word building overviewmmmmmmmmm ^ 1482

verb building machine

noun building machine

basic sound change rules

how to use inria reader for parsing nounsmmmmmmmmm ^ 1483

...

obsolete, see how to disassemble nouns using inria reader

how to use the inria readermmmmmmmmm ^ M- C- 1484

If you hear in a verse something like SaSThAnIndriyANi and you suspect that it is too long to be just one word, drop the whole thing into inria reader. Then set the "input convention" to KH, and hit READ button. You'l get to this page --

SASThAnIndriyANi

The colorful boxes there says that the machine suspects that SASThAnIndriyANi is SaSThAni plus indriyANi. So some rule turned two short i into one long I. Apparently. To confirm that, we look up the meaning of the words and see if their meaning fits where we found them.

More examples for practice --

atrAgamiSyAmi

azvAdravat

gAmiSyAmi

siMho 'dravat

tatragamiSyAmi

zvAbhASata

Here are the correct solutions --

atra + AgamiSyAmi

azvA + adravat

gAm + iSyAmi

siMhas + adravat

tatra + gamiSyAmi

zvA + abhASata

This inria reader thing is a complicated tool, designed from the start to be used by college students that have been good and have read the manual and done their homework. So, learn to not despair with its quirks. It saves a lot of time.

QRAQRAQRA

...

QRA QRA QRA

How to build nouns.mmmmmmmmm ^ M- C- 1485

Nouns are always built by taking a nounbase, attaching a feminine affix to it if necessary, then adding a sup affix. Examples --

When we say "lightning is yellow", we make a word by attaching su after the feminine nounbase vidyut-

vidyut- @f + su → vidyuts →halGyA vidyut

Explanation of labels.mmmmmmmmm ^ 1486

My colleague at learnsanskrit dot org came up with a good comparison for labels. He says a grammar label is a bit like the label in a jacket you buy at a store. After you buy the jacket you no longer need the label, so you strip it off. Yet that does not mean that the label is useless. The clerk at a store needs the label to store the jacket in the proper place, to remember the price, and so on.

Grammar labels are sort of the same thing. A word like zocati "he cries" is made from grammar rules that join the three pieces zuca, zap and tip together and end up making zocati. Here the A of zucA, the Z and P of ZaP, and the P of tiP are label letters. They are called label letters because they are used only inside the store. For instance, the Z and the P of ZaP make some rules work and those rules turn zuc into zoc. After that, the three pieces put together are zocAZaPtiP, but now the label letters have no use. These AZPP can never go outside the store, so we have to remove them before we actually SAY the word, and we say zocati. As in ghoreNa tapasA yuktA devI kaccin na zocati.

What's a derivation.mmmmmmmmm ^ M- C- 1487

A derivation is a list of the rules that work when building a word or sentence from smaller pieces.

Example. Imagine you want to say "rAma is shooting arrows". The verb kSipati is made by attaching the affix laT after the root kSip (applying rule vartamAnelaT), then replacing laT with tip (because of lasya and other rules). After this, rule tudAdi replaces kSip with kSipa. This makes "kSipZatiP", but the Z and P are invisible labels and do not count, so that's actually the word kSipati.

The proper " derivation" of kSipati would be a list of ALL the rules that have been used to build that word kSipati from kSip, arranged in the same order in which they have worked. So it would look more or less like this --

kSip →vartamAnelaT kSip + laT →lasya kSip + tip →tudAdibhyaHzaH kSip + za + tip → kSipati "(he) is throwing"

This shows that vartamAnelaT worked first, lasya afterwards, then tudAdibhyaHzaH.

However, that line is not a COMPLETE derivation, because many more rules have worked there and have not been mentioned. For instance, according to some rule, not mentioned in that list, the tip affix was chosen because the doer is third person and singular. Also, we used rule laHkarmaNi, that tells us that in this situation we can replace the laT either with tip or with jha.

I do not use complete derivations in this website because they are too long, and confusing for the student. And also because there is no way I can figure out ALL the rules I have used. So in practice I will only show SOME of the rules that have been applied, like here --

kSip + laT tip →tudAdibhyaHzaH kSip + za + tip → kSipati "(he) is throwing"

And in fact, in this case, it is not necessary to have the first arrow link to rule tudAdi, because anyone that doesn't know where the za is coming from will click the za, and that will take them to rule tudAdi anyway. So this is enough --

kSip + laT tip → kSip + za + tip → kSipati "(he) is throwing"

Who was pANini.mmmmmmmmm ^ 1488

It is said that Homer, the Greek poet, was blind, and that he was born here or there, and that he lived in this or that century, but all of that is mostly hearsay. The word "Homer" is actually short for "whoever composed the Iliad and the Odyssey".

The same works for Mr. pANini. He lived so long ago that all that nothing is known for sure about his life. Most of you can read about him was made up many centuries afterwards.

There is a big legend about pANini. Indians like to think as if he was the smartest person ever, just what Western culture thinks or has thought about Aristotle, Newton, Bach, Napoleon, Einstein and others. These legends tend to get fatter over time, and pANini's one has had millenia to grow. Read those legends, most of them are fun and interesting, and won't get in our way.

But there is one of these legends that I consider fake and harmful. So, be warned that --

pANini did make up the language. He was describing an actual spoken language that he heard every day.

How the rules build nouns.mmmmmmmmm ^ 1489

How the rules build verbs.mmmmmmmmm ^ 1490

...

bhuj + laG

bhuj + ta

aT + bhuj + ta

abhuj + znam + ta

abhunaj + ta

abhunj + ta

abhungta

abhunkta

abhuMkta

abhuGkta

we stop here because no more rules can apply.