History and Introduction to the Language of Sanskirt
Week 1: History lecture: Sanskrit as a branch of the Indo-European language family. Theories on the
origin of the mother tongue, Proto-Indo-European. Language lesson: Sanskrit’s phonetic system.
Week 2: History lecture: The Sanskrit-speaking people’s move into India including a presentation of the
French excavation finds in Bactria/Margiana northwest of India. The development in time from Vedic
Sanskrit to Classical Sanskrit to Prakrit to Hindi. Language lesson: The basic signs in the major script in
which Sanskrit is written: Devanagari.
Week 3: History lecture: The Scripts: Brahmi to Devanagari and derivatives in South India. A
description of the type of writing system employed, a presentation of Emperor Ashoka’s proclamations
in Brahmi and an explanation about how the Sanskrit dictionary works. Language lesson: The complex
Devanagari signs and consonant clusters.
Week 4: History lecture: Vedic Sanskrit: its time period, meter and the sacred texts. A presentation of
the RgVeda and Sanskrit’s archaic elements that exist in modern Indo-European languages. Language
lesson: The Sanskrit nominal case system.
Week 5: History lecture: Classical Sanskrit: its time period and famous texts. The invention of
Linguistics. An explanation of Sanskrit’s roots and operations system and a description of the Sanskrit
linguistic commentaries. Language lesson: The Sanskrit verbal system.
Week 6: History lecture: Prakrit: its time period and dialects. Sanskrit drama and the use of the
dialects in character presentation. The Indian linguist Panini and the codification of Sanskrit. Language
lesson: Sanskrit’s morphological features, part I (e.g. prefixing & compounds).
Week 7: Buddhism and Jainism and its texts. Emperor Ashoka’s inscriptions. The script Kharoshthti
and the British Museum/University of Washington’s Buddhist texts project. Language lesson: Sanskrit’s
morphological features, part II (e.g. prefixing & compounds).
Week 8: History lecture: The difficulties in translating Sanskrit to English. Recommended texts in the
grammar of Sanskrit. Language lesson: How to break down a text in Sanskrit using an example from the
ancient collection of folk tales written in Sanskrit, the Hitopadesa.