Verbal form of “to be” is taken as implied:Į.g., “The demon (is) arisen” “Rama (is) having-remembered ”.3 Past passive participle These are adjectives: E.g., “The arisen demon walked”, “Having-remembered Rama arrived.” Some authors suggest these be used as simple past tense verbs when there is no verb present in the sentence: E.g., “The demon arose” “Rama remembered. perfect active participle): ”) ktavatu (“ending in tavat ”) Perfect active-P participle: kvasu (“ending in vas”) Perfect active-Ᾱ participle: kānac (“ending in āna”) Rama went to the forest.” Past active participle and and perfect active participle E.g., “Having remembered, Rama went to the forest” or, “After remembering , This signals an action that was completed before some other event. Ktva ̄nta (“ending in tva ̄”) / lyabanta (“ending in ya”)Į.g., “The words are to-beremembered ” (i.e., “The words ought to be remembered”). Sanskrit Term ṣyatkāle kṛ danta bhavi ṣyatkāle dantaĮ.g., “The about-to-remember man asked a question.”įuture passive participle (a.k.a. PARTICIPLES / KṚDANTA -S (“ending in kṛt -s”)2 English Term Future active participle “over-making”)Įxpresses location: “in”, “on”, “at”, etc. Saptamī (“7th”) or adhikaraṇa (“location” lit. Instrumental sense or in the sense of accompaniment). (“giving over completely, bestowing”) Genitive Sanskrit Term pan͂camī camī (“5th”) or apādāna Ĭonversion of the International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration to Harvard-Kyoto IASTĮxplanation of Grammatical Terms NOUN CASES / VIBHAKTI -S (“separations, divisions”) English Term Ablative For an understanding of whythese whythese changes occur, I recommend Robert P. For a basic outline of the rules, see McComas Taylor’s TheLittleRed BookofSanskritParadigms. The Sanskrit sandhi rules have not been included here because they can be be found in many books. English uses sandhi, too: for example,the changing of ato ato anbefore anbefore vowels. IAST can be easily converted into HK according to the chart on the following page.Ī Sanskrit term meaning “holding together”, sandhi (or saṃ sounds -both across word saṃdhi ) is the alteration of sounds- boundaries (external sandhi) and within words (internal sandhi) -that simplifies pronunciation. One downside is that this alphabet cannot be typed into the search box of the online Monier-Williams Dictionary: text must be inputted using ITRANS (Indian Languages Transliteration), HK (Harvard-Kyoto), (Harvard-Kyoto), or SLP1 (Sanskrit Library P honetic Basic). I chose to transliterate using the IAST (International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration) because I find this to be the most readable of the Romanized Sanskrit alphabets. For example, the line in Kena III.1 which I have translat ed as “Ours, indeed, is this victory” is, if t ranslatedĮxactly, “Ours indeed this victory”. It is important to note that Sanskrit texts often omit derivatives of “to be”, so the reader must usually add these at their discretion. To list all of these possibilities in every ca se would have been cumbersome, but I did make note of different possibilities at t imes. This is followed by the root (again separated from prefixes and suffixes). After verbs, I have listed the person, number, mood, voice, and, when applicable, secondary conjugations. In many cases, I have listed the verbal root from which the stem is derived, and have written any prefixes or suffixes separately. It is generally the noun stem (with or without prefixes) that must be entered into the online Monier-Williams Dictionary in order to obtain results. The grammatical notes are structured as follows: After nouns, I have listed the gender, case, and number, followed by the stem (or, for pronouns, the base). In the right-hand column, each Sanskrit word is listed without sandhi 1, followed by bracketed grammatical notes and a few possible renderings. At the top of t he left-hand column is the transliterated text, and beneath this is a suggested translation. The format of this translation closely follows that of Winthrop Sargeant’s translation of th e Bhagavad-Gītā. This translation allows readers with no knowledge of Sanskrit to explore the different possible meanings of the text with the help of the Monier-Williams Sanskrit-English Dictionary, which can be accessed online. Because of this, many translations are often possible for a given passage. Introduction Sanskrit is an inherently vague language: not only are there various possible renderings for individual words, but the word order is quite loose. Please email me if you have questions or corrections: