Hello! Welcome to my update on what I have learned about Sanskrit throughout the month of February. This is truly a beautiful, intricately-structured language that I would love to dive into more deeply someday, but for now I’ll sum up what I know.
(Image from Wikipedia: Excerpt from a 19th-century Illustrated Bhagavad Gita)
Sanskrit is sometimes called a “perfect” language, and each Sanskrit teacher that I came across seemed to have a different way of explaining why. From what I have come to understand, the sounds in Sanskrit are unchanging, meaning that the name of each letter is the sound that letter always makes within a word. Additionally, the structure and rules of words and utterances never change. Unlike in English, where speakers or students of the language have to memorize a lot of exceptions to spelling and grammar rules, the organization and structure of Sanskrit are orderly and make sense. The alphabet is arranged in a grid pattern that, when recited aloud, allows the speaker fluid motion of sounds that begin at the throat and progress through each place of articulation from the palate to the teeth to the lips – for example, if you were to say guh, juh, duh, muh. If you ever struggled to remember the order of “l, m, n” in the English alphabet, you might understand how much easier and faster it would be to learn a more intuitively-organized grid of sounds!
As for the building of words, each Sanskrit word is made of a root sound, a prefix or prefixes that modify the meaning of that root sound, and a suffix or suffixes that add context on how the root is being used. The suffix is what classifies the word into either a name-related word or an action-related word, with name-related suffixes based on gender, number, and context, and action-related suffixes based on the timeframe in which the action is performed, the number of people performing the action, and the person performing the action. According to The Sanskrit Channel, this sums up Sanskrit grammar in a nutshell.
Interestingly, the reason Sanskrit is so often used for chanting is because the slight changes in prefixes and suffixes that alter the meaning of words, as well as the many Sanskrit words that can have multiple meanings based on context, make it easy to form repetitive chants that can be memorized quickly and lull the brain into a pleasant meditative state.
Overall, my favourite video on Sanskrit out of the ones I’ve watched is from the YouTube channel Future IQ, where the hosts make learning about the pronunciation and organization of Sanskrit sounds fun and engaging. Watch it below!
Do you have any further insights into Sanskrit to share? Are you intrigued to start studying this wonderful language? I’d love to hear from you in the comments!