Rewriting the San'script' (appeared in The Education Times)


From Shastras to software and beyond, Sanskrit has secured morethan its just space in the world of words. Hiren Kumar Bose traces thehighs and lows of this erstwhile lingua franca, both in the country ofits birth as well as in the lands the language is out to conquer

Dictionaries would have us believe that the Sanskrit word 'guru' means nothingmore than venerable or spiritual teacher. That's not the complete story.Let us see how the word came into being. The word 'guru' consisting of theaksharas (alphabet) 'gu' and 'ru' stand for a teacher - one whodispels darkness (ignorance) of the mind (person). 'Gu' means darknessand 'ru' means the act of removal.This is how Sanskrit works – by explaining each and every word we use in ourday-to-day lives. Each akshara or alphabet of Sanskrit denotes the setof letters from the first to the last. Besides, the word also meansthat the sound of the letter does not ever get destroyed, signifyingthe eternal quality of the sound of the letters. It retains thephonetic characteristics of the language and also their individualmeanings as well! Conclusively, the sound of a word is essentially thesounds of the aksharas in the word – a concept that will help simplifytext to speech applications with computers.What differentiates Sanskrit from the Western languages? The bestexplanation has come from Vyas Houston who has popularised thelearning of Sanskrit in the US. Vyas compares Sanskrit to mathematicsand goes on to say, "The way words unfold from their seed forms isremarkable. A root is always a single syllable that contains one ofthe basic sounds, 'a', 'i', 'u' or 'ri'. When the root creates a word,the sound undergoes guna, or a transformative principle, to keep itresonating to its optimum. Hence, chit 'to be aware' – becomes theresonant chetami 'I am aware,' and chetanam, 'being aware'. Budh'knowledge' becomes bodhami 'I know' or bodhanam 'knowing'. Theserelationships operate with mathematical precision throughout thelanguage and gives it an extraordinary power."The Vedic or the Sanskrit view gives more importance to the specialsound it should produce, and the compositions of that sound than tothe meaning of the written or spoken word. Hence the Sanskrit languageis phonetic, not linguistic – unlike the Western languages.The language is particularly suited for encrypting without ambiguity.This is particularly apparent in scientific treatises in Sanskrit,such as works of Aryabhatta, Varahamihir, Bhaskara and others of thatera. Sanskrit, the vocabulary of which is derived from root syllables,is ideal for coining new scientific and technological terms. Theprecise and extremely well defined structure of Sanskrit coupled withits antiquity, offers a number of areas in linguistics researchincluding computational linguistics. Sanskrit has a built-in schemefor pronunciation, word formation and grammar.Sanskrit is co-original with the Vedas. The scientific construction ofthe Sanskrit alphabet is well known. No other alphabet in the world(except those that have adopted the alphabet structure from Sanskrit)has such uniquely positioned letters. In Sanskrit, even the soundswhich make the word are consciously selected.While we in India today consider Sanskrit a dead language, theWesterners consider it as simply a fascinating language, a language inwhich the genius of the human civilisation was perfected to itsfullest. Top-notch Western universities have been busy churning oneesoteric dissertation after another on Panini's Ashtadhyay andcomparing Bhartihari's and Patanjali's grammatical logic.Among US universities, it was the University of Michigan which beganteaching Sanskrit as early as the 1890s as part of the Orientallanguages. Today, it attracts a large number of undergraduates, mostof them second-generation Indo-American kids, majoring in engineering,medicine, and business studies read Sanskrit not as a specialisedbranch but to satisfy the four-term foreign language requirement.George Cardona, a professor of historical linguistics at University ofPennsylvania who teaches Indian grammatical theory and is consideredto be a modern tikakaar (commentator) on Panini's Ashtadhyayi saysthat in recent years there has been an inflow of Japanese students toAmerican universities with very advanced knowledge of Sanskrit.Twenty-two universities in the US have Sanskrit as one of theirsubjects, followed by 18 German universities, five BritishUniversities and four Italian universities.Other countries which take Sanskrit seriously are Austria, Belgium,Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland , Netherlands, Norway, Poland,Russia, Singapore, Sweden and Switzerland.In Mumbai, three colleges offer a six-paper degree course in Sanskrit,namely Ruia, Wilson and Somaiya while three others – Jhunjhunwala,Patkar and Bhavan's offer a three-paper degree course.A typical characteristic of the Sanskrit language is its totaldisregard to 'syntax'.Words with their typical case endings may be at any position of the sentenceswithout affecting the meaning or understanding. Take the case 'AhamShalam Gachhami' or 'I go to school'. Play with changing thepositions, like 'Shalam Gachchami Aham' or 'Gachchami Aham Shalam'. Solong as the grammar is perfect, the sentence construction doesn'tmatter. The meaning doesn't change. Try doing that in English though!"This fluidity has rendered Sanskrit particularly suitable forversification and thereby transmitted through generations in the formof shlokas and thousands of aphorisms," elaborates Dipen Chakrabarti,translator, researcher and a Sanskrit lover.Another powerful characteristic of Sanskrit is its ability to be brief and yetinformative. For example, Panini's Astadhyayi, the most celebratedgrammatical work in Sanskrit, is unique in its brevity whilemaintaining all the details. With 3995 aphorisms, the total expansecovered is rather amazing. Apart from the grammatical rules,Astadhyayi is unique as a philosophical treatise as well.Another typical characteristic of Sanskrit works is the greatimportance given toclassification and logical deduction. A language with essentially asingle spoken form that is written in many different ways, Sanskrit isopposed to classical Chinese, which is a language with essentially asingle written form that is spoken in many different ways.Many believe that the language can be revived only if it's brought out from theprecincts of the campus into the streets. Suggests Dr Kala Acharya, director KJSomaiya Bharatiya Sanskriti Peetham, "Its teaching has to be informaland only then can it be popularised. It should be learnt for the joyof reading the classics inthe original or as we say in devbhasa."Samskrita Bharati, an NGO, has done a yeoman's job in this regard byorganising 'Speak Sanskrit' workshops and training volunteers. In1981, Chamu Shastry, a Kannada Brahmin and his friends started Bharatiand have so far trained 20,000 volunteers all over India. Its campsare held regularly in Ghatkopar, Andheri, Dahisar and Borivali andattract housewives, teachers, students and retirees.Shastry's method is to skip grammar and teach Sanskrit as it isspoken. The students thus do not have to wrestle with the nuances ofan arcane syntactics. In fact, people do start speaking Sanskrit aftera 20-hour course spread over ten days. "If the Jews could reviveHebrew why can't we resuscitate Sanskrit?" Shastry argues, then adds,"Popularising Sanskrit is far easier as it is the mother of all Indianlanguages and up to 60 per cent of the words in the other languagesare derived from Sanskrit."