Learn Sanskrit - Section One - Ministry - http://maxpages.com/globalnetwork/Section

NAMASTE
Greetings from Samskritapriyah and the Samskrit Education Society Chennai, India. In these pages you will
find information relating to Sanskrit and also a set of basic lessons to learn the language through self study.
You will be able to read the lessons in Devanagari Script if your Web Browser supports graphics. Please enable
the display of inline graphic images in your browser. We have chosen this method to help the net users see
Devanagari text without having to install any Fonts. The inline images are generated on the fly from special text
files prepared using the Multilingual Software developed at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, at Chennai.
Apart from the lessons, these pages also carry interesting information relating to Sanskrit that is generally not known
outside India.

ABOUT THE LESSONS
The series of twelve lessons is aimed at giving the student a reasonably good introduction to the language. The student
will be able to frame sentences relating to daily activites in life and thus will gain enough confidence to converse in
Sanskrit though with a smaller vocabulary to begin with.
The structure of the lessons is quite different from that of lessons found in conventional Sanskrit primers. It is hoped
that the twelve lessons would provide enough details for the student to understand the basic grammar of Sanskrit
and sentence formation rules.
BACKGROUND REQUIRED FOR FOLLOWING THE LESSONS
The approach taken here does not assume any knowledge of Sanskrit on the part of the student. The student is also
not required to know the Devanagari Script. It is assumed that the student is familiar with the terminology of English
Grammar. Children may also be able to follow the lessons, if parents are able to explain to them the meaning of the
grammatical terms used in the lessons.
The Devnagari text will be shown along with Roman Transliteration using standard diacritical marks to help understand
the pronounciation of the letters and words.
INTERACTION WITH THE SAMSKRIT EDUCATION SOCIETY
If you would like to interact with the Samskritapriyah group either to seek calrifications on the lessons or to address
other issues relating to Sanskrit, you are welcome to send your requests via email to rkk@shiva.iitm.ernet.in.
The software developed at IIT Madras allows email messages to include Devanagari text as a MIME part. If you are
interested in including Sanskrit text in email messages during your interactions, please visit our site at Duke for more
information on how to accomplish the same.
CONTENTS
Why learn or study Sanskrit?
Lessons

TOWARDS GLOBAL HARMONY
The Samskritapriyah group firmly believes in the principle of "Sanatana Dharma", a concept relating to the well being
of all living elements on this earth. The composition in Sanskrit shown below, is a fine example of the expression of
this principle. It is a benediction composed specifically for the occasion of the United Nations Day in 1966, by
His Holiness ChandraSekharendraSaraswati Swami of Kancheepuram in India. It was rendered on that occasion at
the UN by Smt. M.S.Subbulakshmi.

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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 presentted 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, Chennai. IIT Madras, has only made available the web pages as
a courtesey 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 twentyfirst 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
differen states where people, inspite of their differing mother tongue, use it 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
continue to feature a daily Sanskrit service catering to local as well as international news.
The grammar of Sanskrit has attracted scholars world over. It is very precise and uptodate 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 begining, 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 tha 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 builtin scheme for pronounciation, 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 exisitence 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 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 connoisseures 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 refered 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 Nirukta.
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 fiftyone 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 composit.

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List of Lessons

Brief note on the lessons
The first of these Lessons was put on the web on Oct.11, 1997, which was Vijayadasami and probably the most
appropriate day to begin the lessons. Subsequent lessons will be put on these pages at regular intervals, typically
a week to ten days and will give the student enough time to practice a lesson and the associated exercises.
Portions of the lesson will be shown as images on your web browser. Therefore, it will be necessary for you to
enable loading of inline images (gif images). It is possible to download the lessons and study the same off-line.
To be able to read the lessons off-line, you will require the Multilingual Browser developed at IIT Madras.
This software is free and can be downloaded from taylor.mc.duke.edu/~rkk . Please spend some time and
understand the idea behind the IIT Madras software which works for all Indian Languages as well, before
dowloading the version for your computer. It is not clear to us if many would be interested in looking at the
lessons off-line, which requires downloading the IITM software and setting up the same. At this point in time
(October 1997), we request all those who desire to have off-line copies of the lessons to send specific requests
to rkk@shiva.iitm.ernet.in.

Introduction to the Devanagari Script: (Oct.11, 1997)
Lesson 1: (Oct.30, 1997)
Lesson 2: (Nov.14, 1997)
Lesson 3: (Dec.24, 1997)
Lesson 4: (Feb.27,1998)

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The Devanagari Script
Contents
Introduction
Short Vowels
Long Vowels
Support Vowels
Generic form of a Consonant
Gutterals
Palatals
Cerebrals
Dentals
Labials
Semi Vowels, Sibilants etc.
Consonant Vowel combinations
Conjunct characters
Writing methods for Conjuncts
Conjuncts with "ra"
Summary

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Introduction
This prelude begins with an introduction to the Sanskrit letters. The writing system used for Sanskrit is known as Devanagari. Indian languages are phonetic in nature and hence the letters represent unique sounds. In Sanskrit as well as in other Indian languages, proper pronounciation of the words is quite important. Hence it is necessary to learn the sounds associated with the letters of the language.
The word "alphabet" is not usually applied to Sanskrit or other Indian languages. There is a subtle difference between the notion of "alphabet" and the "aksharas" as the letters of Sanskrit are called. We will deal with this separately in one of the lessons.
For many years now, people of the world have learnt the letters of Sanskrit through equivalent Roman transliteration characters which employ special marks (known as diacritics). The diacritics are based on a standardized representation for sounds followed in dictionaries. In India, the National Library at Calcutta has recommended that a single transliteration scheme be used to represent the letters across all the Indian languages. This scheme will be used in the lessons covered in these pages. Students can take advantage of this when it comes to pronouncing the letters and words.
Note on Sound files
For the benefit of the students, we have tried to make available sound files which can be heard on systems supporting sound.
Typically, this means that you should have a sound card or appropriate sound hardware on your computer.
The web browsers are capable of automatically invoking the sound playing programs when you click on the links for sound.
It is possible that your web browser is already configured to correctly identify this program and so you should hear the
sound when you click on the sound links.
However, owing to the variety of sound file formats, it is possible that what you hear is not what was intended to be heard!
Such problems continue to confront us since very few agree on what we would like to call "people's standards"
What we have provided are sound files in the mu-law format consisting of 8Kilobits/sec sampled information in Mono.
This format is properly understood by the Windows95 sendrec32 program. Under Unix, this format should play properly
when the file is just sent to /dev/audio. Please check with your friends who have managed to get this working properly in
case you run into problems. If you do not find any help and you are interested in hearing the sounds and you have the
sound hardware on your system, send a mail to rkk@shiva.iitm.ernet.in. We will try and help you out.

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The vowels
In Sanskrit, the vowels form an independent group from the consonants. There are fifteen vowels which comprise five

Palatals

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short ones, eight long ones and two support vowels. Among these fifteen, only thirteen are in normal use these days.
The vowels are called "swaras" in Sanskrit.
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The vowels

In Sanskrit, the vowels form an independent group from the consonants.
There are fifteen vowels which comprise five short ones, eight long ones
and two support vowels. Among these fifteen, only thirteen are in normal
use these days.

The vowels are called "swaras" in Sanskrit.