SAN - Sanskrit

Sanskrit Electronic Rama Reader, Phase II

Addition of sound files and indices to the Kramapatha Sanskrit reader. See description of earlier Consortial Grant.

Web-Based Sanskrit Course

The current project will create a web-based introductory Sanskrit course incorporating cutting-edge technology in order to provide integrated instruction via text and audio-visual media. Besides the typical textual material of systematic expositions and exercises in PDF files and state of the art integrated audio visual displays typical of much contemporary instructional software, the project will produce unprecedented mechanisms for immediate feedback on exercises, quizzes and exams using Sanskrit parsing software currently under development. We will apply a lexically based phonological and morphological production grammar and parser to student analyses of sentences in Sanskrit exercises to confirm correct steps and flag errors in sandhi analysis, inflectional identification, vocabulary and syntax. The software will be tested initially on students in first-year Sanskrit courses at Brown 2004-5 and will be subsequently made available to scholars worldwide on the Sanskrit Library website. The materials produced will serve to supplement existing Sanskrit instruction, to provide course materials for a university Sanskrit course, and to provide an independent distance education course.

Sanskrit Parser: Phase I: Nominal Forms Searching.

The current project is the first of five stages envisioned in creating a comprehensive Sanskrit parser. In stage one, the current pilot project will produce a program to generate all the inflected forms of any Sanskrit nominal stem. In stage two, the nominal-forms-inflection program will be used in a program to search for all the contextually produced phonological variations in a Sanskrit text file. Subsequent stages will complete the parser with verbal inflection and the handling of agglutinative structures. Housed in the Sanskrit Library website, the programs produced will be freely available to scholars worldwide immediately.

Ramopakhyana: The Story of Rama in the Mahabharata. An Electronic Book for the Sequential Unfoldment of Knowledge

The project will create a web-based annotated Sanskrit reader of the story of Rama in the Ramopakhyana of the Mahabharata. A fully annotated edition of this classic tale from ancient India will include all 727 verses in the Devanagari script as established in the critical edition of the work. Linked to the text will be a series of resources for the learner, including a Roman transliteration, separation of sandhi, prose renditions of the verses, syntactic and cultural notes, an English translation, word by word grammatical analysis including identification of inflection and stem or verbal root, lexical categorization, translation, derivation and compound analysis. The information will be presented on the World Wide Web in the format of an electronic book which allows the reader to unfold the information sequentially as needed. The resulting product will be suitable for adoption in a Sanskrit curriculum at the second year level and beyond, appropriate for either group or individual work.

Kramapatha: A foreign language reader for the sequential unfoldment of knowledge: Proposal to add Sound and Indices

The project will add sound and indexing features to the Kramapatha Sanskrit reader display program. The sound feature will allow the student to play a digital recording of the verse or text segment displayed in the Verse Window. The indexing feature will enable extensive indexing under a number of criteria including multiple categories of morphological identification and lexical categorization, location in text as well as alphabetical by word, stem and derivational root. It will permit the user to select the criteria to build his own indices and to create vocabulary lists for arbitrary segments of the text which would also be printable. The features will greatly expand the usefulness of the learning tool created under the Ramopakhyana project which created a web-based electronic book which allows the reader to unfold the information sequentially as needed. The resulting product will be suitable for adoption in a Sanskrit curriculum at the second year level and beyond, appropriate for either group or individual work.

Sanskrit Educational Software: Integrating linguistic programs into automated Sanskrit translation exercises

The currently proposed project will allow the integration of certain linguistic programs with educational software currently being developed by the author in conjunction with the Scholarly Technology Group at Brown (STG) under a grant from Brown's Computing and Information Services. The educational software utilizes unprecedented mechanisms for immediate feedback on exercises using Sanskrit linguistic software developed by Scharf and Hyman. It applies lexically based phonological and morphological software to student analyses of sentences in Sanskrit-English translation exercises to confirm correct steps and flag errors in sandhi analysis, inflectional identification, vocabulary, and syntax. Malcolm Hyman will be engaged to write a framework to convert a set of sandhi rules written in a modified regular expression syntax to Perl executable code.

A Digitized List of the Principal Parts of Sanskrit Verbs

The project will produce a comprehensive, digitized list of the principal parts of Sanskrit verbs, based on William Dwight Whitney's handbook, The Roots, Verb Forms and Primary Derivatives of the Sanskrit Language. This digitized list will be entered into a database and utilized for first-year Sanskrit students, for posting on the Sanskrit Library web site, and eventually for use in creating a Sanskrit parser.

Pancatantra Audio

In 2001, Professor Ramamurti, a respected traditional scholar of Madras, recorded his mellifluous recitation of PÃƒâ€šrÃ„Â±abhadra's Pancatantra with the intention that I integrate it line by line with the text on The Sanskrit Library website. A qualified Sanskrit student will complete the editing of these digital audio files, mark regions, and save them in archive-quality (AIFF or WAV) format and in web-deliverable (MP3) format. The latter audio files will be made available to students both at Brown and elsewhere at The Sanskrit Library website.

Sanskrit Reader

Development of Samskrtih: A Reader in Sanskrit Culture. The anthology includes readings in epic literature, drama, Kavya literature, Navya-nyaya (logic), Vyakarana, and extensive notes and annotations.

Sanskrit Educational Software

Development of lexically based phonological and morphological software applied to student analyses of sentences in Sanskrit-English translation exercises to confirm correct steps and flag errors in sandhi analysis, inflectional identification, vocabulary, and syntax.