Introduction-
Sanskrit is the primary sacred language of Hinduism and has been used as a philosophical language in the religions of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. Sanskrit is a standardized dialect of Old Indo-Aryan, originating as Vedic Sanskrit as early as 1700-1200 BCE.
How to learn the Sanskrit language on your own?
We can learn the Sanskrit language with the help of online books, online lectures, and many more sites are available on the internet to teach us.
If you want to learn the Sanskrit language by book then I am sharing some tips and experience.
Get Sanskrit textbooks of any board, or from NCERT (Download NCERT Text Books and CBSE Books – look at Sanskrit books at Class 6 onwards)
You’ll get many books from many publishers. Get one book and series and stick to that. Too many book sets from different publications will only lead to wasted time. There are minor good or bad points with each set, but these are irrelevant for a serious learner of Sanskrit. Again, the key is to stick to one series. The NCERT resource mentioned above is a good starting point. There are many (believe me – so many!) Sanskrit books are available with Anvay (phrase decomposition) and Shabdarth (word-to-word meaning). Select a few (again the keyword is FEW and not many) books that have both Sanskrit Text, Anvay, and Shabdarth. Depending on your interest you can select Gita, Mahabharat (yes, these are good starting points to learn ancient Indian history, and the text in Sanskrit, English, and Hindi is easily available on the Internet). Get an appropriate edition from Digital Library of Free Books, Movies, Music & Wayback Machine. Search with Sanskrit keywords and discover our ocean of Sanskrit literature. Select a few and start reading Sanskrit text, its decomposition, and meaning. Select books of your interest – no suggestions required here. Still, if you ask for one, a random (and a good one from Sanskrit literature) suggestion is. There are few YouTube videos available that will help you correctly understand alphabet sounds. Important for pronunciation. Watch a few and then speak when you read the above books. Speak when you read.
Importance of Sanskrit language are:-
Sanskrit is the main liturgical language of Hinduism and used to be the lingua franca that helped all of the different regions of Greater India communicate with each other. Most of the greatest literary works to come out of India were written in Sanskrit, as well as many religious texts however, there are a few specific reasons why Sanskrit should be taken seriously:-
- One of the first written records was in Sanskrit
It has been attested that one of the first written records may have been in Sanskrit. It was probably the texts that make of the Rigveda, which is a collection of Hindu hymns that dates back to ancient times. Though there isn’t a large body of evidence to support this, even though Vedic Sanskrit was a purely spoken language, complete memorization in order for proper pronunciation was crucial, so we can safely say that the written accounts we have now were most likely the same as the ones then.
- Sanskrit is the philosophical language for a few religions.
Besides its importance to Hinduism, Sanskrit is also a philosophical language used in Jainism, Buddhism, and Sikhism. Jainism is a religion practiced by probably less than 1% of the population of India, and yet Jain literature has had a huge impact on Indian culture and history over the centuries. One of the main languages used to write this literature in Sanskrit.
- Sanskrit is the philosophical language for a few religions
Besides its importance to Hinduism, Sanskrit is also a philosophical language used in Jainism, Buddhism, and Sikhism. Jainism is a religion practiced by probably less than 1% of the population of India, and yet Jain literature has had a huge impact on Indian culture and history over the centuries. One of the main languages used to write this literature is Sanskrit.
Amazing facts of Sanskrit language are:-
- More than 95% of the Sanskrit literature has nothing to do with religion, and instead it deals with philosophy, law, science, literature, grammar, phonetics, interpretation, etc.
- The sound of each of the 36 consonants and the 16 vowels of Sanskrit is fixed and precise since the very beginning. They were never changed, altered, improved, or modified.
- All the words of the Sanskrit language always had the same pronunciation as they have today. There was no ‘sound shift,’ no change in the vowel system, and no addition was ever made in the grammar of Sanskrit in relation to the formation of the words.
- The morphology of word formation is unique and of its own kind where a word is formed from a tiny seed root (called dhatu) in a precise grammatical order which has been the same since the very beginning. Any number of desired words could be created through its root words and the prefix and suffix system as detailed in the Ashtadhyayi of Panini.
- No language in the world has its alphabets arranged in such a rational and systematic manner as Sanskrit. For example, the vowels, a, aa, i, ee, u, oo, ae, ai, o, arranged according to the shape of the mouth when these sounds are emitted, az and aa, are pronounced from the throat, i and ee from the palate, o and oo from the lips, etc. In the same way the consonants have been arranged in a sequence on a scientific pattern. The (ka) varga (i.e. ka, kha, ga, gha, nga) are emitted from the throat, the (cha) varga from the palate, the ( ta ) varga from the roof of the mouth, the (ta ) varga from the teeth, and the (pa ) varga from the lips. On the other hand in English, the alphabets are all arranged haphazardly and at random.
- Sanskrit was the language of our scientists in ancient India.
- Before the Arab Muslim Islamic invasion and destruction of India, Sanskrit was the official national language of Indian sub-continent.
- There are an estimated over 30 million Sanskrit manuscripts today with a conservative estimate of 7 million in India itself. This means there are orders of magnitude more manuscripts in Sanskrit than in Latin and Greek put together.
- Sanskrit manuscripts are on a very diverse range of topics, everything from sacred texts to literary works (poetry, drama, satires, histories, epics, novels) to scientific works (mathematics, linguistics, logic, botany, chemistry, medicine,) to entire works on things as seemingly obscure as elephant-raising or even “A Method to Grow Crooked Bamboos for Palanquin Beams”.
- Ancient Nalanda library had many Sanskrit texts in their storage until it was ravaged and burnt