Sanskrit (संस्कृतम् in Devanāgarī) is perhaps the oldest attested member of the Indo-European language family, and an official language of India. Seen by many as the Asian equivalent of Latin, its vast religious and literary tradition is most famously seen in its Hindu or Vedic traditions.
The first Sanskrit text available is from the early canon of Hinduism from Vedic culture, the Vedas. Far more Sanskrit texts are preserved than those in Latin and Greek combined.
Vedic is named for the Vedas the earliest sacred texts of India and the base of the Hindu religion, which were composed in Vedic. The earliest of the Vedas, the Rîgveda, was composed in the middle of the second millennium BC. The Vedic form survived until the middle of the first millennium BC. It is around this time that Sanskrit made the transition from a first language to a second language of religion and learning, marking the beginning of the Classical period. A form of Sanskrit called Epic Sanskrit is seen in the Mahabharata and other Hindu epics. This includes more "prakritisms" (borrowings from common speech) than Classical Sanskrit proper. There is also a language dubbed "Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit" by scholars, which is actually a prakrit ornamented with Sanskritized elements, perhaps for purposes of ostentation.
There is a strong genetic relationship between the various forms of Sanskrit and the Middle Indo-Aryan "Prakrits", or vernacular languages, (in which, among other things, most early Buddhist texts are written) and the modern Indic languages. The Prakrits are probably descended from Vedic or something like it, and there is mutual interchange between later forms of Sanskrit and various Prakrits. There has also been much reciprocal influence between Sanskrit and the Dravidian languages.
The Vedic form of Sanksrit is a close descendant of Proto-Indo-European, the theorized root of all later Indo-European languages. Vedic Sanskrit is the oldest member of the Indo-Aryan sub-branch of the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European family. It is very closely related to Avestan, the language of Zoroastrianism. The genetic relationship of Sanskrit to modern European languages and classical Greek and Latin can be seen in cognates like mother and matr or father and pitr. Other interesting links are to be found between Sanskritic roots and Persian (the language of modern-day Iran), present in such a striking example as the generic term for 'land' which in Sanskrit is sthaan and in Persian staan.
European scholarship in Sanskrit, initiated by Heinrich Roth and Johann Ernest Hanxleden, led to the proposal of the Indo-European language family by Sir William Jones, and thus played an important role in the development of Western linguistics. Indeed, linguistics (along with phonology, etc.) first arose among Indian grammarians who were attempting to catalog and codify Sanskrit's rules. Modern linguistics owes a great deal to these grammarians, and to this day, key terms for compound analysis are taken from Sanksrit. The oldest surviving Sanskrit grammar is Pạ̄nini;'s c. 500 BC Ạṣtādhyāyī ("8 Chapter Grammar").
Sanskrit has 48 phonemes (Vedic Sanskrit has 49). The Sanskrit syllabary serves as a model for most Indian language writing systems except Urdu and those of the southern base, like Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam. For the ingenious phonetic classification scheme of these writing systems see Indian language.
The sounds are described here in their traditional order: vowels, stopss and nasalss (starting in the back of the mouth and moving forward), and finally the liquidss and sibilants.
(Note: The long vowels are held about twice as long as their short counterparts. Also, there exists a third, extra-long length for most vowels, which is used in various cases, but particularly when recording a shout, or a greeting.)
It also has four semivowels: y, r, l, v. All of these but r have nasalized forms. Sanskrit also has palatal, retroflex, and alveolar sibilants. Rounding out the consonants are the voiced and voiceless h (the voiceless h, called the visarga, tends to repeat the preceding vowel after itself) and the anusvaara, which often appears as nasalization of the preceding vowel or as a nasal homorganic to the following consonant.
Vedic Sanskrit had a pitch or tonal accent, but it was lost by the Classical period. Vedic Sanskrit also had labial and velar fricatives and a retroflex L.
Sanskrit has an elaborate set of phonological rules called sandhi and samaas which are expressed in its writing (except in so-called pada texts). Sandhi reflects the sort of blurring that occurs in combining sounds, particularly at word-boundaries; this occurs in spoken language generally, but is explicitly codified in Sanskrit. A simple example of English sandhi is "an apple" versus "a clock".
Sandhi can make Sanskrit difficult for the inexperienced reader. It also creates ambiguities which clever writers have exploited to perform such feats as writing poems which can be interpreted in multiple, conflicting ways depending on how the reader chooses to break apart the sandhi.
Sanskrit historically has had no single script associated with it. For instance, the ancient Brahmi characters were used by Ashoka for his pillar inscriptions. Later, Grantha was used, as were other scripts such as Kannada in the South, and Bengali and other North Indian scripts in other regions. However, over many years, and especially recently, the syllabicDevanagari (meaning "as used in the city of the Gods") script has become the most widely used and associated with Sanskrit. Occasionally, in regions of India where Devnagari is not the script of the vernacular (as it is with Hindi or Marathi) one will find texts still written in the local script, such as Grantha in the South or Bengali in the East.
Writing was introduced relatively late to India, and it did not immediately become important since oral learning was the primary means of transmitting knowledge. Rhys Davids suggests that writing may have been introduced from the Middle East by traders, but Sanskrit, which had been used exclusively in sacred contexts, remained a purely oral language until well into India's classical age. It is interesting to note the importance that Sanskrit orthography and Vedic philosophy of sound play in Hindu symbolism, as the varnamala, or sound-garland/alphabet, of 51 letters is also seen to be represented by the 51 skulls of Kali. In the Upanishads, the transcendent-immanent nature of Brahman is represented by the half-matra, or sphota of sound that is inherent to a beat of sound in the Sanskrit system, as one cannot conceptualize it but realizes it is the inherent base of all else.
There are many transliteration schemes for writing Sanskrit using Latin script. Most commonly used are IAST (International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration), which is the academic standard and includes diacritical marks. Other transcription schemes have evolved due to difficulties representing Sanskrit characters in computer systems. These include Harvard-Kyoto that was used earlier, and ITRANS, a lossless transliteration scheme that is used widely on the Internet (especially Usenet).
For scholarly work, Devanagari has generally been preferred for the transcription and reproduction of whole texts and lengthy excerpts; however, references to individual words and names in texts composed in European languages are usually represented using Roman transliteration.
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 well-behaved. Exponents utilized in verb conjugation include prefixes, suffixes, infixes, and reduplication. Also extremely common is vowel gradation; every root has (not necessarily all distinct) zero, guna, and vrdhii grades. If V is the vowel of the zero grade, the guna grade vowel is traditionally thought of a V + a, and the vrdhii grade vowel as V + aa.
Bahuvrihi, or much-rice, denotes a rich person--one who has much rice. Bahuvrihi compounds refer to a thing which is not specified in any of the parts of which the compound is formed. A block-head, for example, is someone whose head is said to be as thick as a block.
2.Karmadhariya
A compound in which all of the words specify that to which the compound refers. A houseboat, for example, is both a house and a boat.
3.Tatpurusha
There are many tatpurushas (one for each of the nominal cases, and a few others besides); in a tatpurusha, one component is related to another. For example, a doghouse is a dative compound, a house for a dog. It would be called a "caturtitatpurusha" (caturti refers to the fourth case--that is, the dative). Incidentally, "tatpurusha" is a tatpurusha ("this man"--meaning someone's agent), while "caturtitatpurusha" is a karmadhariya, being both dative, and a tatpurusha.
Sanskrit words are found in many other present-day non-Indian languages. For instance, the Thai language contains many loan words from Sanskrit, and ranged as far as the Philippines viz. Tagalog 'guru', or 'teacher', with the Hindu seafarers who traded there.
Sanskrit and related languages have also influenced their Sino-Tibetan-speaking neighbors to the north through the spread of Buddhist texts in translation. Buddhism was spread to Source | Copyright
