Part of the "Teach Yourself" selection of books that look at a wide variety of subjects in a style designed to appeal to the general reader. This book introduces Sanskrit - the ancient and sacred language of Hindus in India.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Ancient and sublime,
By FrKurt Messick "FrKurt Messick" (Bloomington, IN USA) - See all my reviews (VINE VOICE) (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER) (TOP 500 REVIEWER)
This review is from: Teach Yourself Sanskrit (Paperback)
I got this text by Michael Coulson, then head of the Department of Sanskrit at Edinburgh University, Scotland, about twenty five years ago. I was studying religious studies, and wanted to be able to understand the primary scriptures of the primary religions of the world in their original languages as much as possible; I've had a reasonable facility with languages in terms of reading, and found that Coulson's book fit my style of learning rather well.
There is a useful, pull-out sandhi grid early in the book, that shows consonants and vowels. This does not show all possible combinations, but most of the basic ones. This is a hard thing to remember (rather like learning the difference between written English and spoken English, where the pronunciations colloquially vary depending upon accent as well as position in the sentence or the speed of talking). Sanskrit is a langauge where it isn't necessary to learn the entire alphabetic structure for writing at the outset -- Coulson recommends this as a gradual process, and I agree with this idea. The primary Sanskrit font described and used here (a common Sanskrit font throughout India, although far from the only one) is the nagari script. Sanskrit is a part of the Indo-European family of languages, but that being said, it is vastly different from English, and the student of this book would be well-advised to make sure she or he has a good command of English grammar ideas, and the willingness to not attempt to apply them to the Sanskrit sentences and passages presented. Coulson in his introduction makes the distinction between a learned language and a natural one, as well as a dead language and a living one. Sanskrit to a Western student is both a learned and a dead language; to the late Sanskrit writers, it was both learned and living -- very roughly parallel to the Latin used in academic circles in the Middle Ages, a language still living in a sense, but not a natural language for anyone. Sanskrit has much greater fluidity and variation over its incredibly long history; Coulson introduces bits and pieces of these strands, but stays fairly close to a classical Sanskrit represented by the most common and widespread of religious texts. There would be only one item where I really feel I must take marks off, and that would be the constant use of transliteration into Latinate script rather than using the Sanskrit throughout the models. While almost all of the reading passages are in the Sanskrit basic font style, the various grammar points (conjugation and declension charts, etc.) are presented in transliteration, which made things a bit more difficult for me, as I'd sometimes have to struggle not only to remember the Sanskrit but also the code for the transliteration (which, of course, never coincides with the transliteration paradigms in other langauge texts I've studied). This book is designed both for classroom use and for self-study. Based on my readings and comparisons of my translations on texts such as the Rig Veda with other, published translation, this book has helped me gain a working knowledge of Sanskrit, and provides a useful text for review on a periodic basis. It includes an answer key to all the major exercises, a guide for further study, an introduction to prose/poetry constructions, and a useful vocabulary glossary.
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