Part 3: Alphabets, Nouns, Verbs and Sentences

In most languages, a sentence is a group of words strung together that conveys a complete meaningful thought. Words can be either nouns or verbs. A word in turn is made up of letters. Letters can be vowels or consonants. It is the same in Sanskrit also. Let us explore these fundamentals in more detail.

Letters

Sanskrit uses the Devanagari script. The following chart depicts the Sanskrit Vowels and Consonants.

Sanskrit Alphabet Chart

In addition, the basic letters, there are also combined/ conjunct letters like क्र्, क्ष्, प्ल् etc. (For more information, refer to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanskrit.).

There is utmost importance to pronunciation of alphabets. Key aspects that matter are the position of the mouth and the amount of breath taken when pronouncing. The following diagram gives a pictorial representation of this:

The table below shows the position of each letter.

Letter Positions

Nouns

In Sanskrit, every noun has a specific context i.e. whether it is the subject / doer, object, instrument of action etc. This context is added as a suffix to the base noun word. There are 7 such context suffixes and these are called Vibhaktis.

Consider the following long sentence that I just made up.

Mother is cooking food for Krishna with a spoon in a pot.

The underlined word is the verb. All others are nouns In Sanskrit this is written as

माता कृष्णाय चमसेन भोजनं स्थाल्याम् पचति

Maata Krishnaaya Camasena Bhojanam Sthaalyaam Pachati

• Mother (Maata) is the subject

• Food (Bhojanam) is the object

• Spoon is the instrument so Camasa becomes Camasena

• Pot being the location so Sthaali becomes Sthaalyaam

• Krishna being the recipient becomes Krishnaaya

• Lastly, cook being the verb becomes Pachati

Thus, you can see that the context of the noun is built into the word itself in the form of a suffix. Nouns are gender specific and can be singular, dual or plural.

There are 7 types of noun contexts (Vibhaktis). The following table shows the types of declensions (Vibhkatis) with some examples.

Overview of Vibhaktis

Nouns also have a root called a Praatipadikam (प्रातिपदिकम्) which are generated from the original dhaatus. Thus, for a noun-root like Raama, the Vibhakti table looks like the below. Note the noun endings:

Example Vibhkati table for Rama (Masculine Noun ending in a)

Verbs

We saw the form माता पचति  meaning “Mother cooks” in the earlier example, cook being the verb. Just like in English, verbs have tenses and moods e.g. to cook, will cook, should cook, had cooked, having cooked etc. They also have persons e.g. I, You, He/She/They. Lastly there are also numbers, i.e. Singular, Dual, Plural etc.  Suffixes are added to verb roots (Remember धातु dhaatus that we discussed in the previous post) to convey the tense/mood, person and number.

The following table shows the conjugations for the root verb गम् (Gam) meaning “To go” in the 5 commonly used tenses/moods.

Verb table for Gam dhaatu (To go)

Indeclinables etc

There are some words that do not decline. They are called avyayas (अव्यय). These remain the same irrespective of the gender or number. Examples include words like अपी (also), वा (or), कुत्र (where), कदा (when), च् (and) etc.

And then there are compound words. We will discuss them in a later post.

Making a meaningful sentence

Now that we know the basic word formations, we can use the noun and verb roots to make a meaningful sentence.

We have already seen one example above. Some other examples:

Raama’s wife is Sita àरामस्य पत्नी सीता

Girls are playing in the school à बालिकाः पाठशाले क्रीडन्ति

Raama killed Raavana à रामः रावणम् मारैयति

Phew! That was a long post. I hope you are now able to understand the basic structure of the Sanskrit language. In the next few posts, we will look at how words and letters combine.

As always, I look forward to your feedback.