Sanskrit संस�कृतम� saṃskṛtam
Pronunciation:	[sə̃skɹ̩t̪əm]
Spoken in:	India, Nepal
Total speakers:	49,736 fluent speakers (1991 Indian census)
Language family:	Indo-European  Indo-Iranian   Indo-Aryan    Sanskrit
Writing system:	Devan�garī and several other Br�hmī-based scripts
Official status
Official language in:	India (one of the scheduled languages)
Regulated by:	no official regulation
Language codes
ISO 639-1:	sa
ISO 639-2:	san
ISO 639-3:	san
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Sanskrit (संस�कृता वाक� saṃskṛt� v�k, for short संस�कृतम� saṃskṛtam) is a classical language of South Asia, a liturgical language of Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Jainism, and one of the 23 official languages of India.

Its position in the cultures of South and Southeast Asia is akin to that of Latin and Greek in Europe and it has evolved into, as well as influenced, many modern-day languages of the world. It appears in pre-Classical form as Vedic Sanskrit, with the language of the Rigveda being the oldest and most archaic stage preserved. Dating back to as early as 1500 BCE, Vedic Sanskrit is the earliest attested Indo-Aryan language, and one of the earliest attested members of the Indo-European language family.

The corpus of Sanskrit literature encompasses a rich tradition of poetry and drama as well as scientific, technical, philosophical and religious texts. Today, Sanskrit continues to be widely used as a ceremonial language in Hindu religious rituals in the forms of hymns and mantras. Spoken Sanskrit is still in use in a few traditional institutions in India, and there are some attempts at revival.

The scope of this article is the Classical Sanskrit language as laid out in the grammar of Panini, around the 4th century BCE.

History

Devimahatmya manuscript on palm-leaf, in an early Bhujimol script, Bihar or Nepal, 11th century.

Sanskrit is a member of the Indo-Iranian sub-family of the Indo-European family of languages. It has the characteristic Satem sound changes associated with other members of Indo-Iranian. It has exerted strong influence on the languages of India, in particular on the Indo-Aryan group.^{[citation needed]}

The verbal adjective saṃskṛta- may be translated as "put together, well or completely formed, refined, highly elaborated". It is derived from the root saṃ(s)kar- "to put together, compose, arrange, prepare", Monier Williams, A Sanskrit-English Dictionary, p. 1120 where saṃ- "together" and (s)kar- "do, make". The language referred to as saṃskṛt� v�k "the cultured language" has by definition always been a "high" language, used for religious and learned discourse and contrasted with the languages spoken by the people, pr�kṛta- "natural, artless, normal, ordinary". It is also called deva-bh�ṣ� meaning "divine language". The oldest surviving Sanskrit grammar is P�ṇini\'s Aṣṭ�dhy�yī ("Eight-Chapter Grammar") dating to circa the 4th century BCE. It is essentially a prescriptive grammar, i.e., an authority that defines (rather than describes) correct Sanskrit, although it contains descriptive parts, mostly to account for some Vedic forms that had already passed out of use in P�ṇini\'s time.

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 and the language was taught mainly to members of the higher castes, through close analysis of Sanskrit grammarians such as P�ṇini. Sanskrit, as the learned language of Ancient India, thus existed alongside the Prakrits (vernaculars), which evolved into the Middle Indic dialects, and eventually into the contemporary modern Indo-Aryan languages.

Vedic Sanskrit

Main article: Vedic Sanskrit

Sanskrit, as defined by P�ṇini, had evolved out of the earlier "Vedic" form. Scholars often distinguish Vedic Sanskrit and Classical or "Paninian" Sanskrit as separate \'dialects\'. Though they are quite similar, they differ in a number of essential points of phonology, vocabulary, and grammar and syntax that make the understanding of Vedic difficult. Classical Sanskrit is considered to have descended from Vedic Sanskrit. Vedic Sanskrit is the language of the Vedas, a large collection of hymns, incantations (Samhitas), \'theological\' discussions, and religio-philosophical discussions (Brahmanas, Upanishads) which are the earliest religious texts of the Hindu religion. Modern linguists consider the metrical hymns of the Rigveda Samhita to be the earliest, composed by many authors over centuries of oral tradition. The end of the Vedic period is marked by the composition of the Upanishads, which form the concluding part of the Vedic corpus in the traditional compilations. The current hypothesis holds that the Vedic form of Sanskrit survived until the middle of the first millennium BCE.^{[citation needed]} It is around this time that Sanskrit began the transition from a first language to a second language of religion and learning, marking the beginning of the Classical period.

Classical Sanskrit

A significant form of post-Vedic Sanskrit is found in the Sanskrit of the Hindu Epics—the Ramayana and Mahabharata. The deviations from P�ṇini in the epics are generally considered to be on account of interference from Prakrits, or "innovations"Oberlies, "A Grammar of Epic Sanskrit", p.XXIX. and not because they are pre-Paninean. Traditional Sanskrit scholars call such deviations aarsha (आर�ष), or "of the rishis", the traditional title for the ancient authors. In some contexts there are also more "prakritisms" (borrowings from common speech) than in Classical Sanskrit proper. Finally, there is also a language called "Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit" by scholars, which starts out from Buddhist prakrit texts and gradually evolved to various forms of Sanskrit, some more prakritized than the others F. Edgerton,Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit grammar and dictionary. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1953, (see also termination of spoken Sanskrit). According to Tiwari ([1955] 2004), there were four principal dialects of classical Sanskrit, viz., paścimottarī (Northwestern, also called Northern or Western), madhyadeśī (lit., middle country), pūrvi (Eastern) and dakṣiṇī (Southern, arose in the Classical period). The predecessors of the first three are even attested in Vedic Br�hmaṇas, of which the first one was regarded as the purest (Kauṣītaki Br�hmaṇa, 7.6).

European Scholarship

European scholarship in Sanskrit, begun by Heinrich Roth (1620–1668) and Johann Ernst Hanxleden (1681–1731), is regarded as responsible for the discovery of the Indo-European language family by Sir William Jones, and played an important role in the development of Western linguistics.

Sir William Jones, speaking to the Asiatic Society in Calcutta (now Kolkata) on February 2, 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.

Phonology

Further information: Śikṣ�

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 (Ach), diphthongs (Hal), anusvara and visarga, plosives (Sparśa) and nasals (starting in the back of the mouth and moving forward), and finally the liquids and fricatives, written in IAST as follows (see the tables below for details):

a � i ī u ū ṛ � ḷ ḹ ; e ai o au

ṃ ḥ

k kh g gh ṅ; c ch j jh ñ; ṭ ṭh � �h ṇ; t th d dh n; p ph b bh m

y r l v; Å› á¹£ s h

An alternate traditional ordering is that of the Shiva Sutra of P�ṇini.

Vowels

See also: R-colored vowel#Vocalic R in Sanskrit

The vowels of Classical Sanskrit with their word-initial Devanagari symbol, diacritical mark with the consonant प� (/p/), pronunciation (of the vowel alone and of /p/+vowel) in IPA, equivalent in IAST and ITRANS and (approximate) equivalents in English are listed below:

The long vowels are pronounced twice as long as their short counterparts. Also, there exists a third, extra-long length for most vowels, called pluti, which is 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 categorized as diphthongs by Sanskrit grammarians even though they are realized phonetically as simple long vowels. (See above).

Additional points:

• There are some additional signs traditionally listed in tables of the Devanagari script:
  • The diacritic ं called anusvÄ�ra, (IAST: ṃ). It is used both to indicate the nasalization 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 /É™h/ (IAST: ḥ); e.g. पः /pÉ™h/.
  • The diacritic à¤� called chandrabindu, not traditionally included in Devanagari charts for Sanskrit, is used interchangeably with the anusvÄ�ra to indicate nasalization of the vowel, primarily in Vedic notation; e.g. पà¤� /pə̃/.
• If a lone consonant needs to be written without any following vowel, it is given a halanta/virÄ�ma diacritic below (पà¥�).
• The vowel /aË�/ in Sanskrit is realized as being more central and less back than the closest English approximation, which is /É‘Ë�/. But the grammarians have classified it as a back vowel. (Tiwari, [1955] 2004).
• The ancient Sanskrit grammarians classified the vowel system as velars, retroflexes, palatals and plosives rather than as back, central and front vowels. Hence à¤� 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 mÄ�trÄ�s. 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 (see above). These vowels are pronounced as long /eË�/ and /oË�/ 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.
• In the Devanagari script used for Sanskrit, whenever a consonant in a word-ending position is without any virÄ�ma (freely standing in the orthography: प as opposed to पà¥�), the neutral vowel schwa (/É™/) is automatically associated with it—this is of course true for the consonant to be in any position in the word. Word-ending schwa is always short. But the IAST a appended to the end of masculine noun words rather confuses the foreigners to pronounce it as /É‘Ë�/—this makes the masculine Sanskrit words sound like feminine! e.g., shiva must be pronounced as /É•ivÉ™/ and not as /É•ivÉ‘Ë�/. Tiwari ([1955] 2004) argues that in Vedic Sanskrit, अ indicated short /É‘/, and became centralized and raised in the era of the Prakrits.

Consonants

IAST and Devanagari notations are given, with approximate IPA values in square brackets.

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) and Spanish. Each consonant shown below is deemed to be followed by the neutral vowel schwa (/É™/), and is named in the table as such.

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 (�) is also quite marginal, occurring in the genitive plural of r-stems (e.g. m�tṛ "mother" and pitṛ "father" have gen.pl. m�t�ṇ�m and pit�ṇ�m). i, u, ṛ, ḷ are vocalic allophones of consonantal y, v, r, l. There are thus only 5 invariably vocalic phonemes,

a, �, ī, ū, �.

Visarga ḥ ः is an allophone of r and s, and anusvara ṃ, Devanagari ं of any nasal, both in pausa (ie, the nasalized 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 substratal influence of Dravidian^{[citation needed]} 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 pr�ṅ \'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 realized 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, �, �h; 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 to be 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-called padap�ṭha).

Writing system

Kashmiri Shaivaite manuscript in the Sharada script (c. 17th century)

Sanskrit was spoken in an oral society, and the oral tradition was maintained through the development of early classical Sanskrit literature. Writing was not introduced to India until after Sanskrit had evolved into the Prakrits; when it was written, the choice of writing system was influenced by the regional scripts of the scribes. As such, virtually all of the major writing systems of South Asia have been used for the production of Sanskrit manuscripts. Since the late 19th century, Devanagari has been considered as the de facto writing system for Sanskrit,Sanskrit Grammar, William Dwight Whitney, 1889 quite possibly because of the European practice of printing Sanskrit texts in this script.

Writing came relatively late to India, introduced from the Middle East by traders around the 5th century BCE^{[citation needed]}, according to a hypothesis by Rhys Davids and favored by the Persian administration of Gandhara and Sindh. Even after the introduction of writing, oral tradition and memorization of texts remained a prominent feature of Sanskrit literature. In northern India, there are Brahmi inscriptions dating from the 3rd century BCE onwards, the oldest appearing on the famous Prakrit pillar inscriptions of king Ashoka. The earliest South Indian inscriptions in Tamil Brahmi, written in early Tamil, belong to the same period I. Mahadevan, Early Tamil epigraphy from the earliest times to the sixth century A.D. Chennai/Cambridge 2003.. Roughly contemporary with the Brahmi, the Kharosthi script was used in the northwest of the subcontinent. Later (ca. 4th to 8th centuries AD) 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 in Kannada and Telugu speaking regions, Telugu in Telugu and Tamil speaking regions, Malayalam and Grantha in Tamil speaking regions.

Sanskrit in modern Indian scripts. May Åšiva bless those who take delight in the language of the gods. (Kalidasa)

Romanization

Main article: Devanagari transliteration

Since the late 18th century, Sanskrit has been transliterated using the Latin alphabet. The system most commonly used today is the IAST (International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration), which has been the academic standard since 1888/1912. ASCII-based transliteration schemes have evolved due to difficulties representing Sanskrit characters in computer systems. These include Harvard-Kyoto and ITRANS, a transliteration scheme that is used widely on the Internet, especially in Usenet and in email, for considerations of speed of entry as well as rendering issues. With the wide availability of Unicode aware web browsers, IAST has become common online.

European scholars in the 19th century generally preferred Devanagari for the transcription and reproduction of whole texts and lengthy excerpts. However, references to individual words and names in texts composed in European languages were usually represented with Roman transliteration. From the 20th century onwards, due to production costs, textual editions edited by Western scholars have mostly been in Romanized transliteration.

Grammar

Main article: Sanskrit grammar

Grammatical tradition

Main article: Sanskrit grammarians

This short section requires expansion.

Sanskrit grammatical tradition (vy�karaṇa, one of the six Vedanga disciplines) began in late Vedic India and culminated in the Aṣṭ�dhy�yī of P�ṇini, which consists of 3990 sutras (ca. 5th century BCE). After a century P�ṇini (around 400 BCE) K�ty�yana composed V�rtikas on P�ninian sũtras. Patañjali, who lived three centuries after P�nini, wrote the Mah�bh�ṣya, the "Great Commentary" on the Aṣṭ�dhy�yī and V�rtikas. Because of these three ancient Sanskrit grammarians this grammar is called Trimuni Vy�karana. To understand the meaning of sutras Jayaditya and V�mana wrote the commentry named K�sik� 600 AD. Paninian grammar is based on 14 Shiva sutras (aforism). Here whole M�trika (alphabet) is abbreviated. This abbreviation is called Praty�hara.Kashinath V. Abhyankar, A dictionary of Sanskrit Grammar, Gaekwad\'s Oriental Series, No. 134, Oriental Institute, Baroda, 1986

Verbs

Main article: Sanskrit verbs

Classification of 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 � + V.

Tense systems

The verbs 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)

Present system

The present system includes the present and imperfect tenses, the optative and imperative moods, as well as some of the remnant forms of the old subjunctive. The tense stem of the present system is formed in various ways. The numbers are the native grammarians\' numbers for these classes.

For athematic verbs, the present tense stem may be formed through

• 2) No modification at all, for example ad from ad \'eat\'.
• 3) Reduplication prefixed to the root, for example juhu from hu \'sacrifice\'.
• 7) Infixion of na or n before the final root consonant (with appropriate sandhi changes), for example rundh or ruṇadh from rudh \'obstruct\'.
• 5) Suffixation of nu (guṇa form no), for example sunu from su \'press out\'.
• 8) Suffixation of u (guṇa form o), for example tanu from tan \'stretch\'. For modern linguistic purposes it is better treated as a subclass of the 5th. tanu derives from tnnu, which is zero-grade for *tannu, because in the Proto-Indo-European language [m] and [n] could be vowels, which in Sanskrit (and Greek) change to [a]. Most members of the 8th class arose this way; kar = "make", "do" was 5th class in Vedic (krnoti = "he makes"), but shifted to the 8th class in Classical Sanskrit (karoti = "he makes")
• 9) Suffixation of nÄ� (zero-grade nÄ« or n), for example krīṇa or krīṇī from krÄ« \'buy\'.

For thematic verbs, the present tense stem may be formed through

• 1) Suffixation of the thematic vowel a with guṇa strengthening, for example, bháva from bhÅ« \'be\'.
• 6) Suffixation of the thematic vowel a with a shift of accent to this vowel, for example tudá from tud \'thrust\'.
• 4) Suffixation of ya, for example dÄ«Ì�vya from div \'play\'.

The tenth class described by native grammarians refers to a process which is derivational in nature, and thus not a true tense-stem formation. It is formed by suffixation of ya with guṇa strengthening and lengthening of the root\'s last vowel, for example bh�vaya from bhū \'be\'.

Perfect system

The perfect system includes only the perfect tense. The stem is formed with reduplication as with the present system.

The perfect system also produces separate "strong" and "weak" forms of the verb — the strong form is used with the singular active, and the weak form with the rest.

Aorist system

The aorist system includes aorist proper (with past indicative meaning, e.g. abhūḥ "you were") and some of the forms of the ancient injunctive (used almost exclusively with m� in prohibitions, e.g. m� bhūḥ "don\'t be"). The principal distinction of the two is presence/absence of an augment – a- prefixed to the stem.

The aorist system stem actually has three different formations: the simple aorist, the reduplica