Project Artha
by handArtha means meaning.
The purpose of language is to communicate. Communicate what? Events that we see as living beings and the feelings we get because of them.
- Google telling me there is a jam on ORR again!
- Employees talking: 12:30 PM means lunch time, what was on the live counter?
- Birds (and humans) singing to please a girl!
To describe anything you need an object and an action. This action can be on an object, by an object, of an object. This object is the being which is experiencing the action. In Sanskrit you can describe it this way:
| Object | Action | |
|---|---|---|
| Core | sattva, a being | bhāva, a becoming |
| Stem | prātipadika | aṅga |
| Ending | sup | tiṅ |
| Word | subanta | tiṅanta |
| Variables | gender, number, case by role | person, number, tense, voice |
From first principles it is easy to understand the structure. In code you would say it is structs and interfaces, and there are languages that provide nothing else. But this is not just me saying it; the tradition says it in those words.
Yāska's Nirukta divides all words into nāma and ākhyāta, noun and verb, and defines them by what they foreground: a noun has being as its core (sattva-pradhāna), a verb has becoming as its core (bhāva-pradhāna). Pāṇini keeps the same cut with subanta and tiṅanta. The remaining two word classes, upasarga and nipāta (the indeclinables), are the glue that attaches to one side or the other.
If you look at the full pipeline to communicate in Sanskrit, we just have to add a few more things:
Each box is a section of 0.0 Sanskrit Language Framework.
Build a word
Pick a root, add prefixes, then make a verb, a noun or an indeclinable. The word is built in your browser by vidyut-prakriya, which follows the grammar of Pāṇini, and every rule it applied is listed under the word.
Engine: vidyut-prakriya (MIT), its WebAssembly build, run in the browser. Roots: the Dhātupāṭha of vidyut 0.4.0, 2229 roots, with English meanings from ashtadhyayi.com, ordered by how often each root occurs in the DCS corpus. Rule numbers link to ashtadhyayi.com; rule texts are the ones vidyut ships. Dictionary entries: the Artha lexicon (Monier-Williams, Apte and the other CDSL dictionaries), looked up for the word, then its stem, its prefixed root and its root. The choice lists and their English hints: by hand