New Traffic

I always find it somewhat surprising and curious when, looking at the visitor logs, I see that people have arrived here by clicking links at mail.google.com or mail.yahoo.com, or something similar, which I suppose means that someone has emailed them the address to my blog and they clicked through from the email. Lately there have been a lot more of these. How mysterious and flattering, that strangers find something here and think to email it to a friend.

Quite a lot of new traffic seems to be Sanskrit-related, some visitors finding the blog through Sanskrit-related web searches, others following (often mysterious) links directly to Sanskrit-related posts. And tonight I learned that the Clay Sanskrit Library –- the Loeb of Sanskrit, about which I wrote here — has linked to me from their Press page, and they even plug my flash cards! So, thanks, CSL; and welcome, new readers.

October 9, 2008 · Sanskrit · 2 comments

The Clay Sanskrit Library

As a graduate of the St. John’s College Great Books Program entering the Eastern Classics Graduate Program, one of my first impressions of the Eastern texts — actually, not an impression of them as texts at all, but as objects – is how much harder many of them are to find. Surely in the Western Program, too, there are hard-to-find and out-of-print books, and rumors of books that Johnnies alone keep barely in-print. I’ve heard we constitute a double-digit percentage of all sales of Newton’s Principia Mathematica, maybe a quarter or a third or even half of all sales of Ptolemy’s Almagest and Apollonius’ Conics. It is alleged that one of the books of the Conics was without an English translation until only a few years ago because it wasn’t read in St. John’s mathematics tutorial, and nobody else had ever bothered. I don’t know if these claims are true, or who even could verify or refute such trivia, but they don’t sound terribly improbable to me. These books are the exceptions, though, and — as these particular examples illustrate — generally old mathematical or scientific treatises. There is no shortage of English editions of Plato, or of Kant, or of Tolstoy, or. . . .

It was surprising to me that the first seminar reading in the EC program is available only in one expensive and hard-to-find volume (or a photocopy from that volume, available in the college bookstore), and that the second is a printout from online sources (translated in the 1890s). I supposed this must be peculiar to the first few readings, but as I went down the seminar reading list for the first semester, I found many books that exist in only one English translation, or maybe one Victorian and one more modern translation, sometimes printed most recently thirty or forty years ago. This isn’t true of Confucius, of course, or of the Tao Te Ching, or of many of the others you’ve probably heard of, but it was surprising anyway.

So I was especially pleased — beyond the natural enthusiasm of a beginning student of Sanskrit — to learn of the project of the Clay Sanskrit Library. These little books will be familiar to anyone who’s studied Classics, as they are consciously modeled on the Loeb Classical Library, even down to being named after the benefactor whose patronage got them started. Like the Loebs, the Clays are nearly pocket-sized; and like the Loebs, the original (Sanskrit) text is on each left-side page, with the corresponding English facing it on the right. To the Loeb’s green (Greek) and red (Latin) cloth-bound covers, the Clay adds teal.

The Loebs have a head-start of nearly a hundred years, so the Clays are still comparatively few. There are advantages to their late start, however: all volumes are being composed digitally (and, web geeks, in semantic XML), and soon will be indexed, cross-referenced, and fully searchable in Sanskrit and English on their website. Excerpts can be downloaded in PDF. Their future is allegedly uncertain, but I’m rooting for them — I hope, at least, that they make it long enough to print all their 32 (!) volumes of the Mahabharata.

The New Republic printed something of a review of the series last month, and I would suggest to all of my friends interested in great literature to take a look. The author advocates well:

Sanskrit literature, taken as a whole, is–it seems almost ridiculous to have to say this–a surpassing cultural achievement, like ancient Greek literature (though the Sanskrit corpus is, at a conservative estimate, a thousand times larger than what has survived in Greek), and like the literary monuments in classical Chinese or classical Arabic, to say nothing of comparatively young literatures such as we find in English, German, French, or Russian. The astonishing fact is that cultivated readers of the latter tongues may have never heard of Kalidasa, or of the no less important Bhavabhuti, Bharavi, Magha, and Sriharsha.

Happily, help has now arrived.

And there’s sure to be something in the bargain for you, as the article quotes quite a few lines of wise and lovely verse. An example:

An arrow shot by an archer
or a poem made by a poet
should cut through your heart,
jolting the head.
If it doesn’t, it’s no arrow,
it’s no poem.

September 7, 2008 · Links, Literature, Sanskrit · 2 comments

Sanskrit

I’m starting to study Sanskrit (in the Eastern Classics graduate program at St. John’s College, Santa Fe) and was told earlier this month to learn the Devanagari script (including a bunch of the more common or irregular conjuncts) and to complete the first five lessons of the Killingley text before our first meeting next week.  While doing that, I re-discovered Mac OS X’s implementation of international keyboard layouts, and marveled at its Devanagari functionality.  Skip the next paragraph if you’re not interested in that.

(In Leopard, go to Apple Menu >> System Preferences. Click “International”. Click “Input Menu”. On the bottom, check “Show input menu in menu bar”. Check “Keyboard Viewer” (it can come in handy) and any character sets you want. In this case, check one of the Devanagari options, I recommend “Devanagari – QWERTY” for the intuitive layout. If you want to do Roman transliterations, you’ll also want to select “U.S. Extended,” since it has extra diacritics.  Now you should have a flag next to the clock on the menu bar.  Click it to change your keyboard layout.  In Devanagari-QWERTY, the keys correspond to Devanagari characters about how you would expect according to sound, and where Devanagari has several characters corresponding to one Roman letter, they are typed by holding shift or option or both while pressing the corresponding key (aspirated forms generally by holding shift; retroflex forms generally by holding option; aspirated retroflex forms generally by holding both).  Visarga (or unvoiced aspiration — the unvoiced h-sound) is shift-h (or H).  The virama (which cancels a character’s inherent vowel) is made with the f key.  Conjunct consonants are formed automatically (and very logically) by typing the first character, then the virama (f key), then the next character.  The important things to know for Roman transliteration in the U.S. Extended keyboard are that (1) dots under characters are made by typing option-x, then the character; (2) that macrons over long vowels are made by typing option-a, then the vowel; and (3) that acute accents (including over s, as ś) are made by typing option-e, then the character.  Be aware that these are unicode typefaces, so software that is not unicode-friendly won’t be able to use them.  All modern Apple software seems to work fine, including Safari.  And Google even indexes and searches in the Devanagari script.)

I had been hand-writing flash cards of the vocabulary terms at the end of each lesson, but in light of the above I decided to remake them much more nicely.  And since I will have classmates trying to learn the same stuff, and since there are many other people throughout the world undertaking the difficult and noble work of learning Sanskrit, I decided to put them all here as .pdf files.

Each .pdf is two pages: the fronts of the cards on one page, and the backs on the other.  You can print them on separate sheets and paste them onto index cards, or (as I did) print them double-sided.  With most printers the front and back should line up tolerably well.  The cards are in the order that the vocabulary is introduced in Beginning Sanskrit: A Practical Course Based on Graded Reading and Exercises, second edition, by Dermot Killingley (revised by Dermot Killingley and Siew-Yue Killingley), and the filenames include the lesson(s) from which the terms are drawn.  I plan to add more files here as I progress through Killingley’s several volumes.  Though the cards are thus connected to the text that I and my classmates are using, they may be helpful to other learners of Sanskrit as well.

Be advised that I am new to Sanskrit and to Devanagari, and these cards may suffer from limitations in OS X’s implementation of the script or from my own mistakes.  Please contact me if you find any errors and I will do my best to correct them.

NOTE: All nouns and adjectives are declined in the masculine singular, unless they generally occur in another form; all verbs are conjugated in the third-person singular present-tense. As of this writing, vertical conjunct characters beginning with ङ do not seem to occur in (at least) OS X’s implementation of unicode Devanagari. Thus, words that might otherwise have such a conjunct, in these flash cards instead have ङ with virama (as in kaṅkaṇam / कङ्कणम्, which occurs in sheet 35).

Sanskrit Flash Cards 1 (Lesson 1)

Sanskrit Flash Cards 2 (Lesson 1)

Sanskrit Flash Cards 3 (Lesson 2)

Sanskrit Flash Cards 4 (Lessons 2 & 3)

Sanskrit Flash Cards 5 (Lessons 3 & 4)

Sanskrit Flash Cards 6 (Lesson 4)

Sanskrit Flash Cards 7 (Lessons 4 & 5)

Sanskrit Flash Cards 8 (Lessons 5 & 3) (includes word left out from 3rd lesson)

–added 8.Sept.08:

Sanskrit Flash Cards 9 (Lesson 6)

Sanskrit Flash Cards 10 (Lessons 6 & 7)

Sanskrit Flash Cards 11 (Lesson 7)

Sanskrit Flash Cards 12 (Lesson 7 & 8)

–added 20.Sept.08:

Sanskrit Flash Cards 13 (Lesson 8)

Sanskrit Flash Cards 14 (Lesson 10)

Sanskrit Flash Cards 15 (Lessons 10 & 11)

Sanskrit Flash Cards 16 (Lesson 11)

Sanskrit Flash Cards 17 (Lessons 11 & 12)

Sanskrit Flash Cards 18 (Lesson 12)

Sanskrit Flash Cards 19 (Lessons 12 & 13)

Sanskrit Flash Cards 20 (Lesson 13)

Sanskrit Flash Cards 21 (Lessons 13 & 14)

Sanskrit Flash Cards 22 (Lesson 14)

Sanskrit Flash Cards 23 (Lessons 14 & 15)

Sanskrit Flash Cards 24 (Lesson 15)

Sanskrit Flash Cards 25 (Lesson 15)

–added 28.Sept.08:

Sanskrit Flash Cards 26 (Lesson 16)

Sanskrit Flash Cards 27 (Lessons 16 & 17)

–added 18.Oct.08:

Sanskrit Flash Cards 28 (Lesson 17) NOTE: The word snānam (स्नानम्), which occurs in lesson 17, is omitted from this sheet of flash cards because it is an exact duplicate entry from lesson 16.

Sanskrit Flash Cards 29 (Lessons 17 & 18)

Sanskrit Flash Cards 30 (Lesson 18)

Sanskrit Flash Cards 31 (Lessons 18 & 19)

Sanskrit Flash Cards 32 (Lesson 19)

Sanskrit Flash Cards 33 (Lessons 19 & 20)

Sanskrit Flash Cards 34 (Lessons 20 & 21) NOTE: The word anantaram (अनन्तरम्), which occurs in lesson 20, is omitted from this sheet of flash cards because it is an exact duplicate entry from lesson 18.

Sanskrit Flash Cards 35 (Lesson 21)

Sanskrit Flash Cards 36 (Lessons 21 & 22)

Sanskrit Flash Cards 37 (Lesson 22)

Sanskrit Flash Cards 38 (Lessons 22 & 27)

Sanskrit Flash Cards 39 (Lesson 27)

Sanskrit Flash Cards 40 (Lessons 27 & 28)

UPDATE: I stopped making these flashcards when I discovered ProVoc, the excellent (and free) Mac software; and iVocabulary, an inexpensive way to use ProVoc files on an iPhone. There is information about both of them and all of my files available to download over here.

August 27, 2008 · Education, Language, Sanskrit · 7 comments

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