Sanskrit grammar
The grammar of the Sanskrit language has a complex verbal system, rich nominal declension, and extensive use of compound nouns. It was studied and codified by Sanskrit grammarians from the later Vedic period, culminating in the Pāṇinian grammar of the 6th century BCE.
Grammatical tradition
Sanskrit grammatical tradition began in late Vedic India and culminated in the Aṣṭādhyāyī of Pāṇini, which consists of 3990 sutras. About a century after Pāṇini, Kātyāyana composed vārtikas on the Pāṇinian sũtras. Patañjali, who lived three centuries after Pāṇini, wrote the Mahābhāṣya, the "Great Commentary" on the Aṣṭādhyāyī and Vārtikas. Because of these three ancient Sanskrit grammarians this grammar is called Trimuni Vyākarana. Jayaditya and Vāmana wrote a commentary named Kāśikā in 600 CE. 's commentary on Patañjali's also exerted much influence on the development of grammar, but more influential was the Rupāvatāra of Buddhist scholar Dharmakīrti which popularised simplified versions of Sanskrit grammar.The most influential work of the Early Modern period was Siddhānta-Kaumudī by and its various derivate versions by Varadarāja.
European grammatical scholarship began in the 18th century with Jean François Pons and others, and culminated in the exhaustive expositions by 19th century scholars such as Otto von Böhtlingk, William Dwight Whitney, Jacob Wackernagel and others.
Verbs
Classification of verbs
Sanskrit has ten classes of verbs divided into two broad groups: intransitive and transitive. The thematic verbs are so called because an a, called the theme vowel, is inserted between the stem and the ending. This serves to make the thematic verbs generally more regular. Exponents used in verb conjugation include prefixes, suffixes, infixes, and reduplication. Every root has zero, guṇa, and vṛddhi grades. If V is the vowel of the zero grade, the guṇa-grade vowel is traditionally thought of as a + V, and the vṛddhi-grade vowel as ā + V.Tense systems
Sanskrit has ten tenses. The verb tenses are organized into four 'systems' based on the different stem forms used in conjugation. There are four tense systems:The present system includes the present tense and the imperfect, the optative and imperative moods, as well as some of the remnant forms of the old subjunctive. The tense stem of the present system is formed in various ways. The numbers are the native grammarians' numbers for these classes.
Perfect system
The perfect system includes only the perfect. The stem is formed with reduplication as with the present system.The perfect system also produces separate "strong" and "weak" forms of the verb—the strong form is used with the singular active, and the weak form with the rest.
Aorist system
The aorist system includes aorist proper and some of the forms of the ancient injunctive. The principal distinction of the two is presence/absence of an augment – a- prefixed to the stem. The aorist system stem actually has three different formations: the simple aorist, the sibilant aorist, and the reduplicating aorist, which is semantically related to the causative verb.Future system
The future system is formed with the suffixation of sya or iṣya and guṇa. Verbs then conjugate as though they were thematic verbs in the present system. The imperfect of the future system is used as a conditional.Verbs: conjugation
Each verb has a grammatical voice, whether active, passive or middle. There also is an impersonal voice, which can be described as the passive voice of intransitive verbs. Sanskrit verbs have an indicative, an optative and an imperative mood. Older forms of the language had a subjunctive, though this had fallen out of use by the time of Classical Sanskrit.Basic conjugational endings
Conjugational endings in Sanskrit convey person, number, and voice. Different forms of the endings are used depending on what tense stem and mood they are attached to. Verb stems or the endings themselves may be changed or obscured by sandhi.Primary endings are used with present indicative and future forms. Secondary endings are used with the imperfect, conditional, aorist, and optative. Perfect and imperative endings are used with the perfect and imperative respectively.
Nominals
Sanskrit is a highly inflected language with three grammatical genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter ; and three numbers: singular, dual, and plural. It has eight cases: nominative, vocative, accusative, instrumental, dative, ablative, genitive, and locative.The number of actual declensions is debatable. Pāṇini identifies six kārakas corresponding to the nominative, accusative, dative, instrumental, locative, and ablative cases. Pāṇini defines them as follows :
- Apādāna : " firm when departure." This is the equivalent of the ablative case, which signifies a stationary object from which movement proceeds.
- Sampradāna : "he whom one aims at with the object". This is equivalent to the dative case, which signifies a recipient in an act of giving or similar acts.
- ' "that which effects most." This is equivalent to the instrumental case.
- ' : or "substratum." This is equivalent to the locative case.
- Karman : "what the agent seeks most to attain". This is equivalent to the accusative case.
- Kartā : "he/that which is independent in action". This is equivalent to the nominative case.
In this article they are divided into five declensions. The declension to which a noun belongs to is determined largely by form.
Basic noun and adjective declension
The basic scheme of suffixation is given in the table below—valid for almost all nouns and adjectives. However, according to the gender and the ending consonant/vowel of the uninflected word-stem, there are predetermined rules of compulsory sandhi which would then give the final inflected word. The parentheses give the case-terminations for the neuter gender, the rest are for masculine and feminine gender. Both Devanagari script and IAST transliterations are given.| Case name | Case number | Singular | Dual | Plural |
| Nominative | 1 | -s | -au | -as |
| Accusative | 2 | -am | -au | -as |
| Instrumental | 3 | -ā | -bhyām | -bhis |
| Dative | 4 | -e | -bhyām | -bhyas |
| Ablative | 5 | -as | -bhyām | -bhyas |
| Genitive | 6 | -as | -os | -ām |
| Locative | 7 | -i | -os | -su |
| Vocative | -s | -au | -as |
The final characters in the above table are theoretical. In Classical Sanskrit, all of them become when the word is at the end of a sentence, and, if the word is followed by another in a sentence, the rules of sandhi for final "-ḥ" are applied.
a-stems
A-stems comprise the largest class of nouns. As a rule, nouns belonging to this class, with the uninflected stem ending in short-a, are either masculine or neuter. Nouns ending in long-A are almost always feminine. A-stem adjectives take the masculine and neuter in short-a, and feminine in long-A in their stems. This class is so big because it also comprises the Proto-Indo-European o-stems.i- and u-stems
Long Vowel-stems
ṛ-stems
ṛ-stems are predominantly agental derivatives like dātṛ 'giver', though also include kinship terms like pitṛ 'father', mātṛ 'mother', and svásṛ 'sister'.| Singular | Dual | Plural | |
| Nominative | pitā́ | pitárau | pitárah |
| Accusative | pitáram | pitárau | pitṝn |
| Instrumental | pitrā́ | pitṛ́bhyām | pitṛ́bhih |
| Dative | pitré | pitṛ́bhyām | pitṛ́bhyah |
| Ablative | pitúr | pitṛ́bhyām | pitṛ́bhyah |
| Genitive | pitúr | pitróh | pitṝṇā́m |
| Locative | pitári | pitróh | pitṛ́ṣu |
| Vocative | pítar | pitárau | pitárah |
Numerals
The numbers from one to ten are:Personal pronouns and determiners
Sanskrit pronouns are declined for case, number, and gender. Many pronouns have alternative enclitic forms. The first and second person pronouns are declined for the most part alike, having by analogy assimilated themselves with one another. Ablatives in singular and plural may be extended by the syllable -tas; thus mat or mattas, asmat or asmattas. Sanskrit does not have true third person pronouns, but its demonstratives fulfil this function instead by standing independently without a modified substantive.There are four different demonstratives in Sanskrit: tat, etat, idam, and adas. etat indicates greater proximity than tat. While idam is similar to etat, adas refers to objects that are more remote than tat. eta, is declined almost identically to ta. Its paradigm is obtained by prefixing e- to all the forms of ta. As a result of sandhi, the masculine and feminine singular forms transform into ' and '.
The enclitic pronoun ena is found only in a few oblique cases and numbers. Interrogative pronouns all begin with k-, and decline just as tat does, with the initial t- being replaced by k-. The only exception to this are the singular neuter nominative and accusative forms, which are both kim and not the expected *kat. For example, the singular feminine genitive interrogative pronoun, "of whom?", is . Indefinite pronouns are formed by adding the participles api, cid, or cana after the appropriate interrogative pronouns. All relative pronouns begin with y-, and decline just as tat does. The correlative pronouns are identical to the tat series.
In addition to the pronouns described above, some adjectives follow the pronominal declension. Unless otherwise noted, their declension is identical to tat.
- eka: "one", "a certain".
- anya: "another".
- sarva: "all", "every".
- para: "the other".
- sva: "self".
Compounds
- Dvandva
- Tatpuruṣa
- Karmadhāraya
- Bahuvrīhi
Phonology
| Type | Classification | Phonemes |
| Vowels | Plain | a ā i ī u ū |
| Vowels | Syllabic | ṛ ṝ ḷ ḹ |
| Vowels | Diphthongs | e ai o au |
| Vowels | Semivowels | y |
| Consonants | Anusvara | ṃ |
| Consonants | Visarga | |
| Consonants | Plosives | k kh g gh ṭ ṭh ḍ ḍh t th d dh p ph b bh |
| Consonants | Nasals | ṅ ñ ṇ n m |
| Consonants | Liquids | r l |
| Consonants | Fricatives and affricates | v ś ṣ s h c ch j jh |
An alternate traditional ordering is that of the Shiva Sutra of.
It should be understood that, while the script used here is Devanagari, this has no particular importance. It just happens currently to be the most popular script for Sanskrit. The form of the symbols used to write Sanskrit has varied widely geographically and over time, and notably includes in modern times the Tamil and other modern Indian scripts. What is important is that the adherence to the phonological classification of the symbols elucidated here has remained constant in Sanskrit since classical times. It should be further noted that the phonology of modern Indian languages has evolved, and the values given to Devanagari symbols in, e.g. Hindi, differ somewhat from those of Sanskrit.
Vowels
Further information: :File:The_International_Phonetic_Alphabet_.pdf|IPA chart - 2015. and IPA vowel chart with audioThe vowels of Classical Sanskrit written in Devanagari, as a syllable-initial letter and as a diacritic mark on the consonant , pronunciation transcribed in IPA, IAST, and approximate equivalent in English:
| Letter | IPA | IAST | ||
| a | Although, as a more closed vowel, it markedly differs in quality from ', phonologically it functions as its short counterpart. | |||
| ā | ||||
| i | ||||
| ī | ||||
| u | ||||
| ū | ||||
| ṛ | ||||
| ṝ | ||||
| ḷ | ||||
| * | * | *ḹ | a theoretical sound that did not actually exist | |
| e | a long close-mid front unrounded vowel: a in bane | |||
| ai | a diphthong: i in ice, i in kite | |||
| o | a close-mid back rounded vowel: o in bone | |||
| au | a diphthong: ou in house |
The long vowels are pronounced twice as long as their short counterparts. Also, there exists a third, extra-long length for most vowels. This lengthening is called pluti; the lengthened vowels, called pluta, are used in various cases, but particularly in the vocative. The pluti is not accepted by all grammarians. The vowels and continue as allophonic variants of Proto-Indo-Iranian, and are categorised as diphthongs by Sanskrit grammarians even though they are realised phonetically as simple long vowels.
Additional points:
- There are some additional signs traditionally listed in tables of the Devanagari script:
- * The diacritic called anusvāra represented a nasal sound with varied pronunciation
- * The diacritic called visarga, represents voiceless glottal fricative whose voiced counterpart is the consonant '
- * The diacritic called candrabindu indicates the nasalization of a vowel before a consonant, or of the semi-vowels y, v, l.
- If a lone consonant needs to be written without any following vowel, it is given a virāma diacritic below.
- The vowel in Sanskrit is realised as being more central and less back than the closest English approximation, which is. But the grammarians have classified it as a back vowel.
- The ancient Sanskrit grammarians classified the vowels as velars, retroflexes, palatals and plosives rather than as back, central and front vowels. Hence and are classified respectively as palato-velar and labio-velar vowels respectively. But the grammarians have classified them as diphthongs and in prosody, each is given two mātrās. This does not necessarily mean that they are proper diphthongs, but neither excludes the possibility that they could have been proper diphthongs at a very ancient stage. These vowels are pronounced as long and respectively by priests of today. Other than the "four" diphthongs, Sanskrit usually disallows any other diphthong—vowels in succession, where they occur, are converted to semivowels according to sandhi rules.
- Vedic Sanskrit had syllabic /r/ and /l/ that were treated as vowels, but by Classical times these had broken to and plus a vowel. Derivational morphology added a long version of the /r/. Indian pandits came to pronounce them as, and in the North - as in the name of the god known there as "krishn", - as, and in the South - where the same god is commonly referred to as "krushna", - and as, and in the East.
Consonants
IAST and Devanagari notations are given, with approximate IPA values in square brackets.
The table below shows the traditional listing of the Sanskrit consonants with the equivalents in English, French and Spanish. Each consonant shown below is deemed to be followed by the neutral vowel schwa, and is named in the table as such.
| Unaspirated Voiceless alpaprāṇa śvāsa | Aspirated Voiceless mahāprāna śvāsa | Unaspirated Voiced alpaprāṇa nāda | Aspirated Voiced mahāprāna nāda | Nasal anunāsika nāda | |
| Velar kaṇṭhya | ; English: skip | ; English: cow | ; English: game | ; no equivalent | ; English: ring |
| Palatal tālavya | ; no equivalent | ; English: cheer | ; English: jeer | ; no equivalent | ; French: agneau, Spanish ñ |
| Retroflex mūrdhanya | ; English: stop | ; English: time | ; English : door | ; no equivalent | ; no English equivalent |
| lamino-Dental dantya | ; French, Spanish: tomate | ; Aspirated | ; French: dans, Spanish donde | ; Aspirated | ; English: name |
| Labial oṣṭhya | ; English: spin | ; English: pork | ; English: bone | ; no equivalent | ; English: mine |
| Palatal tālavya | Retroflex mūrdhanya | Dental dantya | Labial/ Glottal oṣṭhya | |
| Approximant antastha | ; English: you | ; no equivalent | ; French, Spanish: la | ; Hindi व |
| Sibilant/ Fricative ūṣmang | ; similar to English: ship | ; Retroflex form of | ; English: same | ; English ahead |
In the earlier language, was pronounced as the labio-velar approximant, but it later developed into a labio-dental sound. To an English speaker's ear, this sound may be interpreted as the English "v" or the English "w", depending on context and precise articulation. Moreover, the Sanskrit व has a considerable range of articulation depending on position.. It is nonetheless understood in the Sanskrit writing system, as well as by speakers of modern Indian languages, as one and the same phoneme.
Stress
Vedic Sanskrit had pitch accent. However, by Classical Sanskrit this had been replaced by stress. Stress may not fall on the last syllable of a word, but otherwise it falls on the last heavy syllable. If all syllables before the last are light, then stress falls on the initial syllable. However, stress is not particularly important in Sanskrit.Phonology and sandhi
The Sanskrit vowels are as discussed in the section above. The long syllabic l is not attested, and is only discussed by grammarians for systematic reasons. Its short counterpart ḷ occurs in a single root only, kḷp "to order, array". Long syllabic r is also quite marginal, occurring in the genitive plural of r-stems. i, u, ṛ, ḷ are vocalic allophones of consonantal y, v, r, l. There are thus only 5 invariably vocalic phonemes: a, ā, ī, ū, ṝ.Visarga ḥ is an allophone of r and s, and anusvara ṃ, Devanagari of any nasal, both in pausa. The exact pronunciation of the three sibilants may vary, but they are distinct phonemes. Voiced sibilants, such as z, ẓ, and ź as well as its aspirated counterpart źh, were inherited by Proto-Indo-Aryan from Proto-Indo-Iranian but lost around or after the time of the Rigveda, as evidenced due to ḷh being metrically a cluster. The retroflex consonants are somewhat marginal phonemes, often being conditioned by their phonetic environment; they do not continue a PIE series and are often ascribed by some linguists to the substratal influence of Dravidian or other substrate languages. The nasal is a conditioned allophone of . There are thus 31 consonantal or semi-vocalic phonemes, consisting of four/five kinds of stops realised both with or without aspiration and both voiced and voiceless, three nasals, four semi-vowels or liquids, and four fricatives, written in IAST transliteration as follows: k, kh, g, gh; c, ch, j, jh; ṭ, ṭh, ḍ, ḍh; t, th, d, dh; p, ph, b, bh; m, n, ṇ; y, r, l, v; ś, ṣ, s, h or a total of 36 unique Sanskrit phonemes altogether.
The phonological rules which are applied when combining morphemes to a word, and when combining words to a sentence, are collectively called sandhi "composition". Texts are written phonetically, with sandhi applied.
Phonological processes
A number of phonological processes have been described in detail. One of them is ,. It is the incomplete articulation, or ""repressing or obscuring", of a plosive or, according to some texts, a semi-vowel, which occurs before another plosive or a pause. It was described in the various Prātiśākhyas as well as the '. These texts are not unanimous on the environments that trigger abhinidhana, nor on the precise classes of consonants affected.One ancient grammarian, ', states that only occurred when a consonant was doubled, whereas according to the text of the ' it was obligatory in this context but optional for plosives before another plosive of a different place of articulation. The ' and the ' agree on the observation that abhinidhana occurs only if there is a slight pause between the two consonants and not if they are pronounced jointly. Word-finally, plosives undergo abhinidhāna according to the and the '. The latter text adds that final semivowels are also incompletely articulated. The ' 2.38 lists an exception: a plosive at the end of the word will not undergo and will be fully released if it is followed by a consonant whose place of articulation is further back in the mouth. The ' states that the consonants affected by abhinidhāna are the voiceless unaspirated plosives, the nasal consonants and the semivowels ' and '.
According to Siddheshwar Varma, these differences may indicate geographical variation. It is not clear whether abhinidhana was present in the early spoken Sanskrit or it developed at a later stage. In Prakrit and Pāli abhinidhana was carried a step forward into complete assimilation, as for example sapta to satta.