A Practical Sanskrit Introductory

Description

This course of fteen lessons is intended to lift the Englishsp eaking student whoknows nothing of Sanskrit to the level where he can intelligently apply MonierWilliams dictionary and the DhatuPat ha to the study of the scripturesThe rst ve lessons cover the pronunciation of the basic Sanskrit alphab ettogether with its written form in b oth Devanagar and transliterated Romanash cards are included as an aid The notes on pronunciation are largelydescriptive based on mouth p osition and e ort with similar English ReceivedPronunciation sounds o ered where p ossible The next four lessons describ evowel emb ellishments to the consonants the principles of conjunct consonantsand additions to and variations in the Devanagar alphab et Lessons ten andeleven present sandhi in grid form and explain their principles in sound Thenext three lessons p enetrate MonierWilliams dictionary through its four levelsof alphab etical order and suggest strategies for nding dicult words Thelast lesson shows the extraction of the artha from the DhatuPat ha and theapplication of this and the dictionary to the study of the scripturesIn addition to the primary course the rst eleven lessons include a B sectionwhich intro duces the student to the principles of sentence structure in this fullyin ected language Six declension paradigms and class conjugation in thepresent tense are used with a minimal vo cabulary of nineteen words In the Bpart of lessons ten and eleven the principles of comp ound words are intro ducedThe course aims at a practical understanding of the basic principles at gettinga feel for the language and not a learning of rules by rote To this end eachlesson concludes with exercises for the student to put that understanding intopractice answers to the exercises are presented in an app endix