AHSG 1 Overview

A Higher Sanskrit Grammar Chapter 1 Overview

This chapter goes over the sounds used in the Sanskrit/संस्कृत (saṃskṛt) language as well as their written representation. Sanskrit is heavily focused on sound and correct pronunciation, and that makes this chapter foundational to the rest of the book.

I’ve been simultaneously reading learnsanskrit.org’s excellent Vyākaraṇa Praveśaḥ (Grammar Introduction) to get an overview of the subject. The guide explains key elements of the अष्टाध्यायी (Aṣtadhyayī) in a simple way, and even though I am familiar with a lot of what is there in the first chapter of the present book, the guide (along with some linked resources) helped me grasp some of the finer points about the phonetic system.

I‘m going to structure my notes in a slightly different way: As I go through the book, I’ll exclusively use the Devanagari/देवनागरी (devanāgari) script to write terms that have already been introduced in देवनागरी. For example, since I’ve already used the word संस्कृत to refer to the संस्कृत language in the first line of this article, all future references to it will be in the देवनागरी script.

It’s something I’ve been wanting to try as a pedagogical tool in other domains so I figured I might as well try it here and see how it feels.

I was initially planning on one post per chapter. I can see now that this would require the notes to be too dilute or for each post to be too extensive. Instead, I’ll break it down by groups of points that share context.

Changelog:

Originally written on 26 October 2023

Edited on:

11 November 2023