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Introduction
The study of languages is always fascinating. For this reason alone, one can study or learn Sanskrit.
The members of the Samskritapriyah group are more than fascinated by this language. They come from
different disciplines and have had a long lasting association with Sanskrit. This group, comprising
scientists, linguistic scholars, computer scientists, Indologists and above all, well respected Sanskrit
scholars, feels convinced that there are aspects to Sanskrit not yet seen or observed in other languages.
While the lessons are the primary means to learning the language, the information presented alongside
will more than arouse the curiosity of the reader. It must be emphasized that the views expressed here
are not intended to start a big debate on the language itself. The group has carefully studied the
information presented here, for validity, correctness and authenticity. As a consequence, the information
should appeal to the scientific mind.
DISCLAIMER
The Views expressed here are specific to the Samskritapriyah group and the Samskrit
Education Society. IIT Madras, has only made available the web pages as a courtesy to the
group.
Online resources have been made possible at this site as a result of the Multilingual applications that can
be deployed from a web server. Systems Development Lab., IIT Madras is pleased to offer several
resources for the benefit of the viewers. These are classified into groups based on the nature of the
information served or service provided.
• Learning Resources
• References
• Online Databases
• Online services
• online demos
• Tutorials, quizzes
• Linguistic resources
Learning Resources
Learn Sanskrit, our popular presentation on Learning Sanskrit through self study. The online lessons
have won appreciation from the world community not only for their simplicity and effectiveness but the
unique manner in which the lessons are presented in Devanagari script. The lessons have remained
popular from 1997 when the first few lessons were put up. The lessons have been revised in 2006.
Akshara Animation refers to learning the stroking order for the aksharas in different scripts. This is a
unique presentation through Java Applets. Please use the links on the right to reach the appropriate
pages.
Braille Related information has been included from 2001 to allow sighted persons become familiar with
the principles of English Braille as well as Bharati Braille, the standard followed in India. The pages
disseminating information relating to Braille also serve as useful tutorials.
The quizzes relating to Learning Sanskrit and Braille are one of a kind on the web.
References
Online references relate to text from the scriptures and ancient literary works in Sanskrit and Tamil, two
very old languages of India. The presentations include word by word meanings and translations in
English. Search facilities are provided for searching through the texts. Included here are the
Bhagavadgita, Upanishads, Tolkappiam and Tiukkural.
The pages relating to the scripts of India present detailed information on the scripts and the writing
systems employed for each script.
The online Sanskrit Dictionary is another unique presentation with search features and results returned
in Devanagari script.
Transliteration Maps
General online reference in different transliteration schemes in use.
Online Databases
Searchable online databases containing useful reference data. Indian Postal code data is presented as
also Audio Book information for the Visually handicapped.
Online Services
Online services include useful resources for people where multilingual documents are generated and
distributed through web interfaces. these include transliteration based services, generation of test
documents in Unicode, Braille Transcription for the benefit of the Visually Handicapped. The Multilingual
Software allows effortless creation of E-Books in different Indian languages that can have multilingual
content as also English.
Online Demos
The demos constitute applications that illustrate the strength of the IITM approach to multilingual
computing on the web. These demos show the capabilities of the applications which are based on the
syllable level coding employed for representing text in a uniform manner across the scripts. The demos
clearly establish the viability of multilingual computing and localization of applications. The text to speech
features are also illustrated in the demo pages.
Notable among the demos are the Akshara Animation page and the Search Engine application.
Examples are shown for searches in the text of Bhagavadgita or Tirukkural
The demo on online text to speech synthesis shows how speech can be synthesized using MBROLA.
Speech synthesis is illustrated for Sanskrit as well as Tamil.
Unicode Test Pages
The main strength of the Multilingual Software developed at the lab is the approach to working with
Indian languages at the level of syllables. This approach results in very efficient representation of text in
terms of fixed length codes for syllables which can also be quickly converted to other representations
such as Unicode or ISCII. The service provided here allows one to submit text in any of the scripts and
get a web page containing Unicode representation of the text.
Online transliteration service
This service allows one to include Indian language text in any web page by displaying the text in the
form of an image. This way, one can display text without the need to install additional software or fonts in
the systems. The service allows text to be submitted in transliterated form and the result returned as an
image. This service will be useful for those who wish to include Indian language text strings in a web
page that is predominantly in English. The line below is an example of how this service works.
Tutorials
Useful tutorials have been included at this site. As mentioned earlier in the page, the tutorials have
been prepared to provide the details required to understand the writing systems used in India as well as
the concepts in Braille. The computer science related tutorials relate to the operation of the 8086 CPU as
well as the concepts in Virtual memory. Basic information relating to the tutorials is available in the linked
page.
Linguistic references
The pages relating to Linguistics provide information on linguistic corpora that have been generated for
analysis. Useful information is also included on word structures that exhibit amazing geometrical patterns
of akshara symmetry including very long palindromes!
The pages on "Computing With Tamil" contain useful information on aspects of Tamil Computing that will
be interest to application developers.
Visit:
http://acharya.iitm.ac.in/sanskrit/tutor.php