Author: J S Speijer
Foreword/Introduction: H Kern
Publisher: Motilal Banarsidass
Year: 2009
Language: multilingual
Pages: 402
ISBN/UPC (if available): 9788120804838
Description
Sanskrit grammar has remained, for long, professedly deficient in its treatment of Syntax, in spite of the labours of Delbruck, De Saussure, and Whitney in this field. The present work is an attempt to remove this deficiency. Herein the author has presented a vivid portrait of Syntax as it is represented by Classical Sanskrit literature, Vedic prose and Epics.
The book is divided in to six sections. Section I opens with the general remarks on the structure of sentences. Section II explains concord and case-relations. Section III deals with the different classes of nouns and pronouns. Sections IV, V, VI discuss the syntax of verbs, particles and sentences.
The book is the result of the author's observations of original sources .which he quotes in plenty. Majority of examples cited by him are selected from the works of well-known authors and this has made the work both authoritative and interesting. Among the ancient grammarians, he has followed Panini, whose rules are referred to at; every step,
The study is documented with an introduction and index of Sanskrit words.
REVIEW:
The purpose, in writing this book, is to provide a self-contained primer, workbook and reader for teaching first-rear Sanskrit students with no previous linguistic training. The author has tried throughout the work to introduce, explain and illustrate the most significant features of the language and through verses, quotations, and reading.
To these ends the grammar has been, in several areas, simplified to prevent the beginner from being more hampered than is absolutely necessary by relatively insignificant paradigms, rules, and exceptions. Upon completion of this course, students should have a real working knowledge of the major outlines of Sanskrit sentences with some facility and read, with the help of dictionary, approximately five to ten verses of the Valmiki Ramayana or a similar text in an hour of thinking found in the earlier texts could be integrated into a more comprehensive, structured system of thought.
– Devavanipravesika-An Introduction to the Sanskrit Language-Robert P. Goldman, Sally J. Sutherland Goldman
The present Reader has a modest goal — to add to Lanman’s Vedic selections and, in so doing, to offer beginning Sanskrit students and avenue to the Vedic language.
A selection of Upanisadic texts has a better chance of arousing student’s interest in the enormously rich tradition of Vedic language and literature. Moreover, the Upanisads tend to employ a more interesting rhetorical style than the often rather turgid presentation of earlier Vedic Prose; they provide a window on aspects of the social and cultural life of their time, including the status of women; they even offer glimpses of humour. The Reader is supplemented by an Appendix, Selection XX, which gives related texts, mainly from the earlier Vedic literature, but including one post-Vedic Upanisadic text that may provide a glimpse of how the different strands of thinking found in the earlier texts could be integrated into a more comprehensive, structured system of thought.
- An Early Upanisadic Reader-With, Notes, Glossary and an Appendix of related Vedic texts-Hans Henrich Hock