Features of Sanskrit

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  1. Sanskrit has no script of its own and is written today in many Indian scripts like Devanagari, Kannada, Telugu, etc.
  2. Devanagari is the most widely used script to write Sanskrit.
  3. Indian language alphabets have no case.
  4. Unlike English, there is no concept of spelling in Indian languages.
  5. Sanskrit alphabet is arranged first into vowels, and then into Consonants.
  6. Anuswara and Visarga come at the end of the vowels.
  7. The arrangement of vowels and consonants is classified based on how and where the letters are pronounced in the mouth.
  8. All Indian languages inherit these major features of Sanskrit alphabet system of classification of vowels and consonants.
  9. From the next lesson, we will start leaning simple Sanskrit sentences and start conversing in Sanskrit.
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  1. In Sanskrit you cannot simply given an arbitrary name to a thing.
  2. In Sanskrit things and objects do not have names, it is the properties which have names.
  3. In Sanskrit you name things by referring to their different properties, and hence the same object, person, place, etc can have various different names each referring to a property or an attribute of that object, person, place etc.
  4. In Sanskrit you don’t need loan words, because as we come across new knowledge, new things etc we can simply refer to them based on their attributes and properties.
  5. You can always create as many new names as you want in Sanskrit as long as they refer to the correct property names.
  6. Sanskrit is context sensitive in meaning of its words and sentences because the same property can refer to different things, objects, persons, places etc in different contexts.
  7. In Sanskrit you can create great sentences which reveal multiple information in a single sentence or even in a single word. In other words, entirely different information can overlap within a single word or sentence in Sanskrit. The possibilities for composers, writers, poets to be creative in their composition, writings and poems, to encode secretive information in an ordinary looking sentence are all immense. Sky is the limit for Sanskrit authors.
  8. And we have only touched the tip of the iceberg, more lessons to follow…
  9. Sanskrit is not a mere language, it is a science in itself and an ocean of knowledge. Samskrit itself refers to an attribute which means the one that has been thoroughly refined.
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  1. In Sanskrit, attributes and properties have names, and all the names in Sanskrit are derived from a fixed set of 2012 root words called Dhatu.
  2. Dhatu, not the Parts of Speech, forms the basic building block of Sanskrit.
  3. The process of deriving names is in built in Sanskrit Grammar, because of which Sanskrit never requires any loan words from other languages. If there is a new invention, a new object or a new information discovered, Sanskrit grammar can be used to easily create one or more new words to represent it. We saw an example of representing download and upload in our First Sanskrit Lesson.
  4. Since the Dhatus have meanings attributed to them, and since there is a predefined process of deriving names in Sanskrit, all names in Sanskrit have meaning inherent in the name itself unlike in other languages. For example in English the word Quiz means nothing without a dictionary, or the word Magma means nothing without a dictionary. However in Sanskrit, every word means something on its own, without referring to an particular object or class. In other words, all Sanskrit names state facts – describe the nature and attributes of the thing they represent.
  5. Since Sanskrit is an extremely well structured language with no ambiguity in its grammar , Sanskrit Sentences can easily be used in computational language unlike other natural languages whose sentences are ambiguous and whose grammar is extremely complex making it difficult to write compilers which can understand English sentences. For instance, if Sanskrit was used as a language for database queries, you wouldn’t have needed SQL, because queries in Sanskrit are as structured as SQL.
  6. Dhatu words have meanings over a vast range covering all possible basic meanings representing all human knowledge and actions. Words are derived from one or more Dhatus using a set of grammar rules to represent compound properties and attributes like we saw for “moving in sky”, “born in water” and so on. These attributes are then used to represent objects which have the properties matching these attributes, as we saw for Birds, Lotus, etc.
  7. So Sanskrit language words are an encyclopedia in itself, with each name describing one or more properties of what it represents.
  8. More in next lesson. Questions, corrections, criticism is welcome. Please do not forget to share this lesson. Knowledge and Happiness grows by sharing.
 
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