chunk 82: how to spell Sanskrit ----------------------------------------- chunk 82: how to spell Sanskrit -----------------------------------------
how to spell Sanskrit
The sounds
Spelling of
Roman spelling of
blue
blue nasals
About the
About the
spelling of
ugly space
^ 
Sanskrit is written the way it sounds, with two exceptions --
(1) The sounds
(2) the twenty-five clusters of nasal plus similar , such as the sound
In this website, however, I do not use the weird spellings
Some people will tell you that Sanskrit MUST be spelled using the devanAgarI alphabet. That's just not true. In India it has been written using different alphabets since forever. Learning devanAgarI, however, is a good idea, because most printed books use it.
The Sanskrit in this website is written in the Harvard-Kyoto style. See Wikipedia on Harvard-Kyoto.
I also add some exotic symbols to it sometimes, in order to make things easier for some of my students.
^ 
The sound
the only difference being the timing. The shsh "sound" of the second is longer, like the shsh of "fresh shrimp".
This shsh is a single lengthened sound. Yet, for writing purposes, grammar purposes, and verse rythm purposes, it counts as a cluster of
The same remarks apply to
See also spelling of
^
This is what I teach my students --
" When using Indian lettering, always spell the sounds
Always read aloud
Do that even if a space is written between them. "
Rule vAzari says that you may, if you so wish, pronounce those combinations as
(1) no one does that in India.
(2) saying
(3) back when I told my students that saying
I very much suspect that in times of
See also --
^ 
When using an online dictionary to find one of the few words that contain the sounds
When you look up these in a PAPER dictionary, you will find that they are spelled there as
When I spell Sanskrit in Roman letters, I use
^
In this website I often spell the sounds
Please remember that these combinations always represent the sounds
(If there is a pause in the middle, the blue letter is pronounced as a visarga sound, by kharava, and spelled as H).
When you use devanAgarI to write, you MUST spell those as
When you use Roman letters, spell either way, no one cares.
^
In this website, the nasals
No matter if they are painted blue or black, you must pronounce all
The blue color shows that you should spell the blue letters as topdot, that is to say, as M, to get the correct spelling according to the CRAZY SPELLING RULE . The letters that are not blue must be spelled as themselves.
If you copypaste the above line into inria reader, it will turn into
so that inria reader, which always expects the user to be following the CRAZY SPELLING RULE , won't get confused.
You might ask why I use this unfamiliar way of spelling, instead of the standard CRAZY SPELLING RULE ? I do this for the benefit of my Sanskrit 101 students. Before I started to use blues, all my new students mispronounced
^
Learn about the
Nowadays, most printed Sanskrit books use this alphabet. Which means that if you don't learn it, you are as good as illiterate. Fortunately for you, this alphabet is used for many other languages, like Hindi, so you can find lots of tutorials on the internets.
You can write Sanskrit in any alphabet you want, as long as you write in it well enough to be able to read it with the correct pronunciation.
Bengali readers are reminded that even tough the letter
^ 
Most Indian alphabets do not have a letter for consonants, like
For instance, in the devanAgarI alphabet as it is used to write Sanskrit, there is a letter for
It looks like a short diagonal, written under the letter, pointing southeast.
For some reason, many people used to write Hindi mostly appear to think that the
(spellingofAmverbs) (spellinv)
^
The Am'' verbs are traditionally spelled as single words --
But the
In my view, and in the view of most Sanskrit users, these are actually single words, because you can't say
Yet, some people, mostly Westerners using Roman letters, prefer to spell them as if they were two words. You will see that in the epics files from indology --
On the other hand, Mr. ApTe liked to spell these, in devanAgarI, with no anusvA change --
as he did not consider the
As there is no universal agreement on which is the "right" spelling yet, you may spell however you want. Yet, I tell my students to use the
As of March 2024, inria reader gets
^
In modern Sanskrit printed books, spaces are written after words. Unless the space would look ugly.
Spaces would look ugly...
After any consonants but topdot or dotdot --
Inside a compound --
After a letter made wordfinal by rule sv;AdiSva, such as the
When the last vowel of the word merged with the first vowel of the next word by rules akassa, AdguNaH, vRddhireci.
In old books you can see other uses of the flycrap, like using two of them to show a disappeared
But that's mostly out of use and most modern books have --
chunk 82: how to spell Sanskrit -----------------------------------------