The subject of the presentation is the language and its visual representation.  It chronicles the various stages that visualizing Samskritam has gone through.  And, in this electronic age, it continues to evolve. 

 

(You can click on the images for an enlarged view.  The bulk of the script and images are as originally presented by the author.  There are minor edits with respect to anglicization of certain words.)

Samskritam, as you are all probably well aware of, is first found in the the ancient oral tradition of the Veda. The earliest Vedic hymns were never intended to be written down. This tradition was completely oral for thousands of years, handed down by word of mouth rather than through written texts. The complexity of sounds within the Samskritam language tradition was rich and meaningful. For this reason, there has always been greater accuracy in passing on Samskritam in its multi-dimensional spoken form rather than a two-dimensional written form.

 

The earliest Samskritam, Vedic Samskritam, being an oral tradition, did not have one script in which it began to be written. The Veda was to be memorized, making it kaṇṭhastha "situated in the throat," or learned by heart.  In fact, writing down the Veda
was considered extremely inauspicious, and was greatly discouraged.

So how, when and why did Samskritam begin to be written down, and why did Devanāgarī become the primary script in which Samskritam is now written? These are the questions I will try to briefly answer in this short presentation.

The earliest scripts of India were the Brāhmī script and the related Kharoṣṭhī script. Kharoṣṭhī was found in the northwest Indian and Pakistani region. However, it was the Brāhmī script that became the basis for all South Asian scripts, including the South Indian Dravidian scripts.

 

 

Over the centuries of the first millennium, each region of India developed its own variation on the Brāhmī script in which their regional languages would be written. These regional scripts would then be used to write Samskritam. For example, Samskrita
manuscripts written in Kashmir would be written in Śāradā, the regional script of Kashmir. Other Samskrita texts written in Southern India, would be written in the Grantha script of Telugu or Tamil or another South Indian script. Adjustments in the
script would be made to reflect various Samskrita sounds that perhaps were not reflected in the regional language.

 

Brāhmī Script
First Century BCE

The earliest written Brāhmī inscriptions of the Samskrita language are found in the first century BCE in Ayodhyā and Mathurā. A syllabic, rather than an alphabetic writing system gradually developed within the family of Brāhmī scripts that could accommodate the articulated sounds of this highly syllabic and orally complex language of Samskritam.

Around 1000 CE, Siddhamātṛkā, a popular north Indian form of Brāhmī, began to develop into Nāgarī script. However, the marriage of Devanāgarī and the Samskrita language was only sealed when Hindi became the official language of use. In the last couple of centuries, as Devanāgarī increased in prominence throughout much of India, it became the adopted script of choice in which to write all Samskrita texts. However, we still find many Samskrita works written in regional scripts.

 

Here are some examples of Samskrita texts written in various scripts.

The top manuscript is in the Śāradā script of Kashmir. The bottom manuscript is written on palm leaf using the Oriya script of Orissa.

 

This next picture is taken from a 13th century palm leaf manuscript of the Vājasaneyi Śukla Yajur Veda written in Devanāgarī. This is an older style of Devanāgarī containing pṛṣṭhamātrā vowels where a portion of the vowels "e," "ai," "o," and "au" are placed in front of the character, as is done for the short "i" in modern Devanāgarī.

This is a picture of the Samskrita Maṇipravālam text written in the Tamil Script.

This brings us to the current day, where we find a new medium for visualizing Samskritam. This is the marriage of Samskritam with the computer.  I'm sure many of you already have various ways of entering Samskritam into your computers, either using Devanāgarī or Roman characters. What is relatively recent is the International Unicode Tables, which have become the standard font platform for the digitization of fonts throughout the world.  The International Unicode Committee, a multi-national group of business people, computer experts, language scholars and others, oversee what characters will be added to the Unicode Tables.

 

Currently we find in the tables the Devanāgarī characters representing sounds in classical Samskritam.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now, if you were to look at a Vedic manuscript or printed text, you would see a number of characters that might look unfamiliar to the untrained eye. These characters represent sounds found in the particular Vedic recitation traditions. It is these Vedic sounds and their associated characters that have recently been added to the Unicode Tables.

 

Each of these fonts and their associated characters require a corresponding keyboard to type in the desired ligature or letter.

 

A Devanāgarī keyboard is needed to access the Devanāgarī characters. The keyboard, of course, is different than the keyboard for a Roman script language such as English.

Samskritam can also be keyed into the computer using a font that is based on the Roman script. This Roman font is used with various symbols called diacritics that indicate the sounds in Samskritam that are not found in English. For example, the letter "a" with a bar drawn above it represents Samskritam's long "ā" sound. We can see this here on the "a" key of the Alt key keyboard.

In summary, we can see that Samskritam has always been primarily an oral, spoken language. Throughout the ages, Samskritam's representation in the form of scripts and other means has always been diverse and adaptive to the language itself. The written form of Samskritam has been, on the most part, subservient to the spoken form of Samskritam.  The challenge for us in the modern world is to maintain Samskritam in its oral form. Oral Samskritam must not become secondary to any written or visualized expression of it, because, a living human language is most fundamentally spoken.