Gérard Huet's Sanskrit Site

Version 195 [01/12/04]

Welcome to my Sanskrit Library page. You are invited to visit the first hypertext Sanskrit dictionary, available interactively through its index. It currently gives meanings in French, but has been designed for multilingual use. You may also download printable versions of this dictionary, under several formats, as explained below.

Book form

Portable Document Format

You may download the pdf file from PDF. This document is readable through Acrobat Reader, a well-known browser plug-in from Adobe freely available on Internet. Since the document is rather large, you have to account for some delay in loading its 3 Mb.

Postscript

For those of you who prefer Postscript, it is also available as a compressed Postscript file.

Web form

Interactive browsing

The dictionary may be accessed through a search engine implementing an index.

Your browser must be HTML 4.0 compliant, and for proper viewing of diacritics you must have installed on your system open type fonts for roman transliteration with diacritics, and for devanagari. For instance, install fonts IndUni, available from John Smith at site Cambridge Indology and Sanskrit 99, available from Ulrich Stiehl at site Heidelberg's Sanskrit Web.

If after loading these fonts you still do not get the diacritics and devanagari right, you may have to fiddle with the controls of your browser, so that the font declarations from the dictionary pages get precedence over the standard selection. Also encoding must be specified as Unicode compliant (UTF-8).

Remark that most words are given with their etymology as hypertext links. You may thus navigate from a word to its root. Also, the gender declarations of the main entries are mouse-sensitive, and give you direct access to the relevant declension table. Similarly, the present class of the verbal roots gives access to the conjugation schemes. And for verb entries, preverbs lead you to the correspondingly prefixed derived verbs.

Sanskrit made easy

If you want to search for a Sanskrit word without knowing its exact transliteration, go to section "Sanskrit made easy" of the index page, which allows you to search for words without knowing precise diacritics. For instance, search Vishnou, Siva, or the grammarian Panini.

Sanskrit Grammarian

This interface gives the declension tables for Sanskrit substantives. Try out this declension engine by submitting Sanskrit stems with intended gender. The same transliteration conventions as for the dictionary index apply. For instance, submit "deva" with gender Mas, or "devii" with gender Fem, or "brahman" with gender Neu. The fourth button, labeled "Contextual", may be used for the words which take their gender from the context, such as "aham", "tvad", or the numbers words such as "dva", "tri", etc. In order to have correct viewing of diacritics for the resulting declined forms, you should install on your system the Indic Times font as explained above.

A conjugation engine for roots is now available. It handles the full present system: present indicative, imperfect, imperative and optative, as well as the passive present, the perfect, the aorist and the future. Some secondary conjugations (causative, intensive, desiderative) are also generated, for the full present and future systems. Try out this conjugation engine with data such as bhuu 1, as 2, m.rj 2, han 2, haa 3, hu 3, daa 4, su 5, p.r 6, yuj 7, k.r 8, j~naa 9, namas 10.

Lemmatiser

Conversely, a lemmatiser attempts to tag inflected words. Try for instance devaat, jagmivaan, a.s.tau (clicking on Noun) or apibat, akaar.siit, dudoha, vaahyate etc (clicking on Verb). This lemmatizer knows about inflected forms of derived stems which are not apparent in the display of the main stem inflection. For instance, dar"sayi.syati is found as conjugated form: { ca. fut. a. sg. 3 }[d.r.s_1], dariid.r"syate yields { int. pr. m. sg. 3 }[d.r"s_1], did.rk.sate yields { des. pr. m. sg. 3 }[d.r"s_1] and bibhik.se yields { des. pft. m. sg. 3 | des. pft. m. sg. 1 }[bhaj].

Declined forms

A dictionary of inflected forms of Sanskrit words is under preparation. The declensions of all substantives, adjectives, pronouns and numerals, together with undeclinable forms, is available as a PDF file Volume I. A second volume contains the conjugated forms of roots in the present, imperfect, imperative, optative, perfect, aorist and future tenses as another PDF document Volume II.

Sanskrit Reader

Try our experimental Sanskrit Reader. It is able to segment simple sentences, where the (optional) finite verb form occurs in final position. You may use it to analyse sandhi from compounds. Try for instance to segment "sugandhi.mpu.s.tivardhanam". Then push the "tagging" button and get the fully tagged sentence. For a simple sentence, try "maarjaarodugdha.mpibati". Sentences may be broken with spaces for piecewise reading and for curbing down overgenerative items. Yinyang

The Zen Library

This site reflects an ongoing project of Sanskrit processing on a comprehensive software platform. The project is based on a structured lexicographic database, and on the Zen library of computational linguistics tools, implemented in Pidgin ML, functional core of the Objective Caml programming language. The Zen library and its documentation are available as free software under the Gnu Lesser General Public License from the Zen site.

Links to other Sanskrit resources

French to Sanskrit

Note that a French to Sanskrit dictionary is available through André Signoret's site.

Artwork credits

Orissan artwork on this site © B. K. Arts & Crafts, Bhubaneshwar, Orissa. All rights reserved.
Index page border design courtesy of Sushama Londhe.
Wallpaper om images courtesy of Vishvarupa.com.
Ganesh wallpaper courtesy of François Patte.
Shri Yantra design © G. Huet 1990.

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Gerard.Huet@inria.fr

Last update : December 1st, 2004