Introduction to the Sanskrit Heritage Platform
The Sanskrit Heritage Dictionary
This site provides the service of the Sanskrit Heritage Dictionary, a small hypertext
encyclopedia of Indian Culture, arranged according to Sanskrit entries.
This site also gives access to automated lexical and grammatical resources for Sanskrit.
These more advanced services are explained in the following section on the
Sanskrit Engine.
The Sanskrit Heritage Dictionary is an avatar of a Sanskrit to French Dictionary
"Dictionnaire Français de l'Héritage Sanskrit" compiled by
Gérard Huet since 1994. This dictionary is still freely available
as a 641 pages book under the pdf format.
It is automatically updated with the site,
being now a computer-generated by-product of the lexical database.
The lexical database is designed as a multilingual facility, but in the present
version it is limited to English for grammatical tools and general navigation
help, and to French for meanings of the vocables. Input queries must use
transliteration (this is explained in the Help facility in the green band at
the bottom of this page). Output uses Unicode representations of both
romanisations (roman letters with diacritics) and devanāgarī text.
There is more to Indian culture than Sanskrit can carry, but Sanskrit is
adequate to render the traditional brâhmanical culture, including
Buddhism and Jainism.
The Sanskrit name which renders best our encyclopedic intention is
saṃskṛtībharatīyakoṣa -
Treasure of India according to Perfected tradition.
Knowledge in this tradition is transmitted by lineages of seers
(paraṃparā). Some of this knowledge is available in the West through
Indological litterature, but often in dessicated form. Many sources were used
to compile the current knowledge, and inevitable mistakes occur, not to speak
of glaring omissions. We pray the reader who knows better to signal such
overcomings to us.
Entries in the dictionary are arranged by vocables, which may be verbs or nouns.
Verbs comprise verbal roots, but also their variations with prefix strings of
preverb particles, and secondary formations for causatives, intensives and
desideratives.
Nouns comprise noun roots, primary noun derivatives from verbs, secondary noun
derivatives by suffixes from primary ones, and compounds.
The first two categories are individual entries
at toplevel, the others are sub-entries of a vocable, or sub-sub entries.
Adjectives are just semantic roles of nouns. Pronouns and numbers are
subclasses of nouns. Undeclinable adverbs and tool particles complete the
lexical categories. Idiomatic expressions and a few citations are listed
at the end of entries at any level.
Two index engines are provided.
The main index
requires exactly transliterated input, possibly an initial
prefix of an existing entry, possibly some inflected form of a declined noun
or a conjugated verb.
The Sanskrit made easy
index requires a romanized input for a full word, without diacritics and
aspiration marks, for easy access to words like Siva, Visnu, Panini,
Sankara, etc.
The Sanskrit Engine
The Sanskrit Engine consists in a number of tools accessible online on the
Sanskrit Heritage site. These various tools are available through interfaces
easily reached from the green band at the bottom of your browser panel.
Sandhi
The Sandhi Engine takes two phoneme streams (input as transliterated strings)
and gives as result their sandhi euphonic composition. There are two modes,
external for glueing together words in a sentence, as well as composing,
and internal, for appending of affixes to stems, in morphological derivations.
We provide a deterministic answer, that is a choice is made when optional
forms are admitted. A fuller non-functional sandhi relation is used by the
segmenter, in order to recognize the optional variants.
Grammar
The Sanskrit Grammarian gives you declined forms of nouns and conjugated
forms of root verbs. It is the workhorse of morphological derivation.
For nouns you must provide the base stem, and the intended gender. For verbs
you must provide the root and its present class. The resulting table of
inflected forms is displayed either in diacritics,
or in devanāgarī text, according to the user's choice in the
input buttons.
This morphological engine is available from within the dictionary pages,
where the gender indications of nouns, and the present family indications
of roots, are active links which activate the Sanskrit Grammarian with the
right parameters.
Stemmer
Conversely, an inflected form which is derivable from the dictionary entries
is retrievable, with its morphological taggings, from the
Stemmer.
The user must provide the lexical category where to search the word.
There is some redundancy between the Noun and the Part banks.
Thus a word form such as gataḥ may be found in Noun,
tagged as { nom. sg. m. }[gata], as well as in Part,
tagged as { nom. sg. m. }[gata { pp. }[gam]].
Reader
The Sanskrit Reader Companion allows the analysis of Sanskrit sentences.
We refer to the section Reader of our
entry page for the explanation of its various uses.
In case of difficulty with the use of these various tools, please consult
our page of frequently asked questions
Faq.
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