sanskritists - Profile (original) (raw)
This community is intended as a forum for the discussion of the Sanskrit language and especially the study of Sanskrit--for questions, rants and bickering, and venting over frustrations. My assumption is that this is a completely idle experiment and that in all likelihood almost no one has any use for such a thing, but I thought I'd throw it out there anyway.
Of course, all levels of skill and interest are welcome. Some suggested topics:
-Favorite quotes and passages
-Translation problems
-Discussion of Sanskrit-language (and possibly other, like Pali) texts and literary history
-Any information on dirty sanskrit (curse-words, insults, and things that aren't really dirty but amuse the inner pre-pubescent in us--whatever you'd normally learn first off with a living language, but have to dig for with a classical one)
I'm 
kukkurovaca, I'll be your host this evening. I have three years of formal study, and while I'm rusty and tend to suck wildly went it comes to generating grammatically viable Sanskrit, I read okay and I'm not utterly without skills.
Of course, because Sanskrit tends to exceed the basic paramaters of the Roman script to which computers are accustomed, we have to make certain normative choices regarding how we present text.
Unicode is the preferred medium. Fonts are available (see links sidebar, and the resources below); if you're going to be producing texts, Itranslator 2003 does the whole Unicode thing, and is in general a delightful program. If you don't want to download things or install things in order to produce Devanagari text, you can go to The online itrans interfacewhich will produce not only unicode but the much more universal image files. These have the benefit of letting you make sure others will see exactly what you intend, but of course you have to host the bastards and then link to them.
Alternatively, you can simply the type the text using the ITRANS input system and trust others to forgive you for the profoundly unaesthetic effect that produces.
The overall hierarchy of preferences is unicode devanagari+transliteration, unicode devanagri or transliteration, image files, raw itrans text. I assume that people will every so often slip into unsystematic and unscholarly folk romanizations, but that's scarcely to be helped...
Etiquette:
Courtesy is good. Corrections are fine, but keep them polite.
Links:
Various eclectic resources from Gerard Huet
Itranslator--THE program for working with devanagari
Pali Resources