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Kannada Language

Kannada language

Kannada (ಕನ್ನಡ; also, less commonly, Kanarese) is one of the major Dravidian languages of southern India. Speakers of its various dialects number roughly 40 million people. It is the state language of Karnataka, one of the four southern states in India. It is written using the Kannada script.

History

Perhaps being the oldest language next to Sanskrit, Prakrit, and Tamil, Kannada country and language have a rich heritage. 'Kavirajamarga' of king Nripatunga Amoghavarsha of the Rashtrakuta dynasty(9th century A.D.) is believed to be the earliest literary work in Kannada (Ref: History of Kannada literature, Dr. Jyothsna Kamat). The first record on Kannada language is traced to Emperor Ashoka's Brahmagiri edict dated 230 BC. The development of Kannada as a distinct language from a proto-Dravidian language is probably impossible to date. However, the written tradition of this language is around 1500-1600 years based on the archeological evidences. The initial development of the Kannada language is similar to that of other Dravidian languages. During later centuries, Kannada, along with Telugu, has been highly influenced by Sanskrit vocabulary and literary styles. Kannada is a highly inflected language with three genders (masculine, feminine, neutral or common) and two numbers (singular, plural). It is inflected for gender, number and tense, among other things.

Dialects

There is also a sharp distinction between the spoken and written forms of the language. Spoken Kannada tends to vary from region to region. The written form is more or less constant throughout Karnataka, however. The ethnologue identifies about 20 dialects of Kannada. Notable of them are Kunda (spoken exclusively in Kundapura), Havyaka (spoken mainly by Havyaka Brahmanas of Dakshina Kannada, Uttara Kannada, Shimoga, Sagara, and Udupi districts), Are Bhashe (spoken mainly in Sullia region of Dakshina Kannada), Soliga Kannada, Badaga Kannada, Gulbarga Kannada and Dharavada Kannada, Chitradurga Kannada.....

Classification

The written Kannada language has come under various religious and social influences in its 1600 years of known existence. Linguists generally divide the written form into four broad categories.
- Poorvada Halegannada (Pre-ancient Kananda) : This is the language of Halmidi scripture thought to be from fourth or fifth century.
- Halegannada (Ancient Kannada) : From ninth century CE onwards, until fourteenth century Kannada works were classified under 'Ancient Kannada'. In this period Kannada developed into a matured language. Mostly Jain and Saivite poets produced works in this period.
- Nadugannada ( Middle Kannada) : In this period Brahmanical Hinduism had a great influence on Kannada. A Kannada grammar based on Sanskrit grammar was developed by Keshiraja Bhatta. Language itself Sanskritized to a large extent. Non-brahmin Hindu saints like Kanakadasa also produced devotional poems in this period.
- Hosagannada ( Modern Kannada) : The Kannada works produced by the end of nineteenth century and later are classified under Hosagannada or Modern Kannada. However, till the beginning of twentieth century there were Kannada literary works that could still be classified under Middle Kannada. Most notable among them is poet Muddana's works. Sometimes, his works were described as the 'dawn of Modern Kannada'. Generally, linguists treat Indira Bai or Saddharma Vijayavu by Gulvadi Venkata Raya as the first literary work in Modern Kannada. Modern Kannada in twentieth century has been influenced by many movements. Notable among them are Navodaya, Navya, Dalita/Bandaya. Gulvadi Venkata Raya

Geographic distribution

Kannada is mainly spoken in Karnataka in India, and to a good extent in the neighbouring states of Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and in Kerala. There are significant Kannada speaking populations in the United States and the United Kingdom, and to a lesser extent in Canada and Australia.

Official status

Australia Kannada is one of the 22 official languages of India and is the official language of the state of Karnataka.

Kannada script

The language has 52 letters phonemic and according to academic profile 49 letters are present in Kannada language. These 49 letters are divided into two groups: Swaragalu (15 letters) and "Vyanjanagalu" (34 letters), similar to the vowels and consonants of English, respectively. The character set is almost identical to that of other Indian languages. The script itself, derived from brahmi script, is fairly complicated like most other languages of India owing to the occurrence of various combinations of "half-letters", or symbols that attach to various letters in a manner similar to diacritical marks (such as aigüe, grave, and cédille marks) in the Romance languages. The number of written symbols, however, is far more than the 52 characters in the alphabet, because different characters can be combined to form compound characters (ottaksharas). Each written symbol in the Kannada script corresponds with one syllable, as opposed to one phoneme in languages like English. The script of Kannada is also used in other languages such as Tulu, Kodava Thakk and Konkani.

Transliteration

Several transliteration schemes are used to type Kannada characters using a standard keyboard. These include Baraha (based on ITRANS) and Nudi, the government of Karnataka's standard for Kannada transliteration.

Unicode

Extinct Kannada Letters

Until thirteenth century, Kannada literary works employed letters 'rh', 'lh(zh)', whose manner of articulation most plausibly could be akin to those in present day Malayalam. Tamil is supposed to exhibit only 'lh' and not 'rh'. The later Kannada works replaced 'rh' and 'lh' with ರ(ra) and ಳ(La) respectively. Another letter (or unclassified vyanjana(consonant)?) that has become extinct is 'nh' or 'inn'(Again this has its equivalent in Malayalam). The usage of this consonant was observed until the 1980s in mostly coastal Karnataka(especially, Dakshina Kannada district) Kannada works. Now hardly any mainstream works use this consonant. This letter has been replaced by ನ್(consonant n).

The Dictionary

A German priest Reverend Ferdinand Kittel composed the first Kannada dictionary consisting of more than 70,000 words.

External links

;General
- [http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=KJV Ethnolouge report for Kannada]
- [http://brahmi.sourceforge.net/docs/KannadaComputing.html Description of the Kannada language]
- [http://www.kamat.com/kalranga/kar/literature/history1.htm History of Kannada Language and Literature]
- [http://www.hpnadig.net/blog/index.php/archives/2004/10/25/more-kannada-websites-on-the-net/ List of Kannada websites on the Internet] ;Learning Resources
- [http://learning.sampada.net/ Kannada Learning Center]
- [http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~kulki/kannada/varna.html Learn Kannada (with audio)]
- [http://www.bangalorebest.com/discoverbangalore/learnkanada/index.asp Learn Kannada]
- [http://www.udupipages.com/pages/kanada1.html Basic sentences in Kannada]
- [http://www.iit.edu/~laksvij/language/kannada.html Indian Language Converter] A means to transliterate from romanized English to Unicode Kannada Category:Abugida writing systems Category:Dravidian languages Category:Languages of India ja:カンナダ語

Dravidian languages

The Dravidian family of languages includes approximately 26 languages that are mainly spoken in southern India and Sri Lanka, as well as certain areas in Pakistan, Nepal, and eastern and central India. Dravidian languages are spoken by more than 200 million people, and they appear to be unrelated to languages of other known families. A few scholars include the Dravidian languages in a larger Elamo-Dravidian language family, which includes the ancient Elamite language of what is now southwestern Iran; but this is not accepted by most of the Dravidianists.

History

The origins of the Dravidian languages, as well as their subsequent development and the period of their differentiation, are unclear, and the situation is not helped by the lack of comparative linguistic research into the Dravidian languages. There are striking similarities between the Dravidian and Uralic and Altaic language groups, which suggest prolonged contact between the language families at some stage although a common origin appears unlikely. Inconclusive attempts have also been made to link the family with the Japonic languages, Basque, Korean, Sumerian, the Australian Aboriginal languages and the unknown language of the Indus valley civilisation. Legends common to many Dravidian-speaking groups speak of their origin in a vast, now-sunken continent far to the south. Many linguists, however, tend to favour the theory that speakers of Dravidian languages spread southwards and eastwards through the Indian subcontinent, based on the fact that the southern Dravidian languages show some signs of contact with linguistic groups which the northern Dravidian languages do not. Proto-Dravidian is thought to have differentiated into Proto-North Dravidian, Proto-Central Dravidian and Proto-South Dravidian around 1500 BC, although some linguists have argued that the degree of differentiation between the sub-families points to an earlier split. The existence of the Dravidian language family was first suggested in 1816 by Alexander D. Campbell in his Grammar of the Teloogoo Language, in which he and Francis W. Ellis argued that Tamil and Telugu were descended from a common, non-Indo-European ancestor. However, it was not until 1856 that Robert Caldwell published his Comparative grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian family of languages, which considerably expanded the Dravidian umbrella and established it as one of the major language groups of the world. Caldwell coined the term "Dravidian" from the Sanskrit drāvida, which was used in a 7th century text to refer to the languages of the south of India. The publication of the Dravidian etymological dictionary by T. Burrow and M. B. Emeneau was a landmark event in Dravidian linguistics.

List of Dravidian languages

National languages of India are in boldface:

Southern

- Tamil
- Kannada
- Malayalam
- Tulu
- Bellari
- Toda
- Kota
- Koraga
- Badaga
- Kurumba
- Irula
- Kodava Thakk (Kodagu)

South Central

- Telugu (తెలుగు)
- Gondi
-
-
- Konda
- Manda
- Pengo
- Kui
- Kuvi

Central

- Kolami
- Naiki
- Parji
- Gadaba

Northern

- Brahui (the only Dravidian language not spoken in India, Sri Lanka, or Nepal; it is spoken in Baluchistan in Pakistan)
- Kurukh
- Malto

Phonology

Dravidian languages are noted for the lack of distinction between voiced and unvoiced stops, like Finnish. While Dravidian languages (especially Malayalam, Kannada and Telugu) have large numbers of loan words from Sanskrit and other Indo-European languages, which do make distinctions in voice and aspiration, the words are often mispronounced by monolingual Dravidian speakers. In fact, the Tamil alphabet lacks symbols for voiced and aspirated stops. Dravidian languages are also characterized by a three-way distinction between dental, alveolar, and retroflex places of articulation as well as large numbers of liquids.

Reversal property

Words in Dravidian languages have the property that, by reversing the consonants and applying a well defined set of transformations of the vowels, another word with a similar meaning is obtained. Over time, one form may represent the general case and the other end up representing a special case. For example:
- Erasu (gather) and sEru (join)
- kaNu (look) and iNuku (peep)
- atta (attic) reverses to itself.

Words starting with vowels

A substantial number of words also begin and end with vowels, which helps the languages' agglutinative property. aLu (cry), elumbu (bone), adu (that), alli (there), idu (this), illai (no, absent) adu-idil-illai (that-this-in-absent = that is absent in this)

Sanskrit influence

Kannada, Malayalam and Telugu have been relatively more influenced by the Indo-European language Sanskrit and have borrowed the aspirated consonants. Sanskrit words and derivatives are common in Kannada, Malayalam and Telugu. Tamil is the least influenced and retains the closest form of the Proto-Dravidian language.

References

- The Dravidian Languages / by Bhadriraju Krishnamurti / Cambridge University Press, 2003. ISBN 0521771110
- A comparative grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian family of languages / by Robert Caldwell. 3rd ed. rev. and edited / by J.L. Wyatt, T. Ramakrishna Pillai. New Delhi : Asian Educational Services, 1998. ISBN 8120601173
- A grammar of the Teloogoo language, commonly termed the Gentoo, peculiar to the Hindoos inhabiting the northeastern provinces of the Indian peninsula / by A.D. Campbell. 3d ed. Madras, Printed at the Hindu Press, 1849

External links

- [http://dsal.uchicago.edu/dictionaries/burrow/index.html Dravidian Etymological Dictionary]. The complete dravidian etymological dictionary in a searchable online form.
- [http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=90422 Dravidian languages page in SIL Ethnologue].
- [http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/4737/dravid1.html Dravidian vs. Finnish] A tract which claims to draw a relation between Dravidian and Finno-Ugric languages.
- [http://www.datanumeric.com/dravidian/ Discovery of Dravidian as the source of Indo-European Languages]. A paper claiming that Proto-Dravidian is the common ancestor of Indo-European languages.
- [http://www.verbix.com/documents/etruscan-dravidian.htm Dravidian from Etruscan] Paper claiming a relationship between Dravidian and Etruscan.
- [http://www.atlan.org/articles/dravida/ Dravidian origin of the Guanches]. A paper claiming a Dravidian origin for the language of the Guanches.
- [http://arutkural.tripod.com/tolcampus/jap-tamil.htm Tamil and Japanese]
- http://www.brahui.tk A site by Shafique-Ur-Rehman, Its all about Brahui People live mostly in Balochistan, Pakistan. Category:Agglutinative languages
- Category:Languages of Asia ja:ドラヴィダ語族

Karnataka

Karnataka (ಕನಾ೯ಟಕ in Kannada) is one of the four southern states of India. Before 1973, the state was known as Mysore state, as it was formed out of the former Kingdom of Mysore in 1950, and enlarged in 1956 to include the Kannada-speaking regions of neighboring states. Karnataka's capital Bangalore is the only city in the state with a population of more than 1 million. Other major cities include Mysore, Mangalore, Hubli-Dharwad, Bellary and Belgaum. Kannada is the official language of Karnataka. As of 2001, it is one of 10 Indian states with a population greater than 50 million.

Geography

Karnataka is bordered by the Arabian Sea to the west, Goa to the northwest, Maharashtra to the north, Andhra Pradesh to the east, Tamil Nadu to the east and southeast, and Kerala to the southwest. It is situated at the angle where the western and eastern mountain ranges of South India converge into the Nilgiri Hills. The state has three principal physical zones;
- The coastal strip, between the Western Ghats and the Arabian Sea, which is lowland, with moderate to high rainfall levels. This strip is around 320 km in length and 48-64 km wide.
- The Western Ghats, a mountain range inland from the Arabian Sea, rising to about 900m average height, and with moderate to high rainfall levels.
- The Deccan Plateau, comprising the main inland region of the state, which is drier and verging on the semi-arid. The humidity in these plains or maidans never exceeds 50 percent. There are several suggested etymologies for the name Karnataka. The most reasonable one is that it comes from "karu" + "nadu" meaning "elevated land". It is interesting to note that Karnataka has one of the highest average elevations of Indian states at 1,500 feet. The highest recorded temperature was 45.6 C (114.08 F) at Raichur on May 23, 1928. The lowest recorded temperature was 2.8 C (37.04 F) at Bidar on December 16, 1918.

Districts

see article Districts of Karnataka

Language

Language was the basis for the formation of the Indian states after independence and the new Karnataka state was formed by the inclusion of 9 new districts from the erstwhile Madras State (present day Tamil Nadu), Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh states in 1957. Certain larger districts were further divided for asdministrative convenience resulting in 27 districts in total. The predominant language of Karnataka is Kannada, which is its official language. Other languages include Tamil, Marathi, Konkani, Kodava Thakk, Tulu, Sankethi, Hindi and Urdu.

Economy

Karnataka is one of the more industrialised states in India. Its capital Bangalore has become a major hub of the Information Technology industry. 90% of India's gold production comes from Karnataka, and it is also the IT capital of india. Recently there has been a lot of activity in the extraction of manganese ore from the districts of Bellary and Hospet.

History

Hospet of Karnataka in the 13th century.]] The history of Karnataka dates back to the period of epics. The capital of Vali and Sugriva, 'Vanara Sena' of the Ramayana, is said to have been Hampi in the present day Bellary district. Hidimbasura of Mahabharatha, a cruel and fierce demon, is said to have lived in present day Chitradurga district of Karnataka, who was then exterminated by Bhima who came there along with the other Pandavas and their mother Kunti during the Vanavaasa. Stone transcriptions from the period of Ashoka are the oldest available archaelogical evidence. In the 4th century BCE, a local dynasty called Satavahana came to power, and its rule lasted nearly 300 years. With the disintegration of the Satavahana dynasty, the Kadambas came to power in the north, and the Gangas in the south of the state. The gigantic monolithic statue of Gomateswara is considered to be the monument of the Ganga period. The Chalukyas of Badami (500 to 735) ruled over a wider area, from the Narmada to the Kaveri from the days of Pulikeshi II (609 to 642) who had even defeated Harshavardhana of Kannauj. This dynasty created fine monuments at Badami, Aihole and Pattadakal, both structural and rock-cut. Aihole has been one of the cradles of temple architecture in the country. The Rashtrakutas (753-973) of Malkhed who succeeded them levied tribute on the rulers of Kannauj successively in the so-called Age of 'Imperial Kannauj'. Kannada literature developed in this period. Outstanding Jain scholars of India lived in their court. The Chalukyas of Kalyana (973 to 1183) and their feudatories, the Hoysalas of Halebidu built fine temples, encouraged literature and fine arts. Noted jurist Vijnaneshwara (work-Mitakshara) lived at Kalyana. The great religious leader Basaveshwara was a minister at Kalyana. The Vijayanagar empire (1336 to 1565) fostered indigenous traditions and encouraged arts religion and literature in Sanskrit, Kannada, Telugu and Tamil. Overseas trade flourished. The Bahmani sultans of Gulbarga (later capitals were Bidar and Bijapur) and the Adil Shahi sultans of Bijapur raised fine Indo-Saracenic buildings and encouraged Urdu and Persian literature. After the fall of Maratha Peshwa (1818) and Tipu Sultan of Mysore (1799) Karnataka came under the British. After Indian independence, the Wodeyar Maharaja acceded to India. In 1950, Mysore became an Indian state, and the former Maharaja became its rajpramukh, or governor. After accession to India, the Woyedar family was provided with a pension by the Indian state until 1975, and members of the family still reside in part of their ancestral palace in Mysore. On November 1, 1956 or Rajyotsava Day (Formation Day), Mysore State was enlarged to its present boundaries, incorporating the state of Coorg and the Kannada-speaking portions of neighboring Madras, Hyderabad, and Bombay states, with an elected Chief Minister and state assembly. On November 1 1973 the name of the state was changed to Karnataka.

Natural areas

Karnataka is home to several national parks, including Bandipur National Park in Mysore District, Bannerghatta National Park Savandurga forest Kempegowda Dhama Bangalore District, Nagarhole National Park in Mysore and Kodagu districts, Kudremukh National Park in Dakshina Kannada and Chickmagalur districts, and Anshi National Park in Uttara Kannada District. There are also a number of wildlife sanctuaries and nature preserves. Jog falls of Shimoga District is the highest waterfalls in Asia.

References

External links

- [http://kstdc.nic.in/ Karnataka State Tourism Development Corporation]
- [http://www.karnatakatourism.org/ Karnataka Tourism]
- [http://www.karnataka.gov.in/ Karnataka State Government]
- [http://www.karnatakainformation.org/ Karnataka Government Information Department]
- [http://www.kamat.com/kalranga/kar/ Topics on Karnataka's History and Culture] Category:States and territories of India

States and territories of India

India is subdivided into twenty-eight states, six union territories and the National Capital Territory.

History

Pre-independence

British India, which included all of modern-day India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Bhutan, but not Ceylon, was made up of two types of territorial divisions, provinces and Princely States.

Provinces

Provinces of India were ruled directly by British officials; a governor, chief commissioner, or Administrator, who were appointed by the Viceroy. By 1947 British India had fifteen provinces: Ajmer-Merwara, Assam, Baluchistan, Bengal, Bihar, Bombay, Central Provinces and Berar, Coorg, Delhi, Madras, Northwest Frontier, Orissa, Punjab, Sind, and United Provinces.

Princely States

Princely states were ruled by local, hereditary rulers, who acknowledged British sovereignty in return for local autonomy and British India had hundreds of princely states, which varied greatly in size, from Hyderabad, with a population of over ten million, to tiny states. Most of the princely states were under the authority of a British political agent responsible to the governor of a province. Two divisions, the Central India Agency and Rajputana Agency, consisted of numerous princely states which were governed by a political agent appointed by the Governor-General of India, rather than the governor of a province, and the four largest princely states, Hyderabad, Baroda, Mysore, and Jammu and Kashmir, were directly under the authority of the Governor-General.

Other European Possessions

- Portuguese India included the coastal enclaves of Goa, Daman and Diu, and Dadra and Nagar Haveli,
- French India included five enclaves, Pondichery, Chandernagore, Yanaon, Karikal, and Mahe.
- Danish India (integrated into British India prior to independence

Post-independence

With the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, provinces and princely states were assigned to one country or the other, with two provinces, Punjab and Bengal, partitioned between India and Pakistan along religious lines. Hyderabad's Muslim ruler attempted to remain independent, but the Indian army intervened and Hyderabad was annexed to India. India and Pakistan contested for control of the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir; the state had a Muslim majority, but its Hindu ruler acceded to India. The period from independence in 1947 to the beginning of the Indian republic in 1950 saw the consolidation of the former princely states into new provinces, usually governed by a rajpramukh, (governor) appointed by the Governor-General of India. In 1950, the Indian constitution took effect, the office of the Governor-General was abolished, and India created several different categories of states. Part A states, which were the former provinces, were ruled by an elected governor and state legislature. The nine Part A states were Assam, West Bengal, Bihar, Bombay, Madhya Pradesh (formerly Central Provinces and Berar), Madras, Orissa, Punjab, Uttaranchal, and Uttar Pradesh (formerly United Provinces). The eight Part B states were former princely states or groups of princely states, governed by a rajpramukh. They were Hyderabad, Saurashtra, Mysore, Travancore-Cochin, Madhya Bharat, Vindhya Pradesh, Patiala and East Punjab States Union (PEPSU), and Rajasthan. The ten Part C states included both former princely states and provinces. They were governed by a chief commissioner. The Part C states included Delhi, Kutch, Himachal Pradesh, Bilaspur, Coorg, Bhopal, Manipur, Ajmer, and Tripura. Jammu and Kashmir had special status until 1957. The Andaman and Nicobar Islands was established as a union territory, ruled by a Lieutenant Governor appointed by the central Indian government. The French enclave of Chandernagore voted to join India in 1949, and officially became part of India in 1952, becoming part of the state of West Bengal in 1954. The remainder of French India, Pondichery, Yanaon, Karikal, and Mahe, were administered by India after 1954, formally becoming a union territory in 1962. Dadra and Nagar Haveli was occupied by India 1954, and Goa, Daman, and Diu in 1961, and they subsequently became union territories. In 1953, the Telugu-speaking northern portion of Madras state voted to become the new state of Andhra Pradesh, the first of India's linguistic states.

The States Reorganization Act of 1956

In 1956, the States Reorganization Act took effect, which erased the distinction between parts A, B, and C states, and reorganized state boundaries along linguistic lines. The new states, mostly the former Part A states, were Assam, West Bengal, Bihar, Bombay, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Madras, Mysore (later renamed Karnataka), Orissa, Punjab, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh. Delhi, Himachal Pradesh, Manipur, Tripura, Pondichery, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, and the Laccadive, Mincoy, and Amandivi Islands became union territories. The remainder of the states were merged into the new states or union territories. Several new states and union territories have been created out of existing states since 1956. Bombay State was split into the linguistic states of Gujarat and Maharashtra on May 1 1960. Haryana was created in 1966 out of Punjab. The union territories of Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Mizoram, and Nagaland were created out of Assam. In 2000 three new states were created; Jharkhand was created out of the southern districts of Bihar, Chhattisgarh was created out of eastern Madhya Pradesh, and Uttaranchal was created out of northwestern Uttar Pradesh. The Kingdom of Sikkim was annexed to India as a state in 1975. In addition, several union territories have become states, namely Goa, Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Mizoram, and Nagaland.

Kannada script

The Kannada script is an abugida of the Brahmic family, primarily to write the Kannada language, one of the Dravidian languages in India. It is also used for Konkani and the Tulu language.

General

The script has 49 characters in its alphasyllabary and is phonemic. The Kannada character set is almost identical to that of other Indian languages. The number of written symbols, however, is far more than the 49 characters in the alphasyllabary, because different characters can be combined to form compound characters (ottaksharas). Each written symbol in the Kannada script corresponds with one syllable, as opposed to one phoneme in languages like English. The Kannada writing system is an abugida, with consonants appearing with an inherent vowel. The is classified into three categories: swaras (or vowels), vyanjanas (or consonants) and yogavaahas (part vowel/part consonants). Note: Unicode character entities used below. You will need a font that supports Kannada to see the characters. English transliterations based on Unicode character names listed next to symbol. howÁ

Vowels

There are fourteen vowels (swaras): ಅ (a), ಆ (aa), ಇ (e), ಈ (ee), ಉ (u), ಊ (uu), ಋ (rr), ೠ (between rruu and rrii); ಎ (a~), ಏ (ea), ಐ (ai), ಒ (o), ಓ (oo), ಔ (ou)

Consonants

Two types of consonants are identified in Kannada—the structured consonants and the unstructured consonants. The structured consonants are classified according to where the tongue touches the palate of the mouth and are classified accordingly into five structured groups. The five consonants in each structured group, in order, are voiceless, voiceless aspirate, voiced, voiced aspirate, and nasal.

Structured consonants

Velars - ಕ (ka), ಖ (kha), ಗ (ga), ಘ (gha), ಙ (nga) Palatals - ಚ (ca), ಛ (cha), ಜ (ja), ಝ (jha), ಞ (nya) Retroflex - ಟ (tta), ಠ (ttha), ಡ (dd), ಢ (ddha), ಣ (nna) Dentals - ತ (ta), ಥ (tha), ದ (da), ಧ (dha), ನ (na) Labials - ಪ (pa), ಫ (pha), ಬ (ba), ಭ (bha), ಮ (ma) See place of articulation for more information on tongue positions.

Unstructured Consonants

The unstructured consonants are consonants that do not fall into any of the above structures: ಯ (ya), ರ (ra), ಲ (la), ವ (va), ಶ (sha), ಷ (ssa), ಸ (sa), ಹ (ha), ಳ (lla)

Yogavaahas

The yogavaahas (part-vowel, part consonant) include the anusvara: ಂ (am), and the visarga: ಃ (ah) ǐǔŌ

Numbers

The decimal numbers in the script are: ೦ (0), ೧ (1), ೨ (2), ೩ (3); ೪ (4), ೫ (5), ೬ (6), ೭ (7), ೮ (8), ೯ (9)

External links

- [http://www.unicode.org/unicode/uni2book/ch09.pdf The Unicode Book: Chapter 9] - South and Southeast Asian Scripts (PDF)
- [http://www.omniglot.com/writing/kannada.htm Kannada alphabet] - From Omniglot
- [http://www.iit.edu/~laksvij/language/kannada.html Indian Language Converter] - Transliterate from Romanised to Unicode Kannada Category:Abugida writing systems

Sanskrit

Sanskrit ( संस्कृतम्) is a classical language of India and a liturgical language of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. It has a position in India and Southeast Asia similar to that of Latin and Greek in Medieval Europe, and is a central part of Hindu tradition. Sanskrit is one of the 22 official languages of India. Sanskrit is taught in schools and households throughout India, as a second language. Some Brahmins even identify it as their mother tongue. According to recent reports, it is being revived as a vernacular in the village of Mattur near Shimoga in Karnataka [http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-1199965,curpg-1.cms]. Sanskrit is mostly used as a ceremonial language in Hindu religious rituals in the forms of hymns and mantras. Its pre-classical form of Vedic Sanskrit, the liturgical language of the Vedic religion, is one of the earliest attested members of the Indo-European language family, its most archaic text being the Rigveda. The scope of this article is that of Classical Sanskrit as laid out in the grammar of Panini, roughly around 500 BC. Most Sanskrit texts available today were transmitted orally for several centuries before they were written down in medieval India.

History

500 BC script, Bihar or Nepal, 11th century.]] The word means "refined, consecrated, sanctified". The language referred to as "the refined language" has by definition always been a 'high' language, used for religious and scientific discourse and contrasted with the languages spoken by the people. The oldest surviving Sanskrit grammar is 's ("Eight-Chapter Grammar") dating to ca. the 5th century BC. It is essentially a prescriptive grammar, i. e. an authority that defines (rather than describes) correct Sanskrit, although it contains descriptive parts, mostly to account for Vedic forms that had already passed out of use in Panini's time. Almost every student of Sanskrit hears the traditional story that Sanskrit was created and then refined over many generations (traditionally more than a thousand years) until it was considered complete and perfect. When the term arose in India, "Sanskrit" was not thought of as a specific language set apart from other languages (the people of the time regarded languages more as dialects), but rather as a particularly refined manner of speaking, bearing a similar relation to common language that "Standard" English bears to dialects spoken in the United Kingdom or United States. Knowledge of Sanskrit was a marker of social class and educational attainment, and was taught through close analysis of Sanskrit grammarians such as Pāṇini. This form of the language evolved out of the earlier "Vedic" form, and scholars often distinguish Vedic Sanskrit and Classical Sanskrit as separate languages. However, they are extremely similar in many ways and differ mostly in a few points of phonology, vocabulary, and grammar. But some think that in ancient India there were various dialects of Sanskrit, and Classical Sanskrit is one of these dialects, and Vedic is an earlier stage of another of these dialects; the Vedic dialect had more tendency to change Indo-European [l] into [r]; Vedic changed [d.] and [d.h] into [l.] and [l.h] (with retroflex l) between vowels. Vedic is the language of the Vedas, the earliest sacred texts of India and the base of the Hindu religion. The earliest of the Vedas, the Rigveda, was composed by many authors over hundreds, and probably thousands of years. Recent scholarship traces the composition of the Rigveda to the 3rd or even 4th millennium BCE at a period before the Saraswati River dried up. The Rigveda mentions the Saraswati as the mightiest of all rivers (RV 7.95.2). By 2,500 BCE it had disappeared. The Vedic form of Sanskrit survived until the middle of the first millennium BC. It is around this time that Sanskrit made the transition from a first language to a second language of religion and learning, marking the beginning of the Classical period. A form of Sanskrit called Epic Sanskrit is seen in the Mahabharata and other Hindu epics. This includes more "prakritisms" (borrowings from common speech) than Classical Sanskrit proper. There is also a language dubbed "Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit" by scholars, which is actually a prakrit ornamented with Sanskritized elements, perhaps for purposes of ostentation (see also termination of spoken Sanskrit). There is a strong relationship between the various forms of Sanskrit and the Middle Indo-Aryan "Prakrits", or vernacular languages (in which, among other things, most early Jain and Buddhist texts are written), and the modern Indo-Aryan languages. The Prakrits are probably descended from Vedic, and there is mutual interchange between later forms of Sanskrit and various Prakrits. There has also been reciprocal influence between Sanskrit and the Dravidian languages. European scholarship in Sanskrit, begun by Heinrich Roth and Johann Ernst Hanxleden, led to the proposal of the Indo-European language family by Sir William Jones, and thus played an important role in the development of Western linguistics. Indeed, linguistics (along with phonology, etc.) first arose among Indian grammarians who were attempting to catalog and codify Sanskrit's rules. Modern linguistics owes a great deal to these grammarians, and to this day, key terms for compound analysis are taken from Sanskrit.

Phonology and writing system

See also Shiva Sutra. Classical Sanskrit has 48 phonemes (Vedic Sanskrit has 49). The sounds are described here in their traditional order: vowels, stops and nasals (starting in the back of the mouth and moving forward), and finally the liquids and sibilants. (Note: The long vowels are held about twice as long as their short counterparts. Also, there exists a third, extra-long length for most vowels, which is used in various cases, but particularly in the vocative.)

Simple vowels

Unlike in English, , , and are treated as vowels. Some grammarians mention ॡ , a longer version of , but this does not actually occur in Sanskrit and seems to have been created by analogy with the other vowels. Technically speaking, never occurs in the language at a purely phonetic level. It, however is seen in the genitive plural of vocalic-r stems (मातृ mātṛ mother; पितृ pitṛ father; gen.pl.मातॄणाम् and पितॄणाम् mātṝṇām and pitṝṇām etc.) and explains irregularities in the conjugation of verbs such as d "to tear", and k "to scatter".

Diphthongs (combinations of simple vowels)

Vowels can be nasalized.

Consonants

There is also the anusvāra (), which often appears as nasalization of the preceding vowel or as a nasal homorganic to the following consonant.

Pitch

Vedic Sanskrit is a pitch accent language. Native grammarians define three tones (svara): udātta = 'raised', anudātta = 'not raised', and svarita = 'sounded'. The udātta syllable corresponds to the original Indo-European stress. The svarita is usually the next syllable after an udātta. Probably when the Rigveda was written down, the pitch of speech rose through the udātta and came back down through the following svarita. A svarita which is not next after an udātta is called an "independent svarita". In transliteration udātta is marked with acute accent (´) and independent svarita with a grave accent (`). Independent svarita occurs only where its udātta was lost because of vowel sandhi. Classical Sanskrit is usually pronounced with a stress accent decided by the syllable length pattern of each word.

Sandhi

Sanskrit has an elaborate set of phonological rules called sandhi and which are expressed in writing (except in so-called pada texts). Sandhi refers to combination of words when they are spoken with each other without a gap. Since the word scheme is based on pronunciation, this is no exception. Sandhi rules define how the entire word or phrase sounds when two words are combined or merged. Almost always, the new word sounds like the two words spoken one after other except for euphonic changes at the point where the first word ends and the second one starts. This change depends on the sound with which the first word ends and the sound with which the second word starts. These sounds also form the basis of classification of sandhis. The effects of Sandhi have been carefully observed and described, leading to codified rules of combination. For example, when saying one word ending in i followed by another starting in u, these will be combined into yu. These sandhi rules are not always obeyed in the Vedas. is a combination of two or more words, or sometimes even a phrase, like 'newborn' is for 'newly born'. The meaning of a is normally clear from the itself, though some of the have a meaning very different from their constituent words. These are normally used to refer to some personality, deity or thing by one of its well known characteristics. are also categorized according to the kind of meaning they have and the constituent word that dominates the meaning. plays a key role in many cases, especially in certain expressions. does not have any distortion in the words, although sometimes prefixes and suffixes are used to impart a certain type of meanings to the words. A sandhi always consists of two meaningful words while all constituent words of a may not be meaningful individually. A sandhi may be difficult to understand for a person who is inexperienced in Sanskrit or has a poor vocabulary. It is same with , but they are much easier to understand as they are mostly used in some fixed formats and meanings. Sandhi and add beauty to the language and are extensively used by poets. When a sandhi can be broken in more than one way or a can be interpreted in more than one way, they can be used as puns. There are many examples of such uses in Sanskrit literature.

Script

Veda manuscript in the Sharada script (17th or 18th century)]] Sanskrit historically has had no single script associated with it. Ashoka used the Brahmi script for his pillar inscriptions (which were not in Sanskrit, but in Prakrit dialects and other languages). Roughly contemporary with the Brahmi, the Kharosthi script was used. Later (ca. 4th to 8th centuries AD) the Gupta script, derived from Brahmi, became prevalent. From ca. the 8th century, the Sharada script evolved out of the Gupta script, and was mostly displaced in its turn by Devanagari from ca. the 12th century, with intermediary stages such as the Siddham script. Other scripts used include Kannada in the South, Grantha in Tamil speaking regions, Bengali, and other North Indian scripts in other regions. From the late Middle Ages, and especially in modern times, the Devanagari (meaning "as used in the city of the Gods") script has become the most widely used and associated with Sanskrit. Occasionally, in regions of India where Devanagari is not the script of the vernacular (as it is with Hindi or Marathi) one will find texts still written in the local script. Writing was introduced relatively late to India, and it did not immediately become important since oral learning was the primary means of transmitting knowledge. Rhys Davids suggests that writing may have been introduced from the Middle East by traders, but Sanskrit, which had been used exclusively in sacred contexts, remained a purely oral language until well into India's classical age. It is interesting to note the importance that Sanskrit orthography and Vedic philosophy of sound play in Hindu symbolism, as the varnamala, or sound-garland/alphabet, of 51 letters is also seen to be represented by the 51 skulls of Kali. In the Upanishads, the transcendent-immanent nature of Brahman is represented by the half-matra, or sphota of sound that is inherent to a beat of sound in the Sanskrit system. Since the 19th century, Sanskrit has also been transliterated using the Latin alphabet. Most commonly used today is the IAST (International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration), which has been the academic standard since 1912. Other transliteration schemes have evolved due to difficulties representing Sanskrit characters in computer systems. These include Harvard-Kyoto that was used earlier, and ITRANS, a lossless transliteration scheme that is used widely on the Internet (especially Usenet). For scholarly work, Devanagari has generally been preferred for the transcription and reproduction of whole texts and lengthy excerpts; however, references to individual words and names in texts composed in European languages are usually represented using Roman transliteration.

Grammar

Grammatical tradition

Panini (scholar), Shiva Sutra, Astadhyayi, Dhatupatha, Patanjali, Varadaraja, Laghukaumudi.

Verbs

Classification of verbs

Sanskrit has ten classes of verbs divided into in two broad groups: athematic and thematic. The thematic verbs are so called because an a, called the theme vowel, is inserted between the stem and the ending. This serves to make the thematic verbs generally more regular. Exponents used in verb conjugation include prefixes, suffixes, infixes, and reduplication. Vowel gradation is also very common; every root has (not necessarily all distinct) zero, guṇa, and vṛddhi grades. If V is the vowel of the zero grade, the guṇa-grade vowel is traditionally thought of as a + V, and the vṛddhi-grade vowel as ā + V.

Tense systems

The verbs tenses (a very inexact application of the word, since more distinctions than simply tense are expressed) are organized into four 'systems' (as well as gerunds and infinitives, and such creatures as intensives/frequentatives, desideratives, causatives, and benedictives derived from more basic forms) based on the different stem forms (derived from verbal roots) used in conjugation. There are four tense systems:
- Present (Present, Imperfect, Imperative, Optative)
- Perfect
- Aorist
- Future (Future, Conditional)

Present system

The present system includes the present and imperfect tenses, the optative and imperative moods, as well as some of the remnant forms of the old subjunctive. The tense stem of the present system is formed in various ways. The numbers are the native grammarians' numbers for these classes. For athematic verbs, the present tense stem may be formed through:
- 2) No modification at all, for example ad from ad 'eat'.
- 3) Reduplication prefixed to the root, for example juhu from hu 'sacrifice'.
- 7) Infixion of na or n before the final root consonant (with appropriate sandhi changes), for example rundh or ruṇadh from rudh 'obstruct'.
- 5) Suffixation of nu (guṇa form no), for example sunu from su 'press out'.
- 8) Suffixation of u (guṇa form o), for example tanu from tan 'stretch'. For modern linguistic purposes it is better treated as a subclass of the 5th. tanu derives from tnnu, which is zero-grade for
- tannu, because in Indo-European [m] and [n] could be vowels, which in Sanskrit (and Greek) change to [a]. Most members of the 8th class arose this way; kar = "make", "do" was 5th class in Vedic (krnoti = "he makes"), but shifted to the 8th class in Classical Sanskrit (karoti = "he makes")
- 9) Suffixation of nā (zero-grade nī or n), for example krīṇa or krīṇī from krī 'buy'. For thematic verbs, the present tense stem may be formed through:
- 1) Suffixation of the thematic vowel a with guṇa strengthening, for example, bháva from bhū 'be'.
- 6) Suffixation of the thematic vowel a with a shift of accent to this vowel, for example tudá from tud 'thrust'.
- 4) Suffixation of ya, for example dī́vya from div 'play'. The tenth class described by native grammarians refers to a process which is derivational in nature, and thus not a true tense-stem formation.

Perfect system

The perfect system includes only the perfect tense. The stem is formed with reduplication as with the present system. The perfect system also produces separate "strong" and "weak" forms of the verb — the strong form is used with the singular active, and the weak form with the rest.

Aorist system

The aorist system includes aorist proper (with past indicative meaning, e.g. abhūḥ "you were") and some of the forms of the ancient injunctive (used almost exclusively with mā in prohibitions, e.g. mā bhūḥ "don't be"). The principal distinction of the two is presence/absence of an augment - a- prefixed to the stem. The aorist system stem actually has three different formations: the simple aorist, the reduplicating aorist (semantically related to the causative verb), and the sibilant aorist. The simple aorist is taken directly from the root stem (e.g. bhū-: a-bhū-t "he was"). The reduplicating aorist involves reduplication as well as vowel reduction of the stem. The sibilant aorist is formed with the suffixation of s to the stem.

Future system

The future system is formed with the suffixation of sya or iṣya and guṇa.

Verbs: Conjugation

Each verb has a grammatical voice, whether active, passive or middle. There is also an impersonal voice, which can be described as the passive voice of intransitive verbs. Sanskrit verbs have an indicative, an optative and an imperative mood. Older forms of the language had a subjunctive, though this had fallen out of use by the time of Classical Sanskrit.

Basic conjugational endings

Conjugational endings in Sanskrit convey person, number, and voice. Different forms of the endings are used depending on what tense stem and mood they are attached to. Verb stems or the endings themselves may be changed or obscured by sandhi. Primary endings are used with present indicative and future forms. Secondary endings are used with the imperfect, conditional, aorist, and optative. Perfect and imperative endings are used with the perfect and imperative respectively.

Present system conjugation

Conjugation of the present system deals with all forms of the verb utilizing the present tense stem (explained under Tense Stems above). This includes the present tense of all moods, as well as the imperfect indicative.

Athematic inflection

The present system differentiates strong and weak forms of the verb. The strong/weak opposition manifests itself differently depending on the class:
- The root and reduplicating classes (2 & 3) are not modified in the weak forms, and receive guṇa in the strong forms.
- The nasal class (7) is not modified in the weak form, extends the nasal to ná in the strong form.
- The nu-class (5) has nu in the weak form and nó in the strong form.
- The nā-class (9) has nī in the weak form and nā́ in the strong form. nī disappears before vocalic endings. The present indicative takes primary endings, and the imperfect indicative takes secondary endings. Singular active forms have the accent on the stem and take strong forms, while the other forms have the accent on the endings and take weak forms. The optative takes secondary endings. yā is added to the stem in the active, and ī in the passive. The imperative takes imperative endings. Accent is variable and affects vowel quality. Forms which are end-accented trigger guṇa strengthening, and those with stem accent do not have the vowel affected.

Nominal inflection

Sanskrit is a highly inflected language with three grammatical genders (masculine, feminine, neuter) and three numbers (singular, plural, dual). It has eight cases: nominative, vocative, accusative, instrumental, dative, ablative, genitive, and locative. The number of actual declensions is debatable. In this article they are divided into five declensions. Which declension a noun belongs to is determined largely by form.

a-stems

A-stems comprise the largest class of nominals. As a rule nouns belonging to this class, ending in short-A, are either masculine or neuter. Nouns ending in long-A tend to be feminine. A-stem adjectives take the masculine and neuter in short-A, and feminine in long-A.

i- and u-stems

Long Vowel-stems

ṛ-stems

ṛ-stems are predominantly agental derivatives like dātṛ 'giver', though also include kinship terms like pitṛ́ 'father', mātṛ́ 'mother', and svásṛ 'sister'. See also Devi inflection, Vrkis inflection.

Personal Pronouns and Determiners

The first and second person pronouns are declined for the most part alike, having by analogy assimilated themselves with one another. Note: Where two forms are given, the second is enclitic and an alternative form. Ablatives in singular and plural may be extended by the syllable -tas; thus mat or mattas, asmat or asmattas. The demonstrative ta, declined below, also functions as the third person pronoun.

Compounds

One other notable feature of the nominal system is the very common use of nominal compounds, which may be huge (10+ words) as in some modern languages such as German. Nominal compounds occur with various structures, however morphologically speaking they are essentially the same. Each noun (or adjective) is in its (weak) stem form, with only the final element receiving case inflection. Some examples of nominal compounds include: 1. (co-ordinative) ::These consist of two or more noun stems, connected in sense with 'and', e.g. matara-pitara 'Mother and Father'. Due to these compounds having more than one noun in them, they must be in the dual or plural. 2. (possessive) ::Bahuvrīhi, or "much-rice", denotes a rich person—one who has much rice. Bahuvrīhi compounds refer (by example) to a compound noun with no head -- a compound noun that refers to a thing which is itself not part of the compound. For example, "low-life" and "block-head" are bahuvrihi compounds, since a low-life is not a kind of life, and a block-head is not a kind of head. (And a much-rice is not a kind of rice.) Compare with more common, headed, compound nouns like "fly-ball" (a kind of ball) or "alley cat" (a kind of cat). Bahurvrīhis can often be translated by "possessing..." or "-ed"; for example, "possessing much rice", or "much riced". 3. (determinative) ::There are many tatpuruas (one for each of the nominal cases, and a few others besides); in a tatpurua, the first component is in a case relationship with another. For example, a doghouse is a dative compound, a house for a dog. It would be called a "caturtitatpurua" (caturti refers to the fourth case—that is, the dative). Incidentally, "tatpurua" is a tatpurua ("this man"—meaning someone's agent), while "caturtitatpurua" is a karmadhārya, being both dative, and a tatpurua. An easy way to understand it is to look at English examples of tatpuruas: "battlefield", where there is a genitive relationship between "field" and "battle", "a field of battle"; other examples include instrumental relationships ("thunderstruck") and locative relationships ("towndwelling"). 4. (descriptive) ::The relation of the first member to the last is appositional, attributive or adverbial, e. g. uluka-yatu (owl+demon) is a demon in the shape of an owl. 5. (iterative) ::Repetition of a word expresses repetitiveness, e. g. dive-dive 'day by day', 'daily'.

Syntax

Word order is free with tendency toward SOV.

Numerals

The numbers from one to ten are: The numbers one through four are declined. Éka is declined like a pronomial adjective, though the dual form does not occur. Dvá appears only in the dual. Trí and catúr are declined irregularly:

Influences

Modern-day India

Sanskrit's greatest influence, presumably, is that which it exerted on languages that grew from its vocabulary and grammatical base. Especially among elite circles in India, Sanskrit is prized as a storehouse of scripture and the language of prayers in Hinduism. Like Latin's influence on European languages, Sanskrit has influenced most Indian languages. While vernacular prayer is common, Sanskrit mantras are recited by millions of Hindus and most temple functions are conducted entirely in Sanskrit, often Vedic in form. Most higher forms of Indian vernacular languages like Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, Telugu and Hindi, often called 'shuddha' (pure, higher) are much more heavily Sanskritized. Of modern day Indian languages, while Hindi tends to be, in spoken form, more heavily weighted with Arabic and Persian influence, Bengali and Marathi still retain a largely Sanskrit vocabulary base. The national anthem, Jana Gana Mana is higher form of Bengali, so Sanskritized as to be archaic in modern usages. The national song of India Vande Mataram which is originally a poem - composed by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay and taken from his book called 'Aanandmath', is in pure Sanskrit. Malayalam, which is spoken in the Kerala state of India, also combines a great deal of Sanskrit vocabulary with Tamil (Dravidian) grammatical structure. Kannada, another South Indian language, also contains Sanskrit vocabulary. But as a medium of spiritual instruction for Hindus in India, Sanskrit is still prized and widespread. Sanskrit words are found in many other present-day non-Indian languages. For instance, the Thai language contains many loan words from Sanskrit. For example, in Thai, the Rāvana - the emperor of Sri Lanka is called 'Thoskonth' which is clearly a derivation of his Sanskrit name 'Dashakanth' (of ten necks). And ranged as far as the Philippines, e.g., Tagalog 'gurò' from 'Guru', or 'teacher', with the Hindu seafarers who traded there.

Attempts at revival

Of late, there have been attempts to revive the speaking of this ancient tongue among people, so that vast literature available in Sanskrit can be made easily available to everyone. The CBSE (Central Board of Secondary Education) in India has made Sanskrit a third language in the schools it governs. In such schools, learning Sanskrit is an option for grades 5 to 8. An option between Sanskrit and Hindi (or many other local languages) as a second language exists for grades 9 and 10. Many organizations like the Samskrta Bharati are conducting Speak Sanskrit workshops to popularize the language. About four million people are claimed to have acquired the ability to speak Sanskrit. Sanskrit is claimed to be spoken natively by the population in Mattur, a village in central Karnataka. Inhabitants, of all castes, learn Sanskrit starting in childhood and converse in the language. Even the local Muslims speak and converse in Sanskrit. Historically, the village was given by king Krishnadevaraya of the Vijayanagara Empire to Vedic scholars and their families. People in his kingdom spoke Kannada and Tuluva.

Interactions with Sino-Tibetan languages

Sanskrit and related languages have also influenced their Sino-Tibetan-speaking neighbors to the north through the spread of Buddhist texts in translation. Buddhism was spread to China by Mahayanist missionaries mostly through translations of Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit and classical Sanskrit texts, and many terms were transliterated directly and added to the Chinese vocabulary. (Although Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit is not Sanskrit, properly speaking, its vocabulary is substantially the same, both because of genetic relationship, and because of conscious imitation on the part of composers. Buddhist texts composed in Sanskrit proper were primarily found in philosophical schools like the Madhyamaka.)

Western vogue for Sanskrit

At the end of the introduction to The World as Will and Representation, Arthur Schopenhauer claimed that the rediscovery of the ancient Indian tradition would be one of the great events in the history of the West. Goethe borrowed from Kalidasa for the Vorspiel auf dem Theater in Faust. Goethe and Schopenhauer were riding a crest of scholarly discovery, most notably the work done by Sir William Jones. (Goethe likely read Kalidasa's The Recognition of Sakuntala in Jones' translation.) However, the discovery of the world of Sanskrit literature moved beyond German and British scholars and intellectuals — Henry David Thoreau was a sympathetic reader of the Bhagavad Gita — and even beyond the humanities. In the early days of the Periodic Table, scientists referred to as yet undiscovered elements with the use of Sanskrit prefixes (see Mendeleev's predicted elements). The nineteenth century was a golden age of Western Sanskrit scholarship, and many of the giants of the field (Whitney, Macdonnell, Monier-Williams, Grassmann) knew each other personally. Perhaps the most commonly known example of Sanskrit in the West was also the last gasp of its vogue. T.S. Eliot, a student of Indian Philosophy and Lanham's, ended The Waste Land with Sanskrit: "Shantih Shantih Shantih".

Computational linguistics

There have been suggestions to use Sanskrit as a metalanguage for knowledge representation in e.g. machine translation, and other areas of natural language processing because of its highly regular structure ([http://www.gosai.com/science/sanskrit-nasa.html The AI Magazine, Spring, 1985 #39]). This is due to Classical Sanskrit being a regularized, prescriptivist form abstracted from the much more irregular and richer Vedic Sanskrit. This levelling of the grammar of Classical Sanskrit occurred during the Brahmana phase, after the language had fallen out of popular use, arguably qualifying Classical Sanskrit as an early engineered language.

References

- The Sanskrit Language - T. Burrow - ISBN 8120817672
- Sanskrit Grammar - William D. Whitney - ISBN 8185557594
- Sanskrit Pronunciation - Bruce Cameron - ISBN 1557000212
- "Teach Yourself Sanskrit" - Prof. M. Coulson - ISBN 0340859903
- "A Sanskrit Grammar for Students" - A.A. Macdonell - ISBN 8124600945

External links

- [http://sanskrit.farfromreal.com Discover Sanskrit] A concise study of the Sanskrit language
- [http://bhagavata.org/glossary/ Lexicon] of Names, Essential terms and Sanskrit Words to the S'rîmad Bhâgavatam and the Bhagavad Gîtâ
- [http://bhagavata.org/downloads/SanskritDictionary.html Sanskrit-English dictionary] list of 13.000 basic-terms
- [http://webapps.uni-koeln.de/tamil/ Sanskrit, Tamil and Pahlavi Dictionaries] Monier-Williams dictionary online
- [http://bhagavata.org/downloads/sanskritgrammar.pdf Harivenu Dâsa - An Introductory Course based on S'rîla Jîva Gosvâmî's Grammar] a vaishnava version of Pânini's grammar: (pdf-file)
- [http://www.alkhemy.com/sanskrit/dict/dictall.txt Online Sanskrit Dictionary]
- [http://www.warnemyr.com/skrgram/ An Analytical Cross Referenced Sanskrit Grammar] By Lennart Warnemyr. Phonology, morphology and syntax, written in a semiformal style with full paradigms.
- [http://www.swargarohan.org/Glossary.htm Spiritual Sanskrit-English Dictionary]
- [http://www.lioncity.net/buddhism/index.php?showforum=51 Sanskrit Discussion Forum]
- [http://sanskrit.gde.to/ Sanskrit Documents] Documents in ITX format of Upanishads, Stotras etc. and a metasite with links to translations, dictionaries, tutorials, tools and other Sanskrit resources.
- [http://www.balendu.com Free Sanskrit Word Processor: Madhyam] developed by Balendu Sharma Dadhich
- [http://www.sanskritweb.net Sanskritweb] Freely downloadable Sanskrit fonts and Sanskrit texts
- [http://www.geocities.com/giirvaani/ GiirvaaNi - Sanskrit Classical Literature with translation]
- [http://ds.dial.pipex.com/town/avenue/xha71/pow2.htm The earliest dated illustrated Sanskrit manuscript in the world]
- [http://www.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/cgi-bin/agrep-lindict?query=Sanskr.&category=full&boo=no&ignore=on&substr=on&order=all A list of Chinese words originated from Sanskrit]
- [http://www.uni-koeln.de/phil-fak/indologie/tamil/mwd_search.html Monier-Williams Dictionary - Searchable]
- [http://indica-et-buddhica.org/?q=node/8 Monier-Williams' Sanskrit-English Dictionary: DICT & HTML Downloadable Versions]
- [http://indica-et-buddhica.org/dict/lexica Indica-et-Buddhica.org Lexica (searchable Monier-Williams included)]
- [http://www.thekrishnastore.com/Detail.bok?no=2295&bar= Monier-Williams Dictionary - Searchable Digital Facsimile Edition] Freeware CD
- [http://www.ibiblio.org/sripedia/ebooks/mw/0000/ Monier-Williams Dictionary - Printable]
- [http://www.samskrita-bharati.org/ Samskrita Bharati]
- [http://sanskritlinks.blogspot.com Sanskrit Studies, Links and Information]
- [http://www.ece.lsu.edu/kak/bhate.pdf pAnini’s Grammar and Computer Science]
- [http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=san Ethnologue's Sanskrit report]
- [http://www.americansanskrit.com/ American Sanskrit Institute]
- [http://www.atmajyoti.org/sw_glossary.asp A brief Sanskrit Glossary] Lists commonly used words in spiritual writings
- [http://www.iit.edu/~laksvij/language/hindi.html Tranliterator] Transliterates from romanized to Unicode Sanskrit transliterator.
- [http://www.proz.com/sanskrit-to-english-translation-services Sanskrit Translations]
- [http://www.sanskrit-lamp.org/ A Sanskrit Tutor]
- [http://www.sanskrit-sanscrito.com.ar/ Sanskrit & Sánscrito] Sanskrit language, Yoga, Indian philosophies, blog, names, names of hatha yoga postures, Directory of Free Sanskrit Links, translations and much more (English-Spanish).
- [http://www.atma.ca/] Sanskrit web site, called ATMA (french) Category:Classical languages Category:Languages of India Category:Ancient languages
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Gender

Gender is a grammatical term for the division of words (usually nouns) in a language into various kinds. Most commonly these kinds are masculine, feminine or neuter. In a variety of different contexts, gender now refers to the masculinity or femininity or other of words, persons, organisms, or characteristics. The classification into masculine and feminine is analogous to the biological sexes of male and female, often by physical or syntactical analogy, linguistic decay, misunderstandings, societal norms, or personal choice. The nature of this categorisation varies depending on the context. For example, gender can be used to refer to the differences in biological sex between two members of a species, or different characteristics of electrical connectors. On the other side, in feminist theory, gender is used to refer solely to socially constructed differences between male and female behaviour, and the gender of a noun in many languages may have nothing to do with the concept described by it. Controversy surrounds the reasons, history, validity, and usefulness of many of these classifications.

Etymology and usage

Gender comes from Middle English gendre, from Latin genus, all meaning "kind", "sort", or "type". Ultimately from the proto Indo European root, gen, which is also the root for "kind", "king" and many others. It appears in Modern French in the word genre (type, kind) and is related to the Greek root gen- (to produce), appearing in genesis and oxygen. As a verb, it is used for to breed in the King James Bible: :Thou shalt not let thy cattle gender with a diverse kind. — Leviticus, 19:19 According to Aristotle, the Greek philospher Protagoras used the terms masculine, feminine, and neuter to classify nouns, introducing the concept of grammatical gender. Since the 14th century, the word is also used as a synonym for kind, and often so when the kinds include masculine and feminine. Examples: :The Psyche, or soul, of Tiresias is of the masculine gender — Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia :I may add the gender too of the person I am to govern — Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey :Black divinities of the feminine gender — Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities :Our most lively impression is that the sun is there assumed to be of the feminine gender — Henry James, Essays on Literature By 1900, this usage was considered jocular by some. In 1926, Fowler's Modern English Usage suggested that “gender...is a grammatical term only. To talk of persons...of the masculine or feminine g[ender], meaning of the male or female sex, is either a jocularity (permissible or not according to context) or a blunder.” From Maven's Word of the Day: :Despite such pronouncements, which may be found in similar forms in many usage books, the use of gender to refer to sex has been increasingly common in the last several decades. This use of gender is comparably common, if not more common, than the equivalent use of sex. A few examples from this year: "The state has to justify any discrimination based on race, gender, national origin [etc.]" (New Republic); "No residential college at Yale prohibits visits by either gender" (New York Times Magazine); "Can clever readers really tell a writer's gender from his or her prose?" (Harper's). The growth of this usage, sometimes blamed on "feminists," is probably a result of the increased frequency of the word sex in the sense of sexual intercourse; gender is employed to avoid the potential physical connotations of sex. In some parts of the social sciences, following a usage shift that began in the 1950s and was largely completed in the 1980s, gender has been used increasingly to refer to socially constructed aspects, in contrast to biologically determined, using the word sex for the latter. Example (again from MWofD) “Today a return to separate single-sex schools may hasten the revival of separate gender roles”. Another example: “The effectiveness of the medication appears to depend on the sex (not gender) of the patient”, but “In peasant societies, gender (not sex) roles are likely to be more clearly defined.” This distinction has been advocated vociferously by some, who consider the use of gender as a euphemism for sex incorrect. In the last half of the 20th century, the use of gender in academia has increased strongly, now outnumbering the occurrences of the word sex in the humanities, social sciences, and arts. However, use of the term gender includes the meaning biological sex, and the distinction between sex and gender is only fitfully observed. (Haig, 2004)

Grammatical gender

Main article: grammatical gender In linguistics, grammatical gender is a type of inflection. We say that a language has grammatical genders, or noun classes, when nouns are divided into groups according to natural characteristics of the concepts which they represent. This division can manifest itself in two ways: through morphological characteristics of the nouns themselves, and through morphological changes in other parts of speech that refer to nouns (gender agreement). For example, in Spanish, most nouns that end in -o are masculine and most nouns that end in -a are feminine. Thus, niño means “boy”, and niña means “girl”. This allows new nouns with a similar meaning to be readily created in a different class, by analogy: given the noun empresario (businessman), it was straightforward to make the new noun empresaria for “businesswoman”, when women reached the work market. This kind of class shift can also have more subtle uses, such as making a collective noun like fruta (group of fruits) from a singular noun like fruto (fruit). To understand gender agreement, consider the sentences "The man is tall" and "The woman is tall". In English, the only word that differs between them is the noun "man/woman", which has a direct semantic association with sexual identity. In Spanish, however, one says "El hombre es alto" and "La mujer es alta", respectively. Not only do the words for "man" and "woman" change, (hombre vs. mujer), but so do the article (el, la) and the adjective (alto, alta). When a noun belongs to a certain class, other parts of speech that refer to that noun must be inflected to be in the same class. This is similar to number agreement, whereby parts of speech that refer to a noun are inflected to agree with the grammatical number of that noun.

Sex

Main article: Biological sex Biological sex Gender can refer to the (biological) condition of being male or female, applied to humans, animals, plants, and other sexual species. In this sense, the term is a synonym for sex, a word that has undergone a usage shift itself, having become a synonym for sexual reproduction. Haig: : "Among the reasons that working scientists have given me for choosing gender rather than sex in biological contexts are desires to signal sympathy with feminist goals, to use a more academic term, or to avoid the connotation of copulation." See sex-determination systems and sexual differentiation (for homo sapiens).

Social category

Cribbed from old/current gender article with some quotes from Haig. This needs to be expanded. It's easily the most interesting part of the article. Since 1950, and increasing part of the academic literature, and of the public discourse uses gender for the perceived or projected (self-identified) masculinity or femininity of a person. The terms was introduced by Money (1955): : “The term gender role is used to signify all those things that a person says or does to disclose himself or herself as having the status of boy or man, girl or woman, respectively. It includes, but is not restricted to, sexuality in the sense of eroticism.” A person's gender is complex, encompassing countless characteristics of appearance, speech, movement and other factors not solely limited to biological sex. Societies tend to have binary gender systems in which everyone is categorized as male or female, but this is not universal. Some societies include a third gender role; for instance, the Native American Two-Spirit people and the hijras of India. There is debate over to what extent gender is a social construct and to what extent it is a biological construct. At the extremes of these views you have constructionism which suggests that it is entirely a social construct and essentialism which suggests that it's entirely a biological construct. Gender associations are constantly changing as society progresses. For example, the color pink was considered masculine in the early 1900s and is now seen as feminine.

In feminist theory

During the 1970s there was no consensus about how the terms were to be applied. In the 1974 edition of Masculine/Feminine or Human, the author uses “innate gender” and “learned sex roles“, but in the 1978 edition, the use of sex and gender is reversed. By 1980, most feminist writings had agreed on using gender only for socioculturally adapted traits.

Other languages

In English, both sex and gender are used in contexts where they could not be substituted ( sexual intercourse; anal sex; safe sex; sex worker; sex slave). Other languages, like German, use the same word Geschlecht to refer both to grammatical gender and to biological sex, making the distinction between sex and gender advocated by some anthropologists difficult. In some contexts, German has adopted the English loan-word gender to achieve this distinction. Sometimes 'Geschlechtsidentitaet' is used as gender (although it literally means gender identity) and 'Geschlecht' as sex (translation of Judith Butler's Gender Trouble). More common is the use of modifiers: biologisches Geschlecht for sex, Geschlechtsidentität for gender identity and Geschlechtsrolle for gender role etc.

Other uses

Fasteners and connectors

In electrical and mechanical trades and manufacturing, each of a pair of mating connectors or fasteners is conventionally assigned the designation male or female. The assignment is by direct analogy with animal genitalia; the part bearing one or more protrusions, or which fits inside the other, being designated male and the part containing the corresponding indentations or fitting outside the other being female. genitalia Examples:
- A power cord on a lamp or appliance terminates in a (male) plug; it connects to a (female) socket in a wall or on an extension cord.
- Co-axial cables used for video or other high-frequency signals are normally terminated, at both ends, in a connector comprising an inner pin and an outer fixed or rotating shell; these are conventionally reckoned as male.
- A nut is female and a bolt is male. The gender of a connector is determined by the structure of its primary functional components, e.g., the conductors of an electrical connector, or the load-bearing parts of a fastener, and not by secondary features such as covers, shields or handles that may be installed for environmental protection, safe operation, etc. Connectors are also classified into plugs and receptables (or sockets, jacks); plugs are often male and receptables often female, but this is not always so. For example, the C13 IEC connector used to connect many desktop computers is female plug that fits into a male receptable. A device called a gender changer may be used to join two connectors of the same gender, for example, to extend one video cable with another. Certain connector designs involve paired identical parts each containing both protrusions and indentations; the term hermaphrodite is used for such devices,

Music

In Western Music theory, chords and scales are grouped into modes called major and minor, traditionally related to masculine and feminine. By analogy, the major scales are masculine (clear, open, extrovert), while the minor scales are given feminine qualities (dark, soft, introvert). German uses the same word (Tongeschlecht), and the words Dur (from latin durus, hard) for major and moll (from latin mollis, soft) for minor. See Major and minor.

References

- Chafetz, J. S. Masculine/feminine or human? An overview of the sociology of sex roles. 1st ed. 1974, 2nd ed. 178. Itasca, IL: F. E. Peacock.
- Haig, D. The inexorable rise of gender and the decline of sex: social change in academic titles, 1945-2001. Archives of Sexual Behavior 33: 87-96, 2004 [http://www.oeb.harvard.edu/faculty/haig/pdfs/04InexorableRise.pdf]
- Money, J. Hermaphroditism, gender and precocity in hyperadrenocorticism: Psychologic findings. Bulletin of the Johns Hopkins Hospital, 96, 253–264, 1955.
- [http://www.randomhouse.com/wotd/index.pperl?date=19980612]
See also

- androgyny
- female bodybuilding
- feminity
- gender bender
- gender identity
- gender role
- Gender Studies
- homosexuality
- masculinity
- Queer
- Queer Studies
- stereotype
- third gender
- transgender
- list of transgender-related topics
- Judith Halberstam
External links

- [http://topics.developmentgateway.org/poverty/rc/BrowseContent.do~source=RCContentUser~folderId=3336 Gender and Poverty]
- [http://moodle.ed.uiuc.edu/wiked/index.php/Gender_Inequities_in_the_Classroom WikEd - Gender Inequities in the Classroom]
- [http://moodle.ed.uiuc.edu/wiked/index.php/Gender_Differences WikEd - Gender Differences] ja:ジェンダー simple:Gender

Ethnologue

Ethnologue: Languages of the World is a web and print publication of SIL International (formerly known as the Summer Institute of Linguistics), a Christian linguistic service organization which studies lesser-known languages primarily to provide the speakers with native language biblical texts. The Ethnologue contains statistics for 6,912 languages in the 15th edition, released in 2005 (up from 6,809 in the 14th edition, released 2000) and gives the number of speakers, location, dialects, linguistic affiliations, availability of the Bible, etc. It is currently the most comprehensive existing language inventory, along with the Linguasphere Register. However, some information regarding more esoteric language is quite dated. What counts as a language depends on socio-linguistic evaluation: see Dialect. The Ethnologue provides a three-letter code, called SIL code, for each language it describes. The number of SIL codes significantly exceeds those of ISO 639-1 and RFC 3066. In the 15th edition they have, for the most part, synchronised the SIL codes with ISO 639-3 with the exception that the ISO 639-3 codes are in lowercase while the SIL are in capital letters. There are a few exceptions where the ISO 639-3 and SIL codes differ — for example, Dakota's SIL code: DHG, ISO 639-3: dak (which is the same as Dakota's ISO 639-2 code). The neutrality of Ethnologue as a scientific institution is sometimes disputed, particularly in areas of language classification associated with the Bible and Abrahamic religion. Conversely, the neutrality of Ethnologue as a scientific institution is sometimes lauded: in addition to choosing a primary name for the language, it also gives some of the names by which a language is called by its speakers, by the government, by foreigners, by neighbors, etc., and how it has been named and referenced historically, regardless of which designation is considered official, politically correct, or offensive, or by whom. This selection of "alternative names" is extensive, but often incomplete. As is inevitable in an enterprise so enormous, the Ethnologue contains some errors, some of which it fixes at every edition; for instance, en route to the 14th edition, some languages such as Chenoua were added, and some rumoured "languages" such as Nemadi or Wutana were removed. Some possible remaining errors are discussed at Imraguen language, Senhaja de Srair language, Ghomara language, Kwavi language, Molengue