in many other present-day non-Indian languages.  For instance, the Thai language contains many loan words from Sanskrit, and ranged as far as the Philippines viz. Tagalog 'guru', or 'teacher', with the Hindu seafarers who traded there.


Phonology and writing system

Sanskrit has 48 phonemes (Vedic Sanskrit has 49). The Sanskrit syllabary serves as a model for most Indian language writing systems except Urdu and those of the southern base, like Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam. For the ingenious phonetic classification scheme of these writing systems see Indian language.

The sounds are described here in their traditional order: vowels, stopss and nasalss (starting in the back of the mouth and moving forward), and finally the liquidss 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 when recording a shout, or a greeting.)


Transliteration

There are many transliteration schemes for writing Sanskrit using Latin script. Most commonly used are IAST (International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration), which is the academic standard and includes diacritical marks. Other transcription 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).

See also: devanagari


Vowels (with approximate English equivalents)

a (a) - gut

ā (aa) - father

i (i) - pin

ī (ii) - tweak

u (u) - push

ū (uu) - moo

ṛ (r^i) = between r + i and r + u

ṝ (long r^i) = between r + ii or r + uu

ḹ (l^i) = l + r^i

(Sanskrit recognizes vocalic r (errr) and l (ulll), unlike, say, English)


Diphthongs (Combinations of Simple Vowels)

e - hay

ai - aisle

o - snow

au - pow

Vowels can be nasalized.


Consonants

Sanskrit has a voiceless, voiceless aspirate, voiced, voiced aspirate, and nasal stop at each of the following places of articulation:



It also has four semivowels: y, r, l, v.  All of these but r have nasalized forms.  Sanskrit also has palatal, retroflex, and alveolar sibilants. Rounding out the consonants are the voiced and voiceless h (the voiceless h, called the visarga, tends to repeat the preceding vowel after itself) and the anusvaara, which often appears as nasalization of the preceding vowel or as a nasal homorganic to the following consonant. 



Vedas Sanskrit had a pitch (music) or tonal accent, but it was lost by the Classical period. Vedic Sanskrit also had labial and velar fricatives and a retroflex L.

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 reflects the sort of blurring that occurs, particularly between word-boundaries, in spoken language generally, but is codified in Sanskrit and written down. A simple example of English sandhi is "an apple" versus "a clock". 

Sandhi makes Sanskrit very hard to read without a great deal of practice. It also creates ambiguities which clever poets have exploited to perform such feats as writing poems which can be interpreted in multiple, unrelated ways depending on how the reader chooses to break apart the sandhi.


Morphology and Syntax

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.  It has over ten noun declensions.

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 more well-behaved.  Exponents utilized in verb conjugation include prefixes, suffixes, infixes, and reduplication.  Also extremely common is vowel gradation; every root has (not necessarily all distinct) zero, guna, and vrdhii grades.  If V is the vowel of the zero grade, the guna grade vowel is traditionally thought of a V + a, and the vrdhii grade vowel as V + aa.  

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

1.Bahuvrihi

Bahuvrihi, or much-rice, denotes a rich person--one who has much rice. Bahuvrihi compounds refer to a thing which is not specified in any of the parts of which the compound is formed. A block-head, for example, is someone whose head is said to be as thick as a block.

2.Karmadhariya

A compound in which all of the words specify that to which the compound refers. A houseboat, for example, is both a house and a boat.

3.Tatpurusha

There are many tatpurushas (one for each of the nominal cases, and a few others besides); in a tatpurusha, one component is related to another. For example, a doghouse is a dative compound, a house for a dog. It would be called a "caturtitatpurusha" (caturti refers to the fourth case--that is, the dative). Incidentally, "tatpurusha" is a tatpurusha ("this man"--meaning someone's agent), while "caturtitatpurusha" is a karmadhariya, being both dative, and a tatpurusha.


The verbs tenses (a very inexact application of the word, since more distinctions than simply tense are expressed) are organized into four 'systems' (plus gerunds and infinitives, along with such creatures as intensives/frequentives, desideratives, causatives, and benedictives derived from more basic forms).  Each verb is also has a grammatical voice: either active, passive or middle. (Middle indicates actions done to something other than the speaker for the speaker's own benefit.  The semantic distinction between middle and passive is not maintained in later Sanskrit).   The four systems are:


Word order is free with tendency toward SOV.

Here is a simple example to illustrate the different contexts in which the cases are used for the pronouns:


           mayaa tatam idam sarvam jagad avyaktamuurtinaa |



     matsthaani sarvabhuutaani na caaham teshv avasthitah ||




                                   -- Giitaa (9.4)



"mayaa" (by me) in the first line is in the instrumental case. Word for word this says "by me is pervaded this all universe" but a naturalized translation would be "I pervade all this universe...".

"mat-sthaani" in the second line is a compound of "mat" (me) and "stha" (standing, staying at) and means "they are in me".

"-aham" (I) in the second line is nominative. na caaham = "...and not I....", meaning "but I am not...".

"teshv-" (in/at/by them) at the end of the second line is in locative plural. 
Translated: "...in them".


See Also


External Links