compound analysis in e-texts

[Luis Gonzalez-Reimann]

At 06:04 PM 8/31/96 BST, Jakub Cejka wrote:

>Yes, Sanskrit is a foreign language (even foreign to everyone), I do not, 
>however see the reason why romanized texts do any harm to it. We should 
>not forget that devanagari is not THE Sanskrit script. The original 
>Sanskrit texts (in mss) are written in devanagari, grantha, telugu, 
>bangla, sarada -aadi Scripts. Even today, students in India read Sanskrit 
>not only in devanagari which has otherwise been selected recently as the 
>script (perhaps because of Hindi being widely learnt)...

And let us not lose sight of the fact that neither devanagari nor any of the
other scripts (including brahmi, for that matter) have any "intrinsic"
relationship to Sanskrit.  For centuries Sanskrit texts were transmitted
orally before any form of writing was used to write them down.  So early
(Vedic) Sanskrit has as much to do with devanagari as it has to do with the
roman or any other script. It is just a matter of using diacritics.


Luis Gonzalez-Reimann
University of California, Berkeley