About the W style of typing Sanskrit.

In the gloss files, you mostly always see the Sanskrit spelled in the exact same way it must be pronounced. This is the only official way of writing Sanskrit, and has been so for thousands of years -- pronounce everything the way it's spelled (except !Hs and !Mt, that must sound like !ss and !nt).

However, sometimes it is convenient for my students to see a line of Sanskrit split apart into words. Take, for instance, an expression like !bhramannAgacchat. Even though it is always spelled the same way, it will have different meanings depending on which words it came from -- it can come from !brahman plus !Agacchat "while wandering he came", or from !brahman plus !na plus !agacchat "in his wanderings he did not go", or from !brahman plus !na plus !Agacchat "in his wanderings he did not come". So it is sometimes in your best interest to see what words did the sound come from. To do that, click W.

This makes the page show the original form the words had before the /sandhi rules applied. Examples --

• The letters tenedam, when you click W, might show as tena + idam. The plus sign means that these two words are not inside the same compound, and that some rule changed a + i into e.
• The letters tenadRSTam, when you click W, might show as tena dRSTam. The space means that these two words are not inside the same compound, and that the rules did not change a + d into anything else.
• The letters rajendra, when you click W, might show as rAja-indra. The hyphen means that these two belong to the same compound. Notice that the hyphen does not tell you if there was a change of sound or not; here a+i changed into e, but when there is no sound change, you get a hyphen anyway, as in rAja-puruSas.

Summarizing: a plus sign means that some rule changed some sound. Hyphens only appear inside compounds.

In the line dharmakSetre kurukSetre samavetA yuyutsavaH, when I hit W, I get yoyutsavas +. Why did you write a plus sign there?

Because the original word was yuyutsavas, and rules !!sasaju and !!kharava replaced the !s sound with a !H sound before a @pause.

That's preposterous. My other teacher says that the original word is yuyutsavaH, that no !pANini rule changes the !H into anything else when it is before a @pause, and that some !pANini rule changes !H into !s when it is before a !t.

Your teacher is free to say whatever, just like I am. Yet, next time you talk with them, ask about the names of the rules that do those changes. I'd like to be introduced to them.