You (and Patrick) are absolutely right, and thoughts along the lines of what you just said made up a considerable part of the proposal I submitted to the publisher. (Below is some of what I said there.) Those thoughts are of course going to limit which texts I can include in the Reader; but I am hoping that annotating text passages in the same way I did in my textbook means I will still be able to introduce a fair breadth of texts.

Again, thank you so much for taking the time to reply in such detail!

All the best,

    Antonia

From my proposal:

A Reader of the kind we propose has two functions: one is to introduce students to a variety of texts and textual genres; the other is to help them build up reading stamina. Gaining such stamina can be a painful process; and while there is much to be said for the ‘proper’ philological approach (reading slowly and meticulously, with nothing but a dictionary and a grammar for help, not going on to the next line or stanza until every grammatical detail and its context have been fully understood), one can actually acquire a very good understanding of the grammar of a language (and a certain intuition for its literary styles!) by reading faster and thus reading more. This latter option is possible whenever texts are straightforward. Yet many interesting texts are not straightforward, and for them, this Reader will offer more notes than would, strictly speaking, be necessary. Irregularities will of course always be explained; but especially in the first half of the book, regular phenomena that nevertheless are potentially tricky will also be annotated: instances of infrequently occurring sandhi and long chains of words connected in writing; verbs taking their objects in cases other than the accusative, and generally case usage that is non-intuitive for speakers of English; AblGen Sg of i-, u- or ṛ-stems, instances of -ati or -anti that are not Pres 3rd Sg or Pl, respectively, and other noun and verb forms difficult to recognise; infrequent pronoun forms; and so on. For the very first readings, we are considering following the Clay Sanskrit Library conventions in not combining words in writing. In a nutshell: while the readings are meant to be challenging, they should also be enjoyable.

Furthermore, it is not just the number and contents of annotations that matter, but also their accessibility. Instead of making students constantly leaf back and forth and/or keep their fingers in several places of the book at the same time, the Reader will offer all crucial information – grammatical notes, key vocabulary – on the page where it is needed. Thanks to the better quality of Sanskrit fonts now available for print as well as greater flexibility in book formats, the Reader should be able to keep Lanman’s very legible font size and still combine text, annotations and space for students’ notes on one page.

 Finally, there will be an introduction to each text and a complete vocabulary in the back. It would be ideal if the publisher provided the possibility to store a file with the vocabulary (perhaps in a slightly condensed layout) on their website, for students to print out and use together with the book. (Again, the less leafing back-and-forth, the better.) We would also like to look into the possibility of creating some continuity between our textbook and this Reader (e.g. by giving brief, systematic references to the chapters in which a grammatical phenomenon was first introduced); but we are aware this may not be possible with two books from different publishers.