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chunk 82: reading guide→ how to spell Sanskrit -----------------------------------------
spelling and reading
How to read Sanskrit.
About Sanskrit punctuation
stick
space
legacy
(spellingandreading) (spellina)
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When reading Sanskrit aloud, each letter must be pronounced with its own sound, with three exceptions --
(A) Always read
(B) Always read
(C) Most people in the South of India, and in Hindi-speaking places, always replace the H that is before a pause with an
For more info, read --
(aboutsanskritpunctuati) (sanskria)
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The most commonly found punctuation signs in Sanskrit spelling are --
stick -- If you find a stick in writing you must make a pause at that point. (Sometimes you must make a pause where no stick is written, but this is uncommon.)
space -- In modern printed Sanskrit, spaces are added after certain words, but not after others. Old manuscripts don't have spaces.
avagraha -- Sometimes an avagraha sign is written in the place where an
compounds never have any hyphens or spaces between their parts. Why would one ever want to type something like "insurance companies that provide legal protection" when "Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften" looks so much cooler?
In my website I use lots of hyphens, but that's me.
In some situations I write a hyphen at the end of what looks like a word, for instance
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In the manuscripts, there are no steadfast rules about punctuation. Yet, as general guidelines --
In verse --
The stick shows the end of a verse.
The double stick shows the end of a stanza.
In prose --
The stick always shows a pause.
Usually it appears at the end of sentences.
The double stick shows the end of a paragraph.
There are exceptions to this. For instance, in some manuscripts, the stick at the end of a verse is replaced by a space. Also, in grammar manuscripts, sometimes a stick appears mid-sentence, where we would write a comma.
When stanzas are numbered, the number of the stanza is written after it. Usually sandwitched between two double sticks.
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Traditional Sanskrit spelling uses no spaces at all. You can see some examples of the traditional spelling in this manuscript --
Bhagavad Gita 19th century, at the British Library website
In modern Sanskrit books, if they are printed in devanAgarI, spaces are used after the words that end in a consonant, topdot, or dotdot, and are not a former.
When transliterated into Roman letters, spaces are used after all words.
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An avagraha, which I nicknamed as flycrap, is a symbol of several indian alphabets that looks somehow like a fish hook, or our uppercase "S". In devanAgarI, it is the left half of a short
The avagraha is not pronounced. In the modern spelling of Sanskrit, an avagraha should be written wherever a short
The avagraha is not used if the eG and the disappeared
as in
See also Spelling of
See also legacy
See also
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In old books sometimes you can see two avagraha in a row. That shows the place where a word-initial
But that's mostly out of use and most modern books have --
Also, sometimes you see a single avagraha after
but this can also appear in print as
Also sometimes you can see an avagraha inside a compound --
which is mostly considered incorrect nowadays.
^
You must use (') in inria, even inside a compound, where
Type inria
or
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chunk 82: reading guide→ how to spell Sanskrit -----------------------------------------
