This course of fteen lessons is intended to lift the Englishsp eaking student who
knows nothing of Sanskrit to the level where he can intelligently apply Monier
Williams dictionary and the DhatuPat ha to the study of the scriptures
The rst ve lessons cover the pronunciation of the basic Sanskrit alphab et
together with its written form in b oth Devanagar and transliterated Roman
ash cards are included as an aid The notes on pronunciation are largely
descriptive based on mouth p osition and e ort with similar English Received
Pronunciation sounds o ered where p ossible The next four lessons describ e
vowel emb ellishments to the consonants the principles of conjunct consonants
and additions to and variations in the Devanagar alphab et Lessons ten and
eleven present sandhi in grid form and explain their principles in sound The
next three lessons p enetrate MonierWilliams dictionary through its four levels
of alphab etical order and suggest strategies for nding dicult words The
last lesson shows the extraction of the artha from the DhatuPat ha and the
application of this and the dictionary to the study of the scriptures
In addition to the primary course the rst eleven lessons include a B section
which intro duces the student to the principles of sentence structure in this fully
in ected language Six declension paradigms and class conjugation in the
present tense are used with a minimal vo cabulary of nineteen words In the B
part of lessons ten and eleven the principles of comp ound words are intro duced
The course aims at a practical understanding of the basic principles at getting
a feel for the language and not a learning of rules by rote To this end each
lesson concludes with exercises for the student to put that understanding into
practice answers to the exercises are presented in an app endix
Author(s): Charles Wikne
Year: 1996
