Glossary of Sanskrit Terms. Need 10 people 15 minutes daily for a month

[aditya at icanect.net]

Nandu Abhyankar <abhyankn at plk.af.mil> has recently written an
interesting message which I am forwarding since it may be of interest
to many of you as well.:

                                                Happy New Year
                                                chaitra pratipadaa
                                                varshhapratipadaa
                                                yugaadii
                                                March 20, 1996
Dear friends,

This is a message regarding glossary of Sanskrit terms.
Please read it carefully since it has a long-term/far-reaching
consequences on the glossary preparation, the planned
work of many minds accessing Sanskrit digest!

We encourage your participation whole-heartedly to show any
significant achievement.

The planned work is an on-line one-line meaning representation of
a large collection of Sanskrit words.

There is an on-going project of encoding
Monier-Williams' dictionary for on-line use. The work is initiated
in Europe, and will be useful since it will give a wider
understanding of each Sanskrit word.  It is also a scholarly work,
although we do not know its copyright implications or possible cost
involved.
(http://www.uni-koeln.de/phil-fak/indologie/index.html).

We realize that everyone interested in Sanskrit
must have a printed/published, well prepared , personal
Sanskrit-English-Sanskrit type dictionary.  This is mainly because
Sanskrit, or any language for that matter, should not/cannot be learnt
by
sitting in front of computer screen, although it may be the future
trend!

So our attempt is not to substitute other dictionaries but provide
something complementary and comprehensive, something for ready 
reference when the access to your living room dictionary 
copy is not possible!

With this relevant introduction, let us try to understand what has
already
been done to create an example of Sanskrit words glossary/dictionary 
consisting of about 2500 words.  
We expect that you will join us in providing additional help.

The glossary is available for browsing, word-searching,
and adding more words in a certain format.  Please access it using
Web-URL
http://reality.sgi.com/employees/atul/sanskrit/sanskrit.html
under the category of Sanskrit Dictionary.

You can use the search procedure to do meaningful searches based on 
prefix or exact words strictly according to the ITRANS transliteration
scheme.

You can directly browse the present version of the dictionary file
which
has words in the format
Devanagari (English transliteration) = meaning
The file is kept for reading only.  The words are arranged in the
Devanagari letter sequence with little modifications.

We request that you visit words-add page and add meanings to Sanskrit
words
in the format
word = meaning
one per line.  After adding your list you can browse a file addlist
in http://reality.sgi.com/employees/atul/sanskrit location to check
if your entry is included.  Please note that it is important that you
follow a strict ITRANS transliteration to avoid hours of editting 
by a volunteer later on.  This addlist will then be processed
to enlarge the existing version of the word-meaning pair.  

If web/www access is not possible from your computer, please let us
know
so that we can place a file for FTP access or email it directly.

Anyone interested in the programming procedure or in assisting in
software efforts should contact Atul Narkhede atul at sgi.com .
All the software scripts are written in Perl for Unix-based
workstations.

Independently we request you to prepare short files with
word = meaning
pair one on each line.  Other suggestion is to take-up a small stotra
available on jaguar site, 
(ftp://jaguar.cs.utah.edu/private/sanskrit/sanskrit.html)
split-it into words and give meanings to the shloka
and words, as a result we will have both word/meaning pair as well
as meanings to the stotra-s.
For a list of large number of words please access
sanshab.itx(or sanshab_557_pages.ps) from jaguar site.

Our expectation is that ten people would spend 15 minutes of
their time *daily* to give us 20 word/meaning pairs per day for at 
least a month.  Can we do that?  5000 words per month, more the
better!
After such a collection, it will be editted to eliminate typing
errors.
That leads us to request you to give accurate transliteration and
meanings.

We consider it a beginning and your cooperation is invaluable!

Please join us in providing an on-line preliminary Sanskrit words
glossary,
one among many Sanskrit related projects presented at jaguar site.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------


Have a nice day. 
---------------
Aditya Mishra  
http://www.icanect.net/~aditya   
***********************************************************
The opinions expressed herein are continually mutating and*
might have already been changed  by the time you read them* 
owing to the more recent information that became available*
***********************************************************