word
now
shore
pill
retroflex sh (with the tip of the tongue turned up to touch the hard palate)
upheaval
before
abhorrent
hiss
mind
hood
csl punctuation of english
The acute accent on Sanskrit words when they occur outside of the Sanskrit text itself, marks stress, e.g. Ramayana. It is not part of traditional Sanskrit orthography, transliteration or transcription, but we supply it here to guide readers in the pronunciation of these unfamiliar words. Since no Sanskrit word is accented on the last syllable it is not necessary to accent disyllables, e.g. Rama.
The second CSL innovation designed to assist the reader in the pronunciation of lengthy unfamiliar words is to insert an unobtrusive middle dot between semantic word breaks in compound names (provided the word break does not fall on a vowel resulting from the fusion of two vowels), e.g. Maha·bharata, but Ramayana (not Rama·ayana). Our dot echoes the punctuating middle dot (·) found in the oldest surviving forms of written Indic, the Ashokan inscriptions of the third century bce.
The deep layering of Sanskrit narrative has also dictated that we use quotation marks only to announce the beginning and end of every direct speech, and not at the beginning of every paragraph.
z
csl punctuation of sanskrit
The Sanskrit text is also punctuated, in accordance with the punctuation of the English translation. In mid-verse, the punctuation will not alter the sandhi or the scansion. Proper names are capitalized. Most Sanskrit metres have four “feet” (pada): where possible we print the ________
common sloka metre on two lines. In the Sanskrit text, we use French Guillemets (e.g. «kva samcicirsuh?») instead of English quotation marks (e.g. “Where are you off to?”) to avoid confusion with the apostrophes used for vowel elision in sandhi.
Sanskrit presents the learner with a challenge: sandhi (“euphonic combination”). Sandhi means that when two words are joined in connected speech or writing (which in Sanskrit reflects speech), the last letter (or even letters) of the first word often changes; compare the way we pronounce “the” in “the beginning” and “the end.”
In Sanskrit the first letter of the second word may also change; and if both the last letter of the first word and the first letter of the second are vowels, they may fuse. This has a parallel in English: a nasal consonant is inserted between two vowels that would otherwise coalesce: “a pear” and “an apple.” Sanskrit vowel fusion may produce ambiguity. The chart at the back of each book gives the full sandhi system.
Fortunately it is not necessary to know these changes in order to start reading Sanskrit. For that, what is important is to know the form of the second word without sandhi (pre-sandhi), so that it can be recognized or looked up in a dictionary. Therefore we are printing Sanskrit with a system of punctuation that will indicate, unambiguously, the original form of the second word, i.e., the form without sandhi. Such sandhi mostly concerns the fusion of two vowels.
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In Sanskrit, vowels may be short or long and are written differently accordingly. We follow the general convention that a vowel with no mark above it is short. Other books mark a long vowel either with a bar called a macron (a) or with a circumflex (a). Our system uses the macron, except that for initial vowels in sandhi we use a circumflex to indicate that originally the vowel was short, or the shorter of two possibilities (e rather than ai, o rather than au).
When we print initial a, before sandhi that vowel was a________
’, before sandhi there was a vowel a
further help with vowel sandhi
When a final short vowel (a, i or u) has merged into a following vowel, we print ’ at the end of the word, and when a final long vowel (a, i or u) has merged into a following vowel we print ” at the end of the word. The vast majority of these cases will concern a final a or a.
Examples:
What before sandhi was atra asti is represented as atr’ asti
Finally, three other points concerning the initial letter of the second word:
(1) A word that before sandhi begins with r (vowel), after sandhi begins with r followed by a consonant: yatha” rtu represents pre-sandhi yatha rtu.
(2) When before sandhi the previous word ends in t and the following word begins with s, after sandhi the last letter of the previous word is c and the following word begins with ch: syac chastravit represents pre-sandhi syat sastravit.
(3) Where a word begins with h and the previous word ends with a double consonant, this is our simplified spelling to show the pre-sandhi form: tad hasati is commonly written as tad dhasati, but we write tadd hasati so that the original initial letter is obvious.________
compounds
We also punctuate the division of compounds (samasa), simply by inserting a thin vertical line between words. There are words where the decision whether to regard them as compounds is arbitrary. Our principle has been to try to guide readers to the correct dictionary entries.
example
Where the Deva·nagari script reads:
Others would print:
We print:
And in English:
“May Ganesha’s domed forehead protect you! Streaked with vermilion dust, it seems to be emitting the spreading rays of the rising sun to pacify the teeming darkness of obstructions.”
“Nava·sahasanka and the Serpent Princess” I.3 by Padma·gupta
drama
Classical Sanskrit literature is in fact itself bilingual, notably in drama. There women and characters of low rank speak one of several Prakrit dialects, an “unrened” (prakrta) vernacular as opposed to the “refined” (samskrta) language. Editors commonly provide such speeches with a Sanskrit paraphrase, their “shadow” (chaya). We mark Prakrit speeches with ┌opening and closing┘ corner brackets, and supply the Sanskrit chaya in endnotes. Some stage directions are original to the author but we follow the custom that sometimes editors supplement these; we print them in italics (and within brackets, in mid-text).
wordplay
Classical Sanskrit literature can abound in puns (slesa). Such paronomasia, or wordplay, is raised to a high art; rarely is it a cliche. Multiple meanings merge (slisyanti) into a single word or phrase. Most common are pairs of meanings, but as many as ten separate meanings are attested. To mark the parallel senses in the English, as well as the punning original in the Sanskrit, we use a slanted font (different from italic) and a triple colon (⋮ ) to separate the alternatives. E.g.
It is right that poets should fall silent upon hearing the Kadambari, for the sacred law rules that recitation must be suspended when the sound of an arrow ⋮ the poetry of Bana is heard.
Someshvara·deva’s “Moonlight of Glory” I.15
Who was Harsha?
H
arsha (also called Harsha·vardhana, Shri Harsha, Harsha Deva, and Shiladitya) was a king, who reigned from 606 to 647 over the kingdom of Kanauj (near modern Kanpur). We have far more information about him than we have about most kings of this period, largely due to three witnesses. His court poet, Bana, wrote a prose poem about him, ‘The Deeds of Harsha’ (Harsa/carita), which offers, hidden between the layers of fulsome praise and literary display, quite