overview of flat and bentmmmmmmmmm ^ M- C+ 1628

The affixes that replace tenses can mean the doer or not.

When they do not mean the doer, they are always bent, by bhAva;karmaNoH.

When they mean the doer, it depends on the root --

There are flatty roots like car, whose kartari endings are always flat --

carati "moves"

and bendy roots like plu, that take only bent endings --

plavate "jumps"

and flattybendy roots like yudh, that may take both with no change of meaning --

yudhyati "fights"

yudhyate "fights"

and there are a lot of grammar rules that explain which roots are flatty, which are bendy, and which are flattybendy.

Or, at least, that is what the grammar rules say. Please be warned that lots of authors in the last three thousand years either never heard of those rules, or unapologetically ignored them. So, don't panic when you find a plavati or a carate written somewhere. This happens quite a lot in the epics, often metri causa --

tiSThate hi suhRd yatra na bandhus tatra tiSThati "where there's a friend (in need) there's (often) no friend (nearby)"

Here the tiSThate, with bent ta, sux, and has the exact same meaning as the tiSThati, with flat tip. But don't fix it, because doing so will screw up the verse rythm.

rules that should be studied firstmmmmmmmmm ^ C+ 1629

People that use books to learn languages are used to the books being divided into lessons, with the basic things in the first lesson and the second lesson written for people that learned the first.

The pANini grammar has no such order, because it is not a book made to learn languages. So those that want to learn the grammar do not know what to study first, and teachers each have their own opinion.

So my advice is: do what your teacher says. But if you don't have any, where to start? my advice is --

First learn some of the sandhi rules, that is, the ones that are used most often, like hazica and atoro and akassa and atoguNe.

Then learn some of the rules about using the sup affixes and feminine affixes.

And then some of the rules that make verbs, starting at kartarizap. The first rules to be studied are those mentioned in the "building" pages listed under examples of using inria to disassemble verbs , such as kartarizap lasya tiGas tAnyeka jhontaH.

How to learn the wordfinal sandhi rules.mmmmmmmmm ^ C+ 1634

Some warnings about the right way of learning the sandhi rules.

The wordfinal sandhi rules are the sound-changing rules that affect the last letters of a word.

As a consequence of those rules, the word namas sounds like namaH before a pause,

zivAya namaH

and sounds like namas before s t th,

namas te

like namaz before z,

namo namaH

and like namo before n and most consonants --

namaz zivAya

namo nArAyaNAya

These changes must happen in the spoken language and in the written language at all times. And that's a big burden for freshmen, because they will make two kinds of mistakes while not knowing yet the rule "as becomes o before n",

(A) when they assemble in their head a sentence from two words, they will say incorrectly namas nArAyaNAya not knowing that it should be namonArAyaNAya

(B) when reading the correct namonArAyaNAya, they will not notice that the namo at the start is just a namas in disguise.

If you don't have a reasonably familiarity with the rules, not only you'll speak wrong, but also, when reading, you will have trouble figuring out where a word ends and the next begins.

There are about two hundred sandhi rules in the grammar. As far as I know there are four ways to teach them.

Samskrita Bharati style

Brute force style

Traditional style

Inria gadget style

Samskrita Bharati stylemmmmmmmmm ^ C+ 1635

The easiest way to teach sound changes is not teaching them at all. You first make your students understand that kahA means "who?", that sahA means "he", and that sahA kahA means "who is he?". Then you encourage them to throw at each other a lot of sentences meaning "who are you?", "I am rAm", "are you a student?", and after two weeks they will be persuaded that they can speak basic conversational Sanskrit and will know nothing about the sound changes.

The advantage of this approach is that the students will be very happy and will talk with great self-confidence and self-esteem, and will never be confused by those pesky sound-change rules.

The disadvantage is that, not knowing anything about the rules, they will be very confused when they try to read actual Sanskrit text, and they will do one mistake after another when they try to write. They will converse happily but will be illiterate. If they decide to continue studying Sanskrit, next year they will have to learn that sa kaH is right and sahA kahA is utterly wrong Sanskrit.

Brute force stylemmmmmmmmm ^ C+ 1636

For the brute force style, the teacher makes a list of all sound-change rules, such as this one, and tells the student to memorize all of them. After that, the student must do a lot of exercises applying the rules, such as "namas turns into what before nArAyaNa?".

The problem with this aspproach is that doing all the rules takes a year, and at the end of this year, the student becomes so bored of sound change rules as to decide that Sanskrit is too complicated and that no one is smart enough to remember the rules while talking.

Traditional stylemmmmmmmmm ^ C+ 1637

The traditional way to teach sound change is this --

1. The teacher recites a verse, such as for instance --

asty uttarasyAnM dizi devatAtmA himAlayo nAma nagAdhirAjaH

2. The makes the students repeat the verse.

3. Then explains the meaning of each word. For instance he says --

asti means "there is"

himAlayaH means the himAlaya mountain range

4. If needed, he explains the sound changes that appeared in the verse --

asti before uttarasyAm must be pronounced astyuttarasyAm with a yu, not i plus u

uttarasyAm ends with m when it is alone but the m becomes n before dizi

himAlayaH sounds like himAlayaH when alone but we must say himAlayo when followed by an n.

5. The teacher might explain which pANini rules make these changes compulsory, or he might not (if you are curious: in these examples rules ikoyaNaci and hazica apply). Most of the time he will not, because pANini rules are advanced stuff, not intended for beginners.

After twenty verses the students will have seen several examples of the rule that changes as into o and will be paranoid enough to suspect, every time they see an o in the verse, that it might be a changed as. After a hundred verses they will have seen examples of the most commonly used rules and will be able to know where a word ends and the next begins mostly always. Also, they will be able to chant from memory the first hundred lines of the kumArasambhavam.

Inria gadget stylemmmmmmmmm ^ C+ 1638

The problem with the Traditional style is that you need a teacher to make it work.

If you don't have a teacher at hand to teach you to split a verse into words,

then you use the inria reader to learn that "himAlayonAma" is himAlayas + nAma

and when you need to join himAlayas + nAma and figure out the change, then you use the inria sandhi gadget, and nvm the rule.

After getting used to these tools you will start to not need them, because you will hear himAlayo mahAn and you will inmediately know that the first word is himAlayas.

So you won't need to learn the rules after all. The important part is learning to recognize that namas namo namaz namaH are different ways of saying the same word.

At this point you might ask, if I can manage to join words and split sentences without studying the rules, what is the point of having rules at all?

Simple. Rules were not made to teach you. Rules were made to make teachers, and the people that make gadgets like inria, agree on the correct way of joining and splitting.

Different kinds of nothing.mmmmmmmmm ^ M+ C+ 1639

The pANini rules never say "delete" or "erase". Instead of "delete a", they say "replace a with nothing". An example is rule atolopaH. The first word atas means "replace short a", the second word lopas means "with nothing".

There are different kinds of nothing --

(1) Replacing something with lopa deletes one letter. When rule saMyogAnta commands "replace piturs with lopa", piturs turns into pitur.

(2) luk is a more destructive sort of nothing. When SaDbhyoluk teaches "replace zas with luk", that turns the whole zas into nothingness. So paJca- + zas turns into paJca "five".

Not only that. If adding an affix made changes to its stem, replacing that affix with luk will roll back those changes.

(3) replacing an affix with lup has the same effects that luk has, and it also rolls back the changes that the original affix made to the gender and number of its stem.

(4) zlu is a sort of nothing that, when added after a root, makes the root reduplicate (see zlau).