Sanskrit Totally Explained

Everything about Sanskrit Language totally explained

It has been described as a "paradox" that the first evidence of written Sanskrit occurs centuries later than that of the Prakrit languages which are its linguistic descendants. When Sanskrit was written down, it was first used for texts of an administrative, literary or scientific nature. The sacred texts were preserved orally, and were set down in writing, "reluctantly" (according to one commentator), and at a comparatively late date.

Verbs

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 regular. Exponents used in verb conjugation include prefixes, suffixes, infixes, and reduplication. Every root has (not necessarily all distinct) zero, guṇa, and vṛddhi grades. If V is the vowel of the zero grade, the guṇa-grade vowel is traditionally thought of as a + V, and the vṛddhi-grade vowel as ā + V.
The verb tenses (a very inexact application of the word, since more distinctions than simply tense are expressed) are organized into four 'systems' (as well as gerunds and infinitives, and such creatures as intensives/frequentatives, desideratives, causatives, and benedictives derived from more basic forms) based on the different stem forms (derived from verbal roots) used in conjugation. There are four tense systems:

Present (Present, Imperfect, Imperative, Optative)

Perfect

Aorist

Future (Future, Conditional)

Nouns

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.
The number of actual declensions is debatable. Panini identifies six karakas corresponding to the nominative, accusative, dative, instrumental, locative, and ablative cases (External Link

). Panini defines them as follows (Ashtadhyayi, I.4.24-54):

Apadana (lit. 'take off'): "(that which is) firm when departure (takes place)." This is the equivalent of the ablative case, which signifies a stationary object from which movement proceeds.

Sampradana ('bestowal'): "he whom one aims at with the object". This is equivalent to the dative case, which signifies a recipient in an act of giving or similar acts.

Karana ("instrument") "that which effects most." This is equivalent to the instrumental case.

Adhikarana ('location'): or "substratum." This is equivalent to the locative case.

Karman ('deed'/'object'): "what the agent seeks most to attain". This is equivalent to the accusative case.

Karta ('agent'): "he/that which is independent in action". This is equivalent to the nominative case. (On the basis of Scharfe, 1977: 94)

Personal Pronouns and Determiners

The first and second person pronouns are declined for the most part alike, having by analogy assimilated themselves with one another.

Compounds

One other notable feature of the nominal system is the very common use of nominal compounds, which may be huge (10+ words) as in some modern languages such as German and Finnish. Both, along with Sanskrit, belong to the Agglutinative languages. Nominal compounds occur with various structures, however morphologically speaking they're essentially the same. Each noun (or adjective) is in its (weak) stem form, with only the final element receiving case inflection. Some examples of nominal compounds include:

Dvandva (co-ordinative) ť These consist of two or more noun stems, connected in sense with 'and'. There are mainly two kinds of dvandva constructions in Sanskrit. The first is called itaretara dvandva, an enumerative compound word, the meaning of which refers to all its constituent members. The resultant compound word is in the dual or plural number and takes the gender of the final member in the compound construction. for example rāma-lakşmaņau – Rama and Lakshmana, or rāma-lakşmaņa-bharata-śatrughnāh – Rama, Lakshmana, Bharata and Satrughna. The second kind is called samāhāra dvandva, a collective compound word, the meaning of which refers to the collection of its constituent members. The resultant compound word is in the singular number and is always neuter in gender. for example pāņipādam – limbs, literally hands and feet, from pāņi = hand and pāda = foot. According to some grammarians, there's a third kind of dvandva, called ekaśeşa dvandva or residual compound, which takes the dual (or plural) form of only its final constituent member, for example pitarau for mātā + pitā, mother + father, for example parents. According to other grammarians, however, the ekaśeşa isn't properly a compound at all.

; Bahuvrīhi (possessive) ť Bahuvrīhi, or "much-rice", denotes a rich person—one who has much rice. Bahuvrīhi compounds refer (by example) to a compound noun with no head -- a compound noun that refers to a thing which is itself not part of the compound. For example, "low-life" and "block-head" are bahuvrihi compounds, since a low-life isn't a kind of life, and a block-head isn't a kind of head. (And a much-rice isn't a kind of rice.) Compare with more common, headed, compound nouns like "fly-ball" (a kind of ball) or "alley cat" (a kind of cat). Bahurvrīhis can often be translated by "possessing..." or "-ed"; for example, "possessing much rice", or "much riced".

Tatpuruṣa (determinative) ť There are many tatpuruṣas (one for each of the nominal cases, and a few others besides); in a tatpuruṣa, the first component is in a case relationship with another. For example, a doghouse is a dative compound, a house for a dog. It would be called a "caturtitatpuruṣa" (caturti refers to the fourth case—that is, the dative). Incidentally, "tatpuruṣa" is a tatpuruṣa ("this man"—meaning someone's agent), while "caturtitatpuruṣa" is a karmadhārya, being both dative, and a tatpuruṣa. An easy way to understand it's to look at English examples of tatpuruṣas: "battlefield", where there's a genitive relationship between "field" and "battle", "a field of battle"; other examples include instrumental relationships ("thunderstruck") and locative relationships ("towndwelling").

; Karmadhāraya (descriptive) ť The relation of the first member to the last is appositional, attributive or adverbial, e. g. uluka-yatu (owl+demon) is a demon in the shape of an owl.

Amreḍita (iterative) ť Repetition of a word expresses repetitiveness, e. g. dive-dive 'day by day', 'daily'.

;Dvigu

Syntax

Because of Sanskrit's complex declension system the word order is free (with a strong tendency toward SOV, which was the original system in place in Vedic prose).

Numerals

The numbers from one to ten:

The numbers one through four are declined. Éka is declined like a pronominal adjective, though the dual form doesn't occur. Dvá appears only in the dual. Trí and catúr are declined irregularly:

	Three			Four
	Masculine	Neuter	Feminine	Masculine	Neuter	Feminine
Nominative	tráyas	trī́ṇi	tisrás	catvā́ras	catvā́ri	cátasras
Accusative	trīn	trī́ṇi	tisrás	catúras	catvā́ri	cátasras
Instrumental	tribhís		tisṛ́bhis	catúrbhis		catasṛ́bhis
Dative	tribhyás		tisṛ́bhyas	catúrbhyas		catasṛ́bhyas
Ablative	tribhyás		tisṛ́bhyas	catúrbhyas		catasṛ́bhyas
Genitive	triyāṇā́m		tisṛṇā́m	caturṇā́m		catasṛṇā́m
Locative	triṣú		tisṛ́ṣu	catúrṣu		catasṛ́ṣu

Influence

Modern-day India

Influence on vernaculars

Sanskrit's greatest influence, presumably, is that which it exerted on languages of India that grew from its vocabulary and grammatical base; for instance Hindi, which is a "Sanskritized register" of the Khariboli dialect. However, all modern Indo-Aryan languages as well as Munda and Dravidian languages, have borrowed many words either directly from Sanskrit (tatsama words), or indirectly via middle Indo-Aryan languages (tadbhava words). Words originating in Sanskrit are estimated to constitute roughly fifty percent of the vocabulary of modern Indo-Aryan languages, and the literary forms of (non-Indo Aryan) Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada. Buddhism was spread to China by Mahayanist missionaries mostly through translations of Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit and Classical Sanskrit texts, and many terms were transliterated directly and added to the Chinese vocabulary. (Although Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit isn't Sanskrit, properly speaking, its vocabulary is substantially the same, both because of genetic relationship, and because of conscious imitation on the part of composers. Buddhist texts composed in Sanskrit proper were primarily found in philosophical schools like the Madhyamaka.) The situation in Tibet is similar; many Sanskrit texts survive only in Tibetan translation (in the Tanjur).
The Thai language contains many loan words from Sanskrit. For example, in Thai, the Rāvana – the emperor of Sri Lanka is called 'Thoskanth' which is a derivation of his Sanskrit name 'Dashakanth' ("of ten necks"). Many Sanskrit loanwords are also found in traditional Malay and Modern Indonesian, Old Javanese language (nearly half)) and to a lesser extent, Vietnamese, through Sinified hybrid Sanskrit.

Sanskrit's usage in modern times

Many of India's and Nepal's scientific and administrative terms are named in Sanskrit, as a counterpart of the western practice of naming scientific developments in Latin or Greek. The Indian guided missile program that was commenced in 1983 by DRDO has named the five missiles (ballistic and others) that it has developed as Prithvi, Agni, Akash, Nag and Trishul. India's first modern fighter aircraft is named HAL Tejas.
   Recital of Sanskrit shlokas as background chorus in films, television advertisements and as slogans for corporate organizations has become a trend.
   Recently, Sanskrit has also made an appearance in Western pop music in recent years, in two recordings by Madonna. One, "Shanti/Ashtangi," from the 1998 album "Ray of Light," is the traditional Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga chant referenced above set to music. The second, "Cyber-raga," released in 2000 as a B-side to Madonna's single "Music," is a Sanskrit-language ode of devotion to a higher power and a wish for peace on earth. The climactic battle theme of The Matrix Revolutions features a choir singing Sanskrit prayer (the Gayatri Mantra)in the closing titles of the movie. Composer John Williams also featured a choir singing in Sanskrit for .
   The Sky One version of the title sequence in season one of Battlestar Galactica 2004 features the Gayatri Mantra, taken from the Rig Veda (3.62.10). The composition was written by miniseries composer Richard Gibbs.

Computational linguistics

There have been suggestions to use Sanskrit as a metalanguage for knowledge representation in for example machine translation, and other areas of natural language processing because of its relatively high regular structure. This is due to Classical Sanskrit being a regularized, prescriptivist form abstracted from the much more complex and richer Vedic Sanskrit. This leveling of the grammar of Classical Sanskrit began during the Brahmana phase, and hadn't yet completed by the time of Panini, when the language had fallen out of popular use.

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