December 19, 2006
The semester is over and I haven't written about my Sanskrit class since September. Obviously, I've missed a few days of class in the last month, but not as many as you might believe, especially since much of my recovery was over the Thanksgiving break. So, what do I think of Sanskrit? I love it and find it fascinating. Most fascinating is the seemingly disparate script.
In the beginning of the class, we learned some particular characters that represented vowels, then some more for consonants, even some diacritical marks to form consonant-vowel combinations. But then, there was a wrinkle: consonants clustered together and formed some strange characters that tended to crush together in the space usually reserved for one character. Sometimes they squeezed next to each other; sometimes they stacked; sometimes they had a half form, different form, sideways form, or a completely new character (called a ligature). For example, the "ka" used roughly the same space as "kka", "ddhya", or "svbhri". But, the complexity was just beginning.
Sanskrit nouns decline. Not "decline" in the usually sense, but rather, linguistically, the words have declination, that is they are spelled differently depending on their number (singular, dual and plural) and usage in a particular sentence, or parts of speech, of which there are eight. Not to mention all nouns are one of three genders. Further, under certain, and common, cases entire words combine, in what is called external sandhi. Sandhi makes the sounds of the words flow into each other to make them more pronounceable, or poetic, even. (English has a rule that is very simlar to sandhi: a demonstrative "a" becomes an "an" before a word with a vowel sound. i.e. a tree / an apple.) Even a whole sentence may be written as a breathtaking collision of clustered sounds--an alphabetic train wreck. Added to this, there is no fixed word order, verbs can be dropped and tense can change often and abruptly. Disentangling individual words in a sentence, removing sandhi, and decrypting their parts of speech and meaning, can be quite a puzzle.
Thankfully, I love puzzles, but since you may not, I won't go on about the stunning complexities of Sanskrit grammar. The take-home final exam was to translate a 19-line story--a sort of Aesop's fable about a mouse that transformed into a tiger.
And, as if I even need to say: I'm taking Sanskrit 2 next semester.
