The Sanskrit Heritage Site
Version 240 [2010-02-05]
Welcome to the Sanskrit Heritage site.
You are invited to visit the first hypertext Sanskrit
dictionary, available interactively through its
index.
It currently gives meanings in
French, but has been designed for multilingual use.
You may also download printable versions of this dictionary, under several
formats, as explained below.
This site offers also certain linguistic services for the Sanskrit language, such
as a Sanskrit Reader which parses Sanskrit transliterated
text
into Sanskrit banks of tagged hypertext.
Various phonological and morphological tools are also provided, as explained below.
A general introduction to the site facilities is available
here.
Book form
Portable Document Format
You may download the pdf file from PDF. This document is readable through Acrobat Reader, a well-known browser plug-in from Adobe freely available on Internet. Since the document is rather large, you have to account for some delay in loading its 3 Mb.Postscript
For those of you who prefer Postscript, it is also available as a compressed Postscript file.Web form
Interactive browsing
The dictionary may be accessed through a search engine implementing an index. Your browser must be Strict XHTML 1.0 compliant, and for proper viewing of Sanskrit text you must have installed on your system open type fonts for roman transliteration with diacritics, and for devanagari. For instance, install fonts IndUni, available from John Smith's site. A Unicode-compliant font for devanagari with proper ligatures is Apple's Devanagari MT for Macintosh OS X stations. For Windows users, installation of font 'Arial MS Unicode' is advised for proper rendering. You may have to fiddle with the controls of your browser, so that the font declarations from the dictionary pages get precedence over the standard selection, and thus encoding is specified as Unicode compliant (UTF-8 encoding). Remark that most words are given with their etymology as hypertext links. You may thus navigate from a word to its components, down to its roots. Also, the gender declarations of the main entries are mouse-sensitive, and give you direct access to the relevant declension table. Similarly, the present class mark of the verbal roots gives access to the conjugation schemes. Also for verb entries, preverbs lead you to the correspondingly prefixed derived verbs.Sanskrit made easy
If you want to search for a Sanskrit word without knowing its exact transliteration, go to section "Sanskrit made easy" of the index page, which allows you to search for words without knowing precise diacritics. For instance, search Vishnou, Siva, or the grammarian Panini. Sanskrit Grammarian
This interface gives the declension tables for Sanskrit substantives.
Try out this
declension engine by submitting Sanskrit stems
with intended gender. The same transliteration conventions as for the
dictionary index apply. For instance, submit "deva" with gender Mas,
or "devii" with gender Fem, or "brahman" with gender Neu. The fourth
button, labeled "Any", may be used for the words which take their
gender from the context, such as deictic pronouns ("aham", "tvad"),
or numeral words such as "dva", "tri", etc.
A conjugation engine for roots is also available. It handles
the full present system: present indicative, imperfect, imperative and
optative, as well as the passive present, the perfect, the aorist
and the future. Participial stems, absolutives and infinitives are listed as well.
Some secondary conjugations (causative, intensive,
desiderative) are also generated, for the full present and future systems.
Try out this conjugation engine
with data such as bhuu 1, as 2, m.rj 2, han 2, haa 3, hu 3, daa 4, su 5,
p.r 6, yuj 7, k.r 8, j~naa 9, namas 10. You may cascade by generating declensions
of a generated participial stem.
Lemmatizer
Conversely, a lemmatiser attempts to tag inflected words. Try for instance devaat, jagmivaan, a.s.tau (clicking on Noun) or apibat, akaar.siit, dudoha, vaahyate etc (clicking on Verb). This lemmatizer knows about inflected forms of derived stems which are not apparent in the display of the main stem inflection. For instance, dar"sayi.syati is found as conjugated form: { ca. fut. a. sg. 3 }[d.r.s_1], dariid.r"syate yields { int. pr. m. sg. 3 }[d.r"s_1], did.rk.sate yields { des. pr. m. sg. 3 }[d.r"s_1] and bibhik.se yields { des. pft. m. sg. 3 | des. pft. m. sg. 1 }[bhaj]. N.B. Do not attempt to lemmatize verbal forms with preverbs - this will not work, it knowns only how to invert root forms. Lemmatizing more complex constructions is possible through the Sanskrit Reader below.Declined forms
A dictionary of inflected forms of Sanskrit words is provided. The declensions of all substantives, adjectives, pronouns and numerals is available as a PDF file Volume I. A second volume contains the conjugated forms of roots in the present, imperfect, imperative, optative, perfect, aorist and future tenses as another PDF document Volume II. A third volume Volume III contains participial forms, a fourth Volume IV absolutives, infinitives and other undeclinable words, and a fifth Volume V gives additional generative morphemes. These morphological databanks are now released as free Sanskrit linguistic resources in XML form.Sanskrit Reader
Try our experimental Sanskrit Reader. It is able to segment simple sentences. You may use it to analyse sandhi from compounds in the Segmentation mode. Try for instance to segment "sugandhi.mpu.s.tivardhanam". Then push the "Tagging" button and get the fully tagged sentence. For a simple sentence, try "maarjaarodugdha.mpibati", or "tacchrutvaasa~njaya uvaaca". The precise grammar used to generate sentences is given here as a local automaton graph. In this diagram, transparent nodes are non generative, and colored nodes correspond to the lexical categories recognized by the lemmatizer. The category Auxi is the subset of Verb consisting of conjugated forms of roots "k.r", "as" and "bhuu" used as auxiliaries in periphrastic constructions. In the current version, participles are not systematically generated, the most frequent ones being explicitly lexicalized in category Noun. Pv denotes sequences of preverbs.Sanskrit Parser
If in the reader you press the "Parsing" button, many irrelevant pseudo-solutions are eliminated. Try for instance example "hya.hsaayamaha.mpitraasahavipa.nimagaccham". There are 234 potential segmentation solutions, but the parser keeps only 6. Sentences may be broken with spaces for piecewise reading and for curbing down overgenerative items. For instance, if you cut the previous sentence in two chunks, entering "hya.hsaayamaha.mpitraasaha vipa.nimagaccham", only two solutions are proposed, the first of which being the intended one. Each solution returned with the parser is marked with a green check sign, which may be pressed to get the semantic analysis of the sentence in terms of roles (kāraka).Sanskrit Tagger
The semantic analysis is still ambiguous, since a given segment may be decorated by several morphological categories. All interpretations are presented under the role matrix, sorted by increasing penalty. Check for your favorite interpretation in this list, and select it by clicking on its green heart symbol. The system will return the corresponding unambiguously tagged sentence, as a page which you may save on your own station. Iterating this process allows you to progressively tag a Sanskrit text with the Sanskrit platform assistance.Other Sanskrit Resources
We have on on-going cooperation with the Department of Sanskrit Studies of the University of Hyderabad on computer treatment of Sanskrit. A joint team of investigation has been formed, together with participants from Rashtriya Sanskrit Vidyapeetha, Tirupati and IIT Mumbai. In october 2007 we organized the First International Sanskrit Computational Linguistics Symposium. Please visit the Symposium Site. This was followed by the Second Symposium in may 2008 at Brown University, and by a third one in january 2009 at Hyderabad University. The computational tools for Sanskrit developed at University of Hyderabad are available here as a Mirror Site.
The Zen Library
This site reflects an ongoing project of Sanskrit processing
on a comprehensive software platform.
The project is based on a structured lexicographic database, compiled from
the Sanskrit Heritage dictionary, and on
the Zen computational linguistics toolkit. This toolkit is a library
of programs implemented in Pidgin ML, functional core of the
Objective Caml
programming language. The Zen library and its documentation are available
as free software under the Gnu Lesser General Public License (LGPL) from the
Zen site.
The Sanskrit Portal
Please visit our Sanskrit Portal
to find links to other Sanskrit resources.
Artwork credits
Orissan artwork at this site © B. K. Arts & Crafts,
Bhubaneshwar, Orissa. All rights reserved.
Wallpaper om images courtesy of Vishvarupa.com.
Ganesh wallpaper courtesy of François Patte.
Shri Yantra design © Gérard Huet 1990.
