humanities.language.sanskrit

[joe at sfbooks.com]

Some days ago, Anshuman Pandey wrote in an otherwise helpful forwarding note...

>This message was posted on alt.humanities.language.sanskrit.

Please note.  This is a Usenet newsgroup (like soc.history.ancient and
sci.archaeology that I never shut up about), and its correct name is
humanities.language.sanskrit - no "alt", which would be in a different part
of Usenet.  (Sad but true:  "alt" is more widely available than
"humanities", on Usenet.)

For an introduction to Usenet, I recommend going to

http://cs1.presby.edu/~jtbell/usenet/

which is the Web site of a guy who spends a LOT of time advising newcomers
to Usenet and who writes very clearly.  For my somewhat more specific
introduction (directed to soc.history.ancient), feel free to e-mail me, but
it isn't as good as Jon Bell's.  I also have a good deal of specific
information on how to convince your local Usenet news administrator to
carry the humanities groups, which I wrote for would-be readers of
humanities.classics but which should also apply to this group.

humanities.language.sanskrit was founded by some Sanskrit students who
carried on an introductory course in the language there, and also discussed
particular philological problems of interest to them (much like this list's
philological discussions if less erudite).  Broader Indological or
linguistic discussion was not welcome there but one could get answers to
specific Sanskrit-related questions (I redirected a few there and they got
results).  I believe Shrisha Rao, the person who spearheaded the
newsgroup's founding, is now on this mailing list; he can be more
informative than I and correct any mistakes.  The people who posted to that
newsgroup eventually vanished from it (as best I can tell) in favour of a
mailing list.  The last time I visited, some new people were trying to
start things up again.  I'm sure you can review past postings on the group
via DejaNews:

http://www.dejanews.com/forms/dnsetfilter_exp.html

will take you directly to a page where you can specify which newsgroup you
want and enter "humanities.language.sanskrit" in particular.

I'm very glad to see that Anshuman Pandey is reading the group, and hope
others from this list are too, or will start.  When last I was there some
weeks ago, there was *very* little traffic (at the absolute most, thirty
messages per week), so I doubt it would take a great deal of time.  Please
feel free to contact me if you want more information or the above-mentioned
documents, although I should emphasise that I never have read
humanities.language.sanskrit consistently and can't tell you a lot more
about it in particular than I already have.

Joe Bernstein
joe at sfbooks.com