Learn Sanskrit through self study - Free

Learn Sanskrit through self study

Why Study Sanskrit?

http://acharya.iitm.ac.in/sanskrit/tutor.php


Introduction

The study of languages is always fascinating. For this reason alone, one can study or learn Sanskrit. The members of the Samskritapriyah group are more than fascinated by this language. They come from different disciplines and have had a long lasting association with Sanskrit. This group, comprising scientists, linguistic scholars, computer scientists, Indologists and above all, well respected Sanskrit scholars, feels convinced that there are aspects to Sanskrit not yet seen or observed in other languages.

While the lessons are the primary means to learning the language, the information presented alongside will more than arouse the curiosity of the reader. It must be emphasized that the views expressed here are not intended to start a big debate on the language itself. The group has carefully studied the information presented here, for validity, correctness and authenticity. As a consequence, the information should appeal to the scientific mind.

DISCLAIMER

The Views expressed here are specific to the Samskritapriyah group and the Samskrit Education Society. IIT Madras, has only made available the web pages as a courtesy to the group.

Sanskrit, earliest of the ancient languages.

There is sufficient evidence available today to say that Sanskrit is the oldest language of the world.

Among the current languages which possess a hoary antiquity like Latin or Greek, Sanskrit is the only language which has retained its pristine purity. It has maintained its structure and vocabulary even today as it was in the past.

The oldest literature of the world, the Vedas, the Puranas and the Ithihasas which relate to the Indian subcontinent, are still available in the same form as they were known from the very beginning. There are many many scholars in India who can interpret them today, much the same way great scholars of India did years ago. Such interpretation comes not by merely studying earlier known interpretations but through a steady process of assimilation of knowledge linking a variety of disciplines via Sanskrit.

Sanskrit is as modern as any language can be

Sanskrit is very much a spoken language today. Even now, as we enter the twenty first century, Sanskrit is spoken by an increasing number of people, thankfully many of them young. Among the learned in India, it continues to be a bridge across different states where people, in spite of their own mother tongue, use it to exchange scholarly and even general information relating to the traditions of the country. The News service offered by the Government of India through television and radio continues to feature daily Sanskrit program catering to local as well as international news.

The grammar of Sanskrit has attracted scholars world over. It is very precise and upto date and remains well defined even today. Of late, several persons have expressed the opinion that Sanskrit is the best language for use with computers. The Samskritapriyah group does not subscribe to this view however.

Sanskrit is a Scientist's paradise

Sanskrit, the vocabulary of which is derived from root syllables, is ideal for coining new scientific and technological terms. The need to borrow words or special scientific terms does not arise.

From the very beginning, scientific principles have been hidden in the verses found in the Vedas, Upanishads and the great epics of India. Concepts and principles seen in present day mathematics and astronomy, are all hidden in the compositions and treatises of many early scholars of the country. Some of these principles and concepts will be shown in the information section that will accompany the lessons.

Linguistics

The precise and extremely well defined structure of Sanskrit, coupled with its antiquity offers a number of areas in linguistics research including Computational Linguistics. Also, Sanskrit distinguishes itself in that it is the only known language which has a built-in scheme for pronunciation, word formation and grammar.

Sanskrit, a language for Humanity

Sanskrit is a language for humanity and not merely a means for communication within a society. The oldest surviving literature of the world, viz. the Vedas, encompass knowledge in virtually every sphere of human activity. The fact that many profound principles relating to human existence were given expression through Sanskrit, continue to amaze those who study Sanskrit. A Sanskrit Scholar understands the world better than most others.

Sanskrit perfectly depicted (and continues to depict) the social order of the day and offers clues to historical developments within the Society. The language has been used effectively to describe the virtuous and the not so virtuous qualities of great men, women, kings and queens, the philosophers and Saints of the country.

Philosophy, Theology and Sanskrit

Sanskrit abounds in Philosophy and Theology related issues. There are so many words one encounters within Sanskrit that convey subtly differing meanings of a concept that admits of only one interpretation when studied with other languages. The language thus has the ability to offer links between concepts using just the words.

Sanskrit for your emotions

The connoisseurs of the Sanskrit language know that it is the language of the heart. Whatever be the emotion one wishes to display, be it devotion, love, affection, fear, threat, anger, compassion, benevolence, admiration, surprise and the like, the most appropriate words of Sanskrit can flow like a gushing stream.

Some Unique Characteristics of the language

Sanskrit is co-original with the Vedas.. The vedas cannot be studied without the Vedangas, which are six in number. The first three deal with the spoken aspects of the language. The first of these three, namely Siksha, tells us how to pronounce the letters of the aksharas. Siksha divides the letters into three classes- Swaras, Vyanjanas and Oushmanas. Depending on the effort (Prayatna), place of origin in the body (Sthana), the force used (Bala) and the duration of time (Kala), the letters differ from each other in their auditory quality and meaning.

Vyakarna, known as the grammar of Sanskrit, is the second Vedanga which describes meaningful word formations. This is usually referred to as Sphota or meaningful sound.

The third Vedanga, Niruktam, describes certain fundamental root words used in the Vedas. Classification of words into groups of synonyms is an example. For instance, approximately a hundred and twenty synonyms for water are given in Niruktam.

The fourth Vedanga, Chandas, describes the formation of sentences in metrical form. Unlike English which used a very limited number of metres (basically four), Sanskrit offers about two dozen Vedic metres and innumerable conventional metres.

The remaining two Vedangas, Kalpa and Jyothisha deal with space and time.

The letters of Sanskrit

Sanskrit comprises fifty one letters or aksharas. In other languages, we refer to the letters of the alphabet of the language. We know that the word alphabet is derived from the names of the first two letters of Greek. The term alphabet has no other meaning except to denote the set of letters in the language.

In contrast, the word "akshara" in Sanskrit denotes something fundamental and significant. One of the direct meanings of the word is that it denotes the set of letters of Sanskrit from the first to the last. The word also means that the sound of the letter does not ever get destroyed and thus signifies the eternal quality of the sound of the letters. The consequence of this meaning is that the sound of a word is essentially the sounds of the aksharas in the word, a concept which will help simplify text to speech applications with computers.

There are two aspects of non destruction in the above explanation. The first one refers to the phonetic characteristics of the language, i.e., in any word, the aksharas retain their sound. The second aspect of non destruction, amazingly, is that the aksharas retain their individual meanings as well! To give an example, the word "guru" consisting of the aksharas "gu" and "ru" stands for a teacher- one who dispels darkness (ignorance) of the the mind (person). "gu" means darkness and "ru" means the act of removal.

Now, aren't we beginning to see something very interesting?

The popular Sanskrit language is based on root syllables and words. Unlike the other languages of the world, every word in Sanskrit is derived from a root. It is a well accepted fact that all Indo-European languages have a common origin. On the basis of the above mentioned fact that all the words of Sanskrit are traceable to specific roots, a feature not seen in other languages, one can presume that Sanskrit is most certainly the origin.

Massive, yet precise

One can learn Sanskrit purely for the sake of the great epics of India. The Ramayana has 24,000 verses fully in metre and the Mahabharata qualifies as the world's largest epic with 100,000 verses. The Mahabharata says, "what is here may be elsewhere, what is not here is nowhere." The precision with which the verses convey information on so many different aspects of life in a society, is a factor one must reckon as the ultimate in composition.


Online Resources provided at Acharya

Online resources have been made possible at this site as a result of the Multilingual applications that can be deployed from a web server. Systems Development Lab., IIT Madras is pleased to offer several resources for the benefit of the viewers. These are classified into groups based on the nature of the information served or service provided.

· Learning Resources
· References
· Online Databases
· Online services
· online demos
· Tutorials, quizzes
· Linguistic resources

Learning Resources

Learn Sanskrit, our popular presentation on Learning Sanskrit through self study. The online lessons have won appreciation from the world community not only for their simplicity and effectiveness but the unique manner in which the lessons are presented in Devanagari script. The lessons have remained popular from 1997 when the first few lessons were put up. The lessons have been revised in 2006.

Akshara Animation refers to learning the stroking order for the aksharas in different scripts. This is a unique presentation through Java Applets. Please use the links on the right to reach the appropriate pages.

Braille Related information has been included from 2001 to allow sighted persons become familiar with the principles of English Braille as well as Bharati Braille, the standard followed in India. The pages disseminating information relating to Braille also serve as useful tutorials.
The quizzes relating to Learning Sanskrit and Braille are one of a kind on the web.

References

Online references relate to text from the scriptures and ancient literary works in Sanskrit and Tamil, two very old languages of India. The presentations include word by word meanings and translations in English. Search facilities are provided for searching through the texts. Included here are the Bhagavadgita, Upanishads, Tolkappiam and Tiukkural.

The pages relating to the scripts of India present detailed information on the scripts and the writing systems employed for each script.

The online Sanskrit Dictionary is another unique presentation with search features and results returned in Devanagari script.

Transliteration Maps

General online reference in different transliteration schemes in use.

Online Databases

Searchable online databases containing useful reference data. Indian Postal code data is presented as also Audio Book information for the Visually handicapped.

Online Services

Online services include useful resources for people where multilingual documents are generated and distributed through web interfaces. these include transliteration based services, generation of test documents in Unicode, Braille Transcription for the benefit of the Visually Handicapped. The Multilingual Software allows effortless creation of E-Books in different Indian languages that can have multilingual content as also English.

Online Demos

The demos constitute applications that illustrate the strength of the IITM approach to multilingual computing on the web. These demos show the capabilities of the applications which are based on the syllable level coding employed for representing text in a uniform manner across the scripts. The demos clearly establish the viability of multilingual computing and localization of applications. The text to speech features are also illustrated in the demo pages.

Notable among the demos are the Akshara Animation page and the Search Engine application. Examples are shown for searches in the text of Bhagavadgita or Tirukkural

The demo on online text to speech synthesis shows how speech can be synthesized using MBROLA. Speech synthesis is illustrated for Sanskrit as well as Tamil.

Unicode Test Pages

The main strength of the Multilingual Software developed at the lab is the approach to working with Indian languages at the level of syllables. This approach results in very efficient representation of text in terms of fixed length codes for syllables which can also be quickly converted to other representations such as Unicode or ISCII. The service provided here allows one to submit text in any of the scripts and get a web page containing Unicode representation of the text.

Online transliteration service

This service allows one to include Indian language text in any web page by displaying the text in the form of an image. This way, one can display text without the need to install additional software or fonts in the systems. The service allows text to be submitted in transliterated form and the result returned as an image. This service will be useful for those who wish to include Indian language text strings in a web page that is predominantly in English. The line below is an example of how this service works.

The above string (image) is returned when the submitted URL is
http://acharya.iitm.ac.in/ol_serv/webimg.php?lang=SAN&content=bhAratam
Tutorials Useful tutorials have been included at this site. As mentioned earlier in the page, the tutorials have been prepared to provide the details required to understand the writing systems used in India as well as the concepts in Braille. The computer science related tutorials relate to the operation of the 8086 CPU as well as the concepts in Virtual memory. Basic information relating to the tutorials is available in the linked page.

Linguistic references

The pages relating to Linguistics provide information on linguistic corpora that have been generated for analysis. Useful information is also included on word structures that exhibit amazing geometrical patterns of akshara symmetry including very long palindromes!

The pages on "Computing With Tamil" contain useful information on aspects of Tamil Computing that will be interest to application developers.


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http://acharya.iitm.ac.in/sanskrit/tutor.php