Sanskrit

[Guest]

Mitradena,

Thanks. Sorry for a late reply. I didn't know anyone was reading these threads. <!--emo&--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/smile.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='smile.gif' /><!--endemo-->

1. Good points about Ri and Li. Parallels with other Indo-European languages do make good sense although I am personally not familiar with them.

2. As far as transliteration in english goes, we just have to stick to a convention. There are many transliteration schemes used in scholarly circles.
Of major schemes in use at present, the oldest is CSX (complex sanskrit encoding). CSX uses a charcter set larger than pure ASCII with dots, bars over/under the letters etc. CSX is not easy to type on a normal keyboard. For this reason ITRANS transliteration scheme was developed. ITRANS uses only ASCII characters and is phonetically more appealing to Indians who are used to Sanskrit like pronunciation. A similar ASCII based transliteration was developed by Kyoto Univ and is now called Harvard-Kyoto transliteration scheme.

If I were to recommend a scheme I would recommend ITRANS. An associated Windows software called "Itranslator" is a great tool to write in Sanskrit with Devanagari as well as CSX ouput. CSX is still the transliteration scheme of choice for scholarly publications.

Website for Windows software for Sanskrit writing:
http://www.omkarananda-ashram.org/Sanskr...anslt.html

Website for a Windows software for Monier Williams Dictionary:
http://members.ams.chello.nl/l.bontes/

3. Regarding Anuswara , without any Sandhi it is usually written with trailing "Am" with labial (pa-varga) ma at the end. But this nasal changes form when Sandhi is employed. The general rule is that the anuswar takes the form of the nasal of the group to which the following consonant belongs.

For exmple:
sam+gama=Sa(n)gama. Here after the sandhi (n) is now ka-varga nasal, same as in Ganga.
sam+chaya=sa(n)chaya, here the nasal (n) is now cha-varga nasal as in pancha.
sam+tosha=sa(n)tosha, here (n) is dental (ta-varga)
sam+patti =sampatti, here the nasal is same as m (pa-vatga), so it doesn't change form.

The second s in sanskrita is a dental consonant although not in the five major classes of consonants. Therefore nasal of sam should sound closer to the dental (n) than m. But since s is not a pure consonant in the 5 major classes, it is written as a dot.