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Sanskrit Language Study
A Dictionary of Sanskrit Grammar, by Kashinath Vasudev Abhyankar and J. M. Shukla. Baroda: Oriental Institute, 1961; 2nd rev. ed. 1977 (Gaekwad's Oriental Series, no. 134).
Whitney's Sanskrit Grammar has long been and still remains the standard reference grammar in the English-speaking West, despite its hard-to-use style and dated terminology, simply because no Western writer before or since has described the Sanskrit language in English as comprehensively as he did. Whitney's linguistic output was prodigious in quantity and wide-ranging, including a comparison of the Greek and Latin verbs (1850), books on general linguistics (1867, 1873-74, 1875), a German grammar (1869), reader (1870), and dictionary, a French grammar (1886), an English grammar (1877) and the massive Century Dictionary (6 vols. 1889-91), as well as from Sanskrit a translation of the Surya-Siddhānta (1860, on astronomy), and editions and translations of two Prātiśākhyas (1862, 1871, texts on Vedic phonology) and of the Atharvaveda (ed. 1855-56, trans. 1905). He had also studied Persian, Arabic, Egyptian, and Coptic in the early 1850s. He clearly had a wide linguistic background to draw upon when he wrote his Sanskrit grammar (1879). Yet in his day ethnocentrism was the norm, and Whitney not surprisingly felt that he could analyze Sanskrit better than Pāṇini and milleniums of native scholarship had, so wrote his grammar accordingly, abandoning their classifications and substituting his own at will. Textbooks today such as the Devavāņipraveśikā have returned to the traditional Sanskrit grammatical classifications, but still use Whitney's grammar for reference because it remains the most comprehensive.
Whitney's Roots, Verb-forms and Primary Derivatives of the Sanskrit Language is a work of great practical use. While the most highly inflected verb in English, "be," has a grand total of eight forms, a Sanskrit verb can have literally hundreds of inflected forms. Obviously a dictionary cannot list these all, so only lists the verb by its root. This means that a very large number of verb-forms are not listed in the dictionary. This book lists under each root specimens of its conjugational forms in the various tenses, and its primary derivatives, found in use. This is very helpful for identifying specific verb-forms and their meanings.
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