Sanskrit alphabet, pronunciation and language

http://www.omniglot.com/writing/sanskrit.htm

Sanskrit ( )
Sanskrit is the classical language of Indian and the liturgical language of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. It is also one of the 22 official languages of India. The name Sanskrit means "refined", "consecrated" and "sanctified". It has always been regarded as the 'high' language and used mainly for religious and scientific discourse. Vedic Sanskrit, the pre-Classical form of the language and the liturgical language of the Vedic religion, is one of the earliest attested members of the Indo-European language family. The oldest known text in Sanskrit, the Rigveda, a collection of over a thousand Hindu hymns, composed during the 2nd millenium BC. Today Sanskrit is used mainly in Hindu religious rituals as a ceremonial language for hymns and mantras. Efforts are also being made to revive Sanskrit as an everyday spoken language in the village of Mattur near Shimoga in Karnataka. A modern form of Sanskrit is one of the 17 official home languages in India. Since the late 19th century, Sanskrit has been written mostly with the Devangar alphabet. However it has also been written with all the other alphabets of India, except Gurmukhi and Tamil, and with other alphabets such as Thai and Tibetan. The Grantha, Sharda and Siddham alphabets are used only for Sanskrit. Since the late 18th century, Sanskrit has also been written with the Latin alphabet. The most commonly used system is the International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (IAST), which was been the standard for academic work since 1912.

Devangar alphabet for Sanskrit

Vowels and vowel diacritics

Consonants

Conjunct consonants There are about a thousand conjunct consonants, most of which combine two or three consonants. There are also some with four-consonant conjuncts and at least one well-known conjunct with five consonants. Here's a selection of commonly-used conjuncts:

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Sanskrit alphabet, pronunciation and language

http://www.omniglot.com/writing/sanskrit.htm

You can find a full list of conjunct consonants used for Sanskrit at: http://sanskrit.gde.to/learning_tutorial_wikner/P058.html Numerals

Sample text in Sanskrit

Translated into Sanskrit by Arvind Iyengar Transliteration Sarv mnav svatantr samutpann vartant api ca, gauravadr adhikradr ca samn va vartant. t sarv ctan-tarka-aktibhy susampann santi. Api ca, sarvpi bandhutva-bhvanay paraspara vyavaharantu. A recording of this text by Muralikrishnan Ramasamy Another version of this text

Transliteration (by Stefn Steinsson) Sarv mnav janman svatantr vaiyaktikagaurava adhikra ca tuly va, sarv vivka tmask ca vartat, sarv paraspara bhrtbhvna vyavaharyu. A recording of this text Translation and recording by Shriramana Sharma Translation All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. (Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights)

Links
Information about the Sanskrit language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanskrit http://www.sanskrit-sanscrito.com.ar Online Sanskrit lessons http://acharya.iitm.ac.in/sanskrit/tutor.html

Sanskrit Translation

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Sanskrit alphabet, pronunciation and language

http://www.omniglot.com/writing/sanskrit.htm

http://ccbs.ntu.edu.tw/DBLM/olcourse/sanskrit.htm http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/eieol/vedol-0-X.html http://www.elportaldelaindia.com/El_Portal_de_la_India_Antigua/Snscrito.html Omkarananda Ashram's Sanskrit Page http://omkarananda-ashram.org/Sanskrit/Itranslt.html Devanagari fonts and keyboards http://www.wazu.jp/gallery/Fonts_Devanagari.html http://www.cs.colostate.edu/~malaiya/devafonts.htm http://www.thubtenrigzin.fr/en.html Sanskrit Academy http://www.samskrtam.org/ Cologne Digital Sanskrit Lexicon http://webapps.uni-koeln.de/tamil/ Sanskrit Library - contains digitized Sanskrit texts and various tools to analyse them http://sanskritlibrary.org/ Samskrita Bharati - an organisation established as an experiment in 1981 in Bangalore to bring Sanskrit back into daily life: http://www.samskrita-bharati.org/ American Sanskrit Institute http://www.americansanskrit.com Sanskrit Studies http://www.sanskritstudies.org Sanskrit Voice - a community of Sanskrit lovers http://sanskritvoice.com An archive of Sanskrit dictionaries, readers & grammars in German, English & Russian. (circa 4000 Mb Book Scans, devanagari fonts): http://groups.google.com/group/Nagari Download free devanagari fonts & transliteration macros. History and hi-res scans of Indian typography: http://nagari.southindia.ru Free Diwali Cards http://www.diwali-cards.com http://www.123diwali.com/ ALPHABETUM - a Unicode font specifically designed for ancient scripts, including classical & medieval Latin, ancient Greek, Etruscan, Oscan, Umbrian, Faliscan, Messapic, Picene, Iberian, Celtiberian, Gothic, Runic, Old & Middle English, Hebrew, Sanskrit, Old Nordic, Ogham, Kharosthi, Glagolitic, Old Cyrillic, Phoenician, Avestan, Ugaritic, Linear B, Anatolian scripts, Coptic, Cypriot, Brahmi, Old Persian cuneiform: http://guindo.pntic.mec.es/~jmag0042/alphabet.html

Indo-Aryan languages
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Copyright 1998-2012 Simon Ager

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