Week 02, 2023
16 Jan 2023 My notes for this week are linked here.Summary
This week, I read the first three chapters of the Cambridge book and did a lot of transliteration! I also got introduced to verbs in Sanskrit.
Thoughts
My expectation when I decided I’d learn Sanskrit was that it would take me many months to see Sanskrit, but I was wrong. What I mean by seeing here is the ability to not just read the Sanskrit script but workout meanings of sentences. I was biased by my experience with learning Hindi in school: we did basic words and small sentences for nearly a couple of years because I was in elementary school then! Things are different when you learn a language as an adult. Unlike my meager attempts at French and German (and Latin!) on Duolingo, this time, I have solid footing and groundwork being laid through grammar. And, unlike my attempts to strengthen my Tamil through reading stories, I am starting with the basics, with plenty of exercises along the way to actually gauge some progress. My takeaway so far: learning through a textbook gives you an incredible amount of confidence very early!
Progress
We had two lecture and two homeworks this week in the course. Both homeworks were almost exclusively on transliteration, I think the logic is that we’ll get used to the script this way. Frankly, it helps. I don’t think as much when reading anymore, except when there are many conjunct-consonants, which are still a bit tricky. We even had a quiz! It was fun to see words like सरस्वती and हनुमान् in an actual academic exam. I’m quite impressed by how much everyone has learnt already!
Once we had a grip on the script, we moved onto reading a few longer sentences. The textbook has sentences without sandhi for now, which means we don’t have too many complex words to breakdown. We read the Mahabharata excerpt (1.56.34) यदिहास्ति तदन्यत्र यन्नेहास्ति न तत्क्वचित् in the non-sandhi version, and I felt quite pleased.
At home, I read a bit ahead to look into verbs and their conjugation, thinking it would keep me ahead of the class for at least a week. However, I had severely underestimated the pace of the class. What I thought would come after many more classes ended up being topics in the very next lecture!
As we did the grammar, I felt transported back to my school days when I learnt English grammar with a lot of enthusiasm. I hadn’t heard some of the grammar terms in many years, and there were even quite a bunch of new terms (see question 2 below). My peers in the class with a background in languages (particularly those learning Latin or Greek) had a lot of insights to offer, and it was fascinating to see their perspectives.
We learnt that there are finite verbs and non-finite verbs and the difference is that the finite verbs conjugate or change their form based on many factors but non-finite verbs don’t. The five main categories for which Sanskrit verbs are conjugated are Number, Person, Tense, Mood and Voice. Sanskrit has:
- three numbers: Singular, Dual and Plural
- three persons: First, Second and Third
- many tenses: a few flavors of Past, Present and Future. Continuous tenses are absent (like in French).
- three moods (see question 1 below): Indicative, Potential and Imperative
- three voices: Active, Middle and Passive
There are verb roots in Sanskrit, which are classified into ten classes, depending on how the roots form stems. Then, different endings and affixes are added to the stem to create the various verb forms. The meaning of the verb boils down to the root form, and hence dictionaries list only the root forms of the verbs and the class it belongs to. For starters, we learnt the 9 combinations of Number and Person for the Present Indicative Active form of verbs.
After all of this background and from knowing the various forms of the Present Indicative Active, I got a small taste of just how much information can be packed into just a few words. This makes Sanskrit quite efficient! What I’m excited by is eventually gaining enough understanding of Sanskrit to read Sanskrit poetry and marvel at the work of geniiuses from around 3000 years ago!
The Cambridge textbook has plenty of vocabulary to learn along the way, and hence, I will keep track of them in my PDF notes linked above.
Questions
These are some of the questions I had this week:
1. How many moods does Sanskrit have?
The Cambridge textbook only mentioned the three moods listed above, but the learnsanskrit.org page on verbs linked here mentions that there are ten combinations of Tense and Mood.
2. What are some examples of non-finite verbs?
The section on finite verbs vs non-finite verbs in the Cambridge textbook was confusing (with just pointers to future chapters). I’m also lost in the terminology of some of these grammar concepts, so I think I’ll answer this question in depth at a later point. Some terms to look out for: participles, gerundive, absolutive, and infinitive.
3. What’s the difference between the virāma in Sanskrit and the halant in Hindi?
Nothing, they are the same. In fact, they are the same as the dot above letters in Tamil (called pulli ). This Wikipedia page has the list of synomyms of the virāma.