Introduction to the Sanskrit Heritage Site
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 630 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 transliterations 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 quotations 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 compounds, 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 { pp. nom. sg. m. }[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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