Description

This is a Sanskrit Grammar book by A. F. Stenzler ; translated into English with some revision by Renate SoehnenPreface At first sight it may seem unnecessary to provide another Sanskrit Primer in English, there being so many already in existence. There are, however, no doubt some good reasons for the translation of this classic introduction to Sanskrit used in many German universities. One reason is that its scheme is unique: namely, the combination of a concise reference grammar with a corpus of sentences which relate to various groups of paragraphs within the grammar and are accompanied by a glossary; thus grammar and reader are combined. These sentences, being taken from original sources (no made-up sentences) and occurring out of context, leave ample scope for a teacher to comment upon them, and thereby to connect them with the background of Indian culture. Thus it will be seen that this primer is not primarily intended for self-instruction; it needs a teacher to give the necessary additional information and to provide the students with separate exercise material, in order to develop their skills. Not only the cultural background, but also many of the grammatical terms used (at a time when the knowledge of Latin and even Greek could be presupposed) need explanation, especially nowadays when the students seem to have no knowledge at all of any other language but English (of which it has even been said that it has no grammar). There may be said to be another important reason justifying this translation: the Euro-pean Community background. At a time when it is becoming readily feasible to exchange students, e.g. within the ERASMUS scheme, it may not be unreasonable to make provision for material a knowledge of which could be presupposed in Britain as well as in Germany and other continental countries. The barriers between the educational systems may be lower if there is a basis of instruction valid for both. And since Germany has a certain definite importance for Sanskrit studies, it is conceivable and perhaps even desirable that a contribution from this side should be made. When I started translating this primer, in order to teach Sanskrit for beginners at SOAS, I did not envisage how much work would be involved not only for myself, but also for my senior colleague Professor J. C. Wright — who, though only asked to correct my English, made so many contributions to the content of the grammar that I should like to name him as collaborator or even co-author — as well as my German mahaguru Prof. Dr. Paul Thieme, University of Tubingen, who, too, did not spare time and energy in order to help me in correcting my work. To both of them I wish to express my special thanks. I also want to thank the students whom I had to teach and who helped me by asking questions, by pointing out mistakes and inconsistencies, and by making me understand which problems are of special urgency for English native speakers in learning Sanskrit. Finally, I wish to express my gratitude to the Publications Committee of the School of Oriental and African Studies for meeting the cost of publication of this book. London 1992 Renate Sohnen-Thieme Please contribute back by OCRing and Spellcheck/Proofreading this book. I recommend ABBYY Finereader 11 (or similar) for doing this work in a relatively easy way. If you plan to do that please leave a comment here so the effort won’t be duplicated by others. Please upload back the final pdf. Thank you.Please note that the high quality scan images are posted here for a specific purpose – to make it easy to OCR/spellcheck the book and not spend 100 hours doing that from a crappy, lossy compressed pdfs that are sometimes posted here. So please don’t waste your time asking why this is not a pdf file. Instead please contribute a few hours of your time and OCR and proofread the posted book. Thank you.