Hi Dears, Most of us dont know about the importance and the glorious past of Sanskrit language, even though it is one of the very oldest language(around 4500 years) with a perfect grammar. India was the birth place for the Sanskrit but now the western countries (for eg: NASA) are more interested in learning this ancient and perfect language. How ever the new Government under Narendra Modi has taken measures to give SANSKRIT its old glory and fame once again. Thanks to Mrs.SMRITI IRANI(Hon. HRD Minister) who has given instruction that SANSKRIT must be taught strictly in all the educational institutes in INDIA. ★★★India was the motherland of our race and Sanskrit the mother of Europes languages. India was the mother of our philosophy, of much of our mathematics, of the ideals embodied in Christianity... of self-government and democracy. In many ways, Mother India is the mother of us all.★★★ - Will Durant - American Historian 1885-1981. The earliest known inscriptions in Sanskrit date to the 1st century BCE. They are in the Brahmi script, which was originally used for Prakrit, not Sanskrit. 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. Sanskrit in modern Indian and other Brahmi scripts. May Śiva bless those who take delight in the language of the gods. (Kalidasa) Brahmi evolved into a multiplicity of scripts of theBrahmic family, many of which were used to write Sanskrit. Roughly contemporary with the Brahmi, the Kharosthi script was used in the northwest of the subcontinent. Later (around the 4th to 8th centuries CE) the Gupta script, derived from Brahmi, became prevalent. From ca. the 8th century, the Sharada script evolved out of the Gupta script. The latter was displaced in its turn by Devanagari from ca. the 11/12th century, with intermediary stages such as the Siddham script. In Eastern India, the Bengali script and, later, the Oriya script, were used. In the south where Dravidian languages predominate, scripts used for Sanskrit include Kannada, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam and Grantha. Origin and development Sanskrit is a member of the Indo-Iranian sub-family of the Indo-European family of languages. Its closest ancient relatives are the Iranian languages Avestan (with which it is nearly identical) and Old Persian. In order to explain the common features shared by Sanskrit and other Indo-European languages, many scholars have proposed migration hypotheses asserting that the original speakers of what became Sanskrit arrived in what is now India and Pakistan from the north-west some time during the early second millennium BCE. Evidence for such a theory includes the close relationship of the Indo-Iranian tongues with the Baltic and Slavic languages, vocabulary exchange with the non-Indo-European Uralic languages, and the nature of the attested Indo-European words for flora and fauna. The earliest attested Sanskrit texts are Brahmanical texts of the Rigveda, which date to the mid-to-late second millennium BCE. No written records from such an early period survive, if ever existed. However, scholars are confident that the oral transmission of the texts is reliable: they were ceremonial literature whose correct pronunciation was considered crucial to its religious efficacy. From the Rigveda until the time of Pāṇini (fl. 4th century BCE) the development of the early Vedic language may be observed in other Vedic texts: the Samaveda, Yajurveda, Atharvaveda, Brahmanas, and Upanishads. During this time, the prestige of the language, its use for sacred purposes, and the importance attached to its correct enunciation all served as powerful conservative forces resisting the normal processes of linguistic change. However, there is a clear, five-level linguistic development of Vedic from the Rigveda to the language of the Upanishads and the earliest Sutras (such asBaudhayana). Standardisation by Panini The oldest surviving Sanskrit grammar is Pāṇinis Aṣṭādhyāyī (Eight-Chapter Grammar). It is essentially a prescriptive grammar, i.e., an authority that defines correct Sanskrit, although it contains descriptive parts, mostly to account for some Vedic forms that had become rare in Pāṇinis time. Classical Sanskrit became fixed with the grammar of Panini (roughly 500 BCE), and remains in use as a learned language until the present day. Coexistence with vernacular languages The term Sanskrit was not thought of as a specific language set apart from other languages, but rather as a particularly refined or perfected manner of speaking. Knowledge of Sanskrit was a marker of social class and educational attainment in ancient India and the language was taught mainly to members of the higher castes, through close analysis of Sanskrit grammarians such as Pāṇini and Patanjali, who exhorted that one should speak proper Sanskrit at all times, and at least during ritual. Sanskrit, as the learned language of Ancient India, thus existed alongside the Prakrits (vernaculars), also called Middle Indic dialects, and eventually into the contemporary modern Indo-Aryan languages. However, linguistic change led to an eventual lost of mutual intelligibility. Patronage and use by the upper classes Many of the Sanskrit dramas suggest that it coexisted along with Prakrits, spoken by multilingual speakers with more extensive education. Sanskrit speakers were also almost always multilingual. In the medieval era, Sanskrit continued to be spoken and written, particularly by learned Brahmins for scholarly communication. This was a thin layer of Indian society, but covered a wide geography. Centres like Varanasi, paithan, Pune, and Kanchipuram had a strong presence of teaching and debating institutions, and high classical Sanskrit was maintained until British times. Decline There are a number of sociolinguistic studies of spoken Sanskrit which strongly suggest that oral use of Sanskrit is limited, with its development having ceased sometime in the past. Pollock (2001) says most observers would agree that, in some crucial way, Sanskrit is dead.Pollock has further argued that, while Sanskrit continued to be used in literary cultures in India, Sanskrit was not used to express changing forms of subjectivity and sociality embodied and conceptualised in the modern age. Instead, it was reduced to reinscription and restatements of ideas already explored, and any creativity in Sanskrit was restricted to hymns and verses. He describes it in comparison with the dead language of Latin: Both died slowly, and earliest as a vehicle of literary expression, while much longer retaining significance for learned discourse with its universalist claims. Both were subject to periodic renewals or forced rebirths, sometimes in connection with a politics of translocal aspiration... At the same time... both came to be ever more exclusively associated with narrow forms of religion and priestcraft, despite centuries of a secular aesthetic. Hanneder (2002) and Hatcher (2007) contest Pollocks characterisation, pointing out that modern works continue to be produced in Sanskrit: On a more public level the statement that Sanskrit is a dead language is misleading, for Sanskrit is quite obviously not as dead as other dead languages and the fact that it is spoken, written and read will probably convince most people that it cannot be a dead language in the most common usage of the term. Pollock’s notion of the “death of Sanskrit” remains in this unclear realm between academia and public opinion when he says that “most observers would agree that, in some crucial way, Sanskrit is dead” —Hanneder (2002:294) Hanneder (2009) argues that modern works in Sanskrit are either ignored or their modernity contested. When the British imposed a Western-style education system in India in the nineteenth century, knowledge of Sanskrit and ancient literature continued to flourish as the study of Sanskrit changed from a more traditional style into a form of analytical and comparative scholarship mirroring that of Europe. Public education and popularization Attempts at reviving the Sanskrit language have been undertaken in the Republic of India since its foundation in 1947 (it was included in the 14 original languages of the Eighth Schedule to the Constitution). Organisations like the Samskrta Bharati are conducting Speak Sanskrit workshops to popularise the language. The All-India Sanskrit Festival (since 2002) holds composition contests. The 1991 Indian census reported 49,736 fluent speakers of Sanskrit. All India Radio transmits news bulletins in Sanskrit twice a day across the nation. Besides, Sanskrit learning programmes also feature on the list of most of the AIR broadcasting centres. The Mattur village in central Karnataka claims to have native speakers of Sanskrit among its population. Inhabitants of all castes learn Sanskrit starting in childhood and converse in the language. Even the local Muslims speak and converse in Sanskrit. Historically, the village was given by king Krishnadevaraya of the Vijayanagara Empire to Vedic scholars and their families. People in his kingdom spoke Kannada and Telugu. Another effort concentrates on the preservation of oral transmission of the Vedas. Shri Vedabharathi is one such organisation based out of Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh that has been digitising the Vedas through voice recording the recitations of Vedic Pandits. Samskrita Bharati is an organisation working for Sanskrit revival. It is a tax exempt non-profit organisation with its headquarters in New Delhi, India. The International Centre, “Aksharam,” a complex located in Bangalore, India, is its international centre. It houses a research wing, a library, audio-visual lab, and staff quarters. It also has several state-units spread across the country both in the US and India. The US chapter is a registered nonprofit tax-exempt organisation with its headquarters in San Jose, California. School curricula The CBSE (Central Board of Secondary Education) of India along with several other state education boards have made Sanskrit a third or second language choice(though it is an option for the school to adopt it or not, the other choice being the states own official language) in the schools it governs. In such schools, learning Sanskrit is an option for grades 5 to 8 (Classes V to VIII). This is true of most schools affiliated to the ICSE board too, especially in those states where the official language is Hindi. Sanskrit is also taught in traditional gurukulas throughout India. In the Western countries St. James Junior School in London, England offers Sanskrit as part of the curriculum. In the United States, since September 2009, high school students have been able receive credits (as Independent Study or towards Foreign Language requirements) by studying Sanskrit, as part of the SAFL: Samskritam as a Foreign Language program coordinated by Samskrita Bharati European scholarship in Sanskrit, begun by Heinrich Roth (1620–1668) and Johann Ernst Hanxleden (1681–1731),[42] is regarded as responsible for the discovery of the Indo-European language family by Sir William Jones. This scholarship played an important role in the development of Western philology, or historical linguistics.[43] Sir William Jones, speaking to The Asiatic Society in Calcutta on 2 February 1786, said: The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong, indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists. British attitudes According to Thomas R. Trautmann, after the 18th-century wave of Indomania, i.e. enthusiasm for Indian culture and for Sanskrit, as exemplified in the positions of Orientalist scholars such as Sir William Jones, a certain hostility to Sanskrit and to Indian culture in general began to assert itself in Britain in the early 19th century. The hostility was manifest by a neglect of Sanskrit in British academia, as compared to other European countries, and was part of a general push in favor of the idea that India should be culturally, religiously and linguistically assimilated to Britain as far as possible. Traufmann considers that this British hostility to Sanskrit had two separate and logically opposite sources: one was British Indophobia, which he calls essentially a developmentalist, progressivist, liberal, and non-racial-essentialist critique of Hindu civilisation as an aid for the improvement of India along European lines. The other was race science, which was a theorisation of the English common-sense view that Indians constituted a separate, inferior and unimprovable race. (PLEASE REFER TO THE IMAGES ATTACHED AS REFERENCES TO THE GRAMMATICAL TERMS BELOW) Typology Classical Sanskrit is an inflectional language with subject–object–verb (SOV) word order. Phonology Further information: Śikṣā Classical Sanskrit distinguishes about 36 phonemes. There is, however, some allophony and the writing systems used for Sanskrit generally indicate this, thus distinguishing 48 sounds. The sounds are traditionally listed in the order vowels (Ac), diphthongs (Hal), anusvara and visarga, plosives (Sparśa) andnasals (starting in the back of the mouth and moving forward), and finally the liquids and fricatives, written in IAST as follows: a ā i ī u ū ṛ ṝ ḷ ḹ ; e ai o au ṃ ḥ k kh g gh ṅ; c ch j jh ñ; ṭ ṭh ḍ ḍh ṇ; t th d dh n; p ph b bh m y r l v; ś ṣ s h An alternate traditional ordering is that of the Shiva Sutra of Pāṇini. Vowels The vowels of Classical Sanskrit written in Devanagari, as a syllable-initial letter and as a diacritic mark on the consonant प्(/p/), pronunciation transcribed in IPA, IAST, and approximate equivalent in English:(Please refer the images) The long vowels are pronounced twice as long as their short counterparts. Also, there exists a third, extra-long length for most vowels. This lengthening is called pluti; the lengthened vowels, called pluta, are used in various cases, but particularly in the vocative. The pluti is not accepted by all grammarians. The vowels /e/ and /o/ continue as allophonic variants of Proto-Indo-Iranian /ai/, /au/ and are categorised as diphthongs by Sanskrit grammarians even though they are realised phonetically as simple long vowels. Additional points: • There are some additional signs traditionally listed in tables of the Devanagari script: • The diacritic ं called anusvāra, (IAST: ṃ). It is used both to indicate the nasalisation of the vowel in the syllable [◌̃]and to represent the sound of a syllabic /n/ or /m/; e.g. पं /pəŋ/. • The diacritic ः called visarga, represents /x/ (IAST: ḥ); e.g. पः /pəh/. While pronounced as a fricative, its assimilable into a succeeding stop, • The diacritic ँ called chandrabindu, not traditionally included in Devanagari charts for Sanskrit, is used interchangeably with the anusvāra to indicate nasalisation of the vowel, primarily in Vedic notation; e.g. पँ /pə̃/. • If a lone consonant needs to be written without any following vowel, it is given a halanta/virāma diacritic below (प्). • The vowel /aː/ in Sanskrit is realised as being more central and less back than the closest English approximation, which is /ɑː/. But the grammarians have classified it as a back vowel. • The ancient Sanskrit grammarians classified the vowel system as velars, retroflexes, palatals and plosives rather than as back, central and front vowels. Hence ए and ओ are classified respectively as palato-velar (a+i) and labio-velar (a+u) vowels respectively. But the grammarians have classified them as diphthongs and in prosody, each is given two mātrās. This does not necessarily mean that they are proper diphthongs, but neither excludes the possibility that they could have been proper diphthongs at a very ancient stage. These vowels are pronounced as long /eː/ and /oː/ respectively by learned Sanskrit Brahmans and priests of today. Other than the four diphthongs, Sanskrit usually disallows any other diphthong—vowels in succession, where they occur, are converted to semivowels according to sandhi rules. Consonants IAST and Devanagari notations are given, with approximate IPA values in square brackets(please refer the images) The table below shows the traditional listing of the Sanskrit consonants with the (nearest) equivalents in English (as pronounced in General American and Received Pronunciation or the Indian English pronunciation if specified), French and Spanish. Each consonant shown below is deemed to be followed by the neutral vowel schwa (/ə/), and is named in the table as such. (Please refer the images) Accent Main article: Vedic accent Vedic Sanskrit had pitch accent: Some syllables had a high tone, and the following syllable a falling tone, though through ellipsis a falling tone may occur elsewhere. Classical Sanskrit ... This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it. Phonology and sandhi The Sanskrit vowels are as discussed in the section above. The long syllabic l (ḹ) is not attested, and is only discussed by grammarians for systematic reasons. Its short counterpart ḷ occurs in a single root only, kḷp to order, array. Long syllabic r (ṝ) is also quite marginal, occurring in the genitive plural of r-stems (e.g. mātṛ mother and pitṛ father have gen.pl.mātṝṇām and pitṝṇām). i, u, ṛ, ḷ are vocalic allophones of consonantal y, v, r, l. There are thus only 5 invariably vocalicphonemes, a, ā, ī, ū, ṝ. Visarga ḥ ः is an allophone of r and s, and anusvara ṃ, Devanagari ं of any nasal, both in pausa (i.e., the nasalised vowel). The exact pronunciation of the three sibilants may vary, but they are distinct phonemes. An aspirated voiced sibilant/zʱ/ was inherited by Indo-Aryan from Proto-Indo-Iranian but lost shortly before the time of the Rigveda (aspirated fricatives are exceedingly rare in any language). The retroflex consonants are somewhat marginal phonemes, often being conditioned by their phonetic environment; they do not continue a PIE series and are often ascribed by some linguists to the substratalinfluence of Dravidian[47] or other substrate languages. The nasal [ɲ] is a conditioned allophone of /n/ (/n/ and /ɳ/ are distinct phonemes—aṇu minute, atomic [nom. sg. neutr. of an adjective] is distinctive from anu after, along; phonologically independent /ŋ/ occurs only marginally, e.g. in prāṅ directed forwards/towards [nom. sg. masc. of an adjective]). There are thus 31 consonantal or semi-vocalic phonemes, consisting of four/five kinds of stops realised both with or without aspiration and both voiced and voiceless, three nasals, four semi-vowels or liquids, and four fricatives, written in IAST transliteration as follows: k, kh, g, gh; c, ch, j, jh; ṭ, ṭh, ḍ, ḍh; t, th, d, dh; p, ph, b, bh; m, n, ṇ; y, r, l, v; ś, ṣ, s, h or a total of 36 unique Sanskrit phonemes altogether. The phonological rules which are applied when combining morphemes to a word, and when combining words to a sentence, are collectively called sandhi composition. Texts are written phonetically, with sandhi applied (except for the so-calledpadapāṭha). Compounds Main article: Sanskrit 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. Nominal compounds occur with various structures, however morphologically speaking they are essentially the same. Each noun (or adjective) is in its (weak) stem form, with only the final element receiving case inflection. The four principle categories of nominal compounds are: • Dvandva (co-ordinative) These consist of two or more noun stems, connected in sense with and. Examples are rāma-lakşmaņau—Rama and Lakshmana, rāma-lakşmaņa-bharata-śatrughnāh—Rama, Lakshmana, Bharata and Satrughna, and pāņipādam—limbs, literally hands and feet, from pāņi = hand and pāda = foot. • Tatpuruṣa (determinative) There are many tatpuruṣas; 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; other examples include instrumental relationships (thunderstruck) and locative relationships (towndwelling). • Karmadhāraya (descriptive) A compound where 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. Karmadhārayas are considered by some to be tatpuruṣas. • Bahuvrīhi (possessive/exocentric) Bahuvrīhi compounds refer to a compound noun that refers to a thing which is itself not part of the compound. For example the word bahuvrīhi itself, from bahu = much and vrīhi = rice, denotes a rich person—one who has much rice. Syntax Because of Sanskrits complex declension system the word order is free. In usage, there is a strong tendency toward subject–object–verb (SOV), which was the original system in place in Vedic prose. However, there are exceptions when word pairs cannot be transposed. Popular culture in other languages Recital of Sanskrit shlokas as background chorus in films, television advertisements and as slogans for corporate organisations has become a trend. The opera Satyagraha by Philip Glass uses texts from the Bhagavad Gita, sung in the original Sanskrit. Recently, Sanskrit also made an appearance in Western pop music 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 Madonnas album 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 a Sanskrit prayer from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad in the closing titles of the movie. Composer John Williams featured choirs singing in Sanskrit for Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. The lyrics of The Child In Us by Enigma also contains Sanskrit, Latin and English verses. The Sky1 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 e.g. machine translation, and other areas of natural language processing because of its relatively high regular structure. This is due to Classical Sanskrit being a regularised, prescriptivist form abstracted from the much more complex and richer Vedic Sanskrit. Current usage and study Sanskrit is taught in many South Asia Studies and/or Linguistics departments in Western universities. In addition to this, it is also used during worship in Hindu temples in the West, being the Hindu liturgical language, and Sanskrit revival attempts are underway amongst expatriate Hindu populations. Similarly, Sanskrit study is also popular amongst the many Western practitioners of Yoga, who find the language useful in understanding the Yoga Sutra. vedicsciences.net/articles/sanskrit-nasa.html smritiweb/navin/miscellaneous/what-is-so-scientific-about-sanskrit-seriousquestion en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanskrit_studies en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanskrit
Posted on: Sat, 30 Aug 2014 05:05:18 +0000
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