Sanskrit Guide learnsanskrit.org November 25, 2012 1 About learnsanskrit.org No

Sanskrit Guide learnsanskrit.org November 25, 2012 1 About learnsanskrit.org November 25, 2012 2 Sanskrit Seek Govinda, seek Govinda — seek Govinda, you fool! For when you've come to your final hour, grammar will not save you.[1] Sanskrit is a language of many faces. At one moment, it is the millennia-old language of the authorless Vedas and all the texts in their tradition. At another, it is the supple verses of Kalidasa and Bilhana, or the intricate puzzle boxes of Magha and Bharavi. And in between are its meditations on nearly every part of human life: existence, reality, religion, love, duty, marriage, war, sex, death, violence, laughter, beauty, perception, nature, anatomy, urbanity, ritual, desire, food, purpose, meaning, language, and many more. At once, it is primordial and strikingly modern. So it is appropriate that Sanskrit itself has many names. It was just called "the language" once, but this plain name gave way to loftier ones, like "perfected speech" and "the language of the gods." "Sanskrit" is just one of these many names. The word has been translated in dozens of ways, like "perfected" or "perfectly made" or "put together" or just "assembled." All of these meanings are part of the word "Sanskrit." And lurking in the word "Sanskrit" is the notion of something unnatural. For although Sanskrit spent more than a thousand years as a fluid native language, it "froze" in the 5th century BCE when the grammarian Panini formalized it. He described Sanskrit so comprehensively that it has remained nearly the same for more than two thousand years. To him, Sanskrit was just "the language" spoken by the learned men of his time. But to those that followed him, Sanskrit was the "perfected" language forever protected from the fluidity of human life. When Sanskrit was formalized in this way, it lost some of the vitality that we find in other languages. But in exchange, it became a timeless and placeless language unlike any other. It speaks from a world that has long disappeared from the earth. By learning Sanskrit, we can open our ears to that world and let some of its voices be heard once more. 3 The Guide Learning Sanskrit This guide tries to make Sanskrit as easy, simple, and intuitive as possible. To understand this approach, we should start from the beginning. The hard way When Panini set out to describe Sanskrit comprehensively, he formalized the language into four thousand rules, known together as the Ashtadhyayi. The text is a complex algebraic system with meta-rules, exceptions, counter-exceptions, and many other technical devices. Together they form a complete algorithmic machine, with basic "chunks" of language for its raw material and complete Sanskrit sentences for its results. But although the Ashtadhyayi is clean and efficient, Sanskrit is not. It has plenty of complicated forms, rare idioms, redundant phrases, and ambiguities. These things are inherent to all natural languages. But they can make mastering Sanskrit a long and difficult process. Still, it is possible to master the language. Sanskrit writers had no choice but to do so. They wrote for highly educated audiences who knew Sanskrit already, and in order to be taken seriously, they had to have total mastery of the language. And the best way to gain that mastery was to study the Ashtadhyayi in detail. But if your goal is just to read Sanskrit texts, this approach is slow and wasteful. It's like building a skyscraper from the top down. The easy way Today, most people who learn Sanskrit do not use the Ashtadhyayi. These days, there are dozens of books and courses available, and to some extent, they all try to make it easier to learn to read Sanskrit texts. But surprisingly, many of these resources have some of the same problems as the Ashtadhyayi: • They assume a strong knowledge of grammar or linguistics. • They use unfamiliar technical terms when simpler terms are available. • They teach concepts in an unintuitive or sub-optimal order. • They illustrate patterns, but not always clearly. • They focus on Sanskrit by itself. • They teach Sanskrit grammar instead of Sanskrit itself. 4 To some extent, each of these problems is unavoidable. But it is possible to lessen their effects and make them less difficult. That is what this guide sets out to do: • The guide assumes almost no background knowledge. If you understand English, you know enough to use this guide. • Wherever possible, the guide uses simple English terms to describe concepts. Many of these concepts come with several examples. • The guide teaches the common and powerful parts of Sanskrit early on. Each of the early lessons has a direct and significant impact on your ability to learn Sanskrit. • The guide explicitly identifies patterns wherever possible. • The guide has optional content of all kinds. Digressions, extra lessons, and a large number of footnotes give you a break from Sanskrit while still connecting Sanskrit to a larger universe of ideas and concepts. • The guide tries to treat Sanskrit as as a language, not a rule book. Many lessons have examples from real Sanskrit texts to connect the material to something real and illustrate Sanskrit concepts in an authentic context. In this guide In this guide, we will study the basic and intermediate parts of Sanskrit and learn enough of the language to read texts like the Bhagavad Gita and the works of the poet Kalidasa. In the future, this guide might also discuss the more advanced parts of Sanskrit and focus on more difficult texts, like commentary and technical literature. In either case, the guide provides a strong Sanskrit foundation that you can extend however you please. 5 End matter Footnotes 1. ^ Bhaja Govindam verse 1. This devotional song is attributed to the sage Adi Shankara. The original text and a translation can be found here. 6 Sounds learnsanskrit.org November 25, 2012 7 a and ā Almost any language resource will start by describing its language's sounds. This guide will do the same. But unlike most other languages, Sanskrit requires total mastery of its different sounds. They shift, blend, and transform constantly, and unless you are very familiar with them, Sanskrit will be difficult to understand. Fortunately, the Sanskrit sound system is easy to master. It has remained nearly the same for thousands of years, and we know almost exactly how Sanskrit once sounded. a Let's start with the very first sound in the Sanskrit alphabet. It is a fundamental sound that we can produce effortlessly: When you produce this sound, let your breath flow cleanly through your mouth, without any breaks or stops. Sounds produced in this way are called vowels. As you learn the Sanskrit sounds, study the recordings carefully and consult the knowledgeable people around you. Use the English approximations as a last resort. ā To get the second sound of the alphabet, we make a twice as long as it was before. The sound of the vowel changes slightly: a is called short because it is not as long as ā. ā is called long because it is longer than a. As you pronounce these vowels, try to make ā exactly twice as long as a. a "u" in "but" ā "a" in "father" 8 Blended sounds Background Some languages, such as English, have writing systems that do not match the sounds of the language well. For example, the English word "enough" does not have a "g" sound, but a "g" is added anyway. Other languages, such as Spanish or Italian, have writing systems that match the sounds of the language very well. Even if you do not know either of these languages, you can probably pronounce words like plaza or numero fairly well. But Sanskrit goes one step further. In almost every text, written Sanskrit is a perfect record of the sounds that appear in spoken Sanskrit. This might be confusing. Let's see some examples. Examples Here are two simple Sanskrit sentences: बालाय आह bālāya āha He speaks for the boy. सा आोित sā āpnoti She obtains. Try reading the first sentence out loud ten times. As you might have noticed, it is tiresome to keep stopping after bālāya and keep starting again at āha. That pause is difficult to pronounce, and it takes too much extra time. Because of these pauses, speaking Sanskrit can feel hard and slow. The earliest Sanskrit speakers solved this problem by blending words together. Blended words are easier to say, and it takes much less time to say them. In bālāya āha, for example, it is so much easier to blend a and ā into bālāyāha. 9 This is how Sanskrit is usually written down, too. Even if two words are supposed to be separate, they are blended wherever possible: बालाय आह → बालायाह bālāya āha → bālāyāha He spoke for the boy. सा आोित → साोित sā āpnoti → sāpnoti She obtains. In the wild This blending occurs almost everywhere. Try to blend the words in the sentences below: uploads/Philosophie/ guide-sanskrit.pdf

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