title: Netherlands national football team

text: With the coronavirus postponing Euro 2020 to 2021, the Netherlands played their group matches at home at the Johan Cruijff Arena in Amsterdam, beating Ukraine 3–2, Austria 2–0 and North Macedonia 3–0. However, the tournament ended in disappointment for the Netherlands once more, as they were beaten 2–0 by the Czech Republic in their Round of 16 tie in Budapest, after a Matthijs de Ligt red card. Two days later, De Boer left his position. He was replaced by Louis van Gaal, who came out of retirement to return for a third spell in charge of the side. On 16 November 2021, the Netherlands qualified for the 2022 World Cup after beating Norway 2–0 and topping their qualification group on the final day. In the 2022 World Cup, the Netherlands topped their group with 7 points. They progressed to the quarterfinals where they eventually lost to Argentina on penalties.


title: Netherlands national football team

text: The Netherlands national football team famously plays in bright orange shirts. Orange is the historic national colour of the Netherlands, originating from one of the many title of the ruling head of state, Prince of Orange. The current Netherlands away shirt is blue. The lion on the crest is the Netherlands' national and royal animal and has been on the crest since 1907 when they won 3–1 over Belgium.


title: Netherlands national football team

text: Nike is the national team's kit provider, a sponsorship that began in 1996 and is contracted to continue until at least 2026. Before that the team was supplied by Adidas and Lotto.


title: Netherlands national football team

text: Deeply rooted in anti-German sentiment due to the occupation of the Netherlands by Germany during World War II, the Netherlands' long-time football rival is Germany. Beginning in 1974, when the Netherlands lost the 1974 World Cup to West Germany in the finals, the rivalry between the two nations has become one of the best-known in international football.


title: Netherlands national football team

text: To a lesser extent, the Netherlands maintains a rivalry with their other neighbour, Belgium; a Belgium–Netherlands fixture is referred to as a Low Countries derby. They have played in 126 matches with the two competing against each other regularly between 1905 and 1964. This has diminished due to the rise of semi-professional football.


title: Netherlands national football team

text: The Netherlands national football team matches have broadcast on Nederlandse Omroep Stichting which includes all friendlies, Nations League and World Cup qualifiers. The newest contract is a seven-year deal until 2027.


title: Netherlands national football team

text: The Netherlands national team does not have a national stadium but plays mostly at the Johan Cruyff Arena in Amsterdam. It played host to its first Netherlands international game back in 1997, a 1998 World Cup qualification match against San Marino which the Netherlands won 4–0. It was formally called the Amsterdam Arena until 2018 when it was renamed in memory of Johan Cruyff.


title: Netherlands national football team

text: Over the last few years, De Kuip in Rotterdam has hosted matches more regularly. Occasionally, matches take place at Philips Stadion in Eindhoven and the De Grolsch Veste in Enschede.


title: Netherlands national football team

text: The following matches were played or are scheduled to be played by the national team in the past or in the upcoming 12 months. The time in the Netherlands is shown unless the match is in a different time zone.


title: Netherlands national football team

text: The Netherlands' first two tournament appearances at the 1934 and the 1938 editions saw them lose their first round matches to Switzerland (1934) and Czechoslovakia (1938).


title: Netherlands national football team

text: After not qualifying for the next six World Cups, they qualified for the 1974 FIFA World Cup in West Germany. There, with the use of Total Football tactics, they recorded their first win in World Cup competition against Uruguay. They qualified through to the second round where a win on the finals match day secured the Netherlands a spot in the finals. They lost to West Germany 2–1 with Gerd Müller scoring the winning goal for the Germany. The Netherlands once again made the 1978 FIFA World Cup finals with the team finishing second in the group behind Peru. After finishing top of the all-European group in the second round, they met Argentina in the finals. Argentina protested René van de Kerkhof's forearm plaster cast. After that protest, the game went to extra time where Argentina won 3–1 after scoring two goals in extra time.


title: Netherlands national football team

text: The 1990 edition saw the Netherlands not win a single game throughout the tournament, scoring only two goals in the group stage. After finishing with an identical record with the Republic of Ireland, they were split by drawing of lots. The Netherlands took on West Germany losing 2–1 in Milan. 1994 saw the Netherlands knocked out in the quarter-finals stage as they lost to eventual champions Brazil with Branco's brutal free-kick sending them out. After qualifying from their group with five points, the Netherlands made the semi-finals of the 1998 edition where they once again lost to the Brazilians. This time it was by penalties; Phillip Cocu and Ronald de Boer's shots missed the goal to give Brazil a spot in the finals. The Netherlands went on to finish in fourth place after losing to Croatia in the third place playoff.


title: Netherlands national football team

text: In 2006, the Netherlands made it to the round of 16 where, in what was called the "Battle of Nuremberg" they lost by a single goal to Portugal. The Netherlands were given seven yellow cards. The following edition, in 2010, saw the team qualify to the knockout stage by finishing atop Group E. After defeating Slovakia 2–1 in the round of 16, they came back from an early goal by Robinho to defeat Brazil 2–1 in the quarter-finals as Wesley Sneijder scored a double. In the semi-finals, they defeated Uruguay in a tough game for the Netherlands, making their first World Cup finals since 1978. In the finals, they took on Spain. During normal time, the Netherlands had plenty of chances to win the game, the closest being in the 62nd minute when Sneijder shot wide. Spain's winning goal came off a play in the 116th minute after the Netherlands went down to ten men.


title: Netherlands national football team

text: In 2014, the Netherlands finish atop Group B with wins over Spain, Australia and Chile. In the round of 16 match against Mexico, the Netherlands came back from a goal down to manage a 2–1 win in stoppage time with Klaas-Jan Huntelaar scoring a controversial penalty. In the quarter-finals, they defeated Costa Rica on penalties however they lost to Argentina on penalties in the semi-finals. The Netherlands took bronze in the tournament after defeating hosts nations Brazil 3–0 in the third place playoff.


title: Martha Stewart

text: Martha Helen Stewart (, ; born August 3, 1941) is an American retail businesswoman, writer, and television personality. As founder of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, she gained success through a variety of business ventures, encompassing publishing, broadcasting, merchandising and e-commerce. She has written numerous bestselling books, is the publisher of "Martha Stewart Living" magazine and hosted two syndicated television programs: "Martha Stewart Living", which ran from 1993 to 2004, and "Martha", which ran from 2005 to 2012.


title: Martha Stewart

text: In 2004, Stewart was convicted of felony charges related to the ImClone stock trading case; she served five months in federal prison and was released in March 2005. There was speculation that the incident would effectively end her media empire, but in 2005 Stewart began a comeback campaign and her company returned to profitability in 2006. Stewart rejoined the board of directors of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia in 2011 and became chairwoman of her namesake company again in 2012. The company was acquired by Sequential Brands in 2015.


title: Martha Stewart

text: Martha Stewart was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, on August 3, 1941. She is the second of six children born to parents Edward Kostyra (1912–1979) and Martha (née Ruszkowski; 1914–2007) and is of Polish heritage. Both her parents were teachers, her father later becoming a pharmaceutical salesman. When Stewart was three years old, the family moved to Nutley, New Jersey. She adopted the name "Grace" for her Catholic confirmation name.


title: Martha Stewart

text: When Stewart was 10, she worked as the occasional babysitter for the children of Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, and Gil McDougald, all players for the New York Yankees. Mickey and Merlyn Mantle had four sons, whom Stewart watched and for whom she organized birthday parties. She also began modeling. At 15, Stewart was featured in a television commercial for Unilever. She went on to appear in television commercials and in magazines, including one of Tareyton's "Smokers would rather fight than switch!" cigarette advertisements. During her college years, she supplemented her scholarship money through "modeling jobs at $50/hour — which was a lot of money at that time." Among the companies she modeled for was Chanel.


title: Martha Stewart

text: Stewart's mother taught her how to cook and sew. Later, she learned the processes of canning and preserving when she visited her grandparents' home in Buffalo, New York. Her father had a passion for gardening and passed on much of his knowledge and expertise to his daughter. Stewart was also active in many extracurricular activities, such as the school's newspaper and art club.


title: Martha Stewart

text: Stewart graduated from Nutley High School. She attended Barnard College of Columbia University, originally planning to major in chemistry, but switching to art, history, and later architectural history. To help pay her college tuition, she did fashion modeling for Chanel. During this time, she met Andrew Stewart, who finished his law degree at Yale Law School. They married in July 1961. She returned to Barnard a year after their marriage to graduate with a double major in history and architectural history.


title: Martha Stewart

text: Meanwhile, Andrew Stewart founded a publishing house and served as chief executive of several others. Andrew and Martha Stewart moved to Westport, Connecticut, where they purchased and restored the 1805 farmhouse on Turkey Hill Road that would later become the model for the TV studio of "Martha Stewart Living". During the project, Stewart's panache for restoring and decorating became apparent.


title: Martha Stewart

text: In 1976, Stewart started a catering business in her basement with a friend from her modeling days, Norma Collier. The venture quickly became successful but soured when Collier alleged that Stewart was difficult to work with, and was also taking catering jobs on the side. Stewart soon bought Collier's portion of the business. Stewart was also hired as the manager of a gourmet food store, the Market Basket, but after a disagreement with the owners at the mini-mall she was forced out and opened her own store.


title: Martha Stewart

text: Andrew had become the president of prominent New York City publisher Harry N. Abrams, Inc. In 1977, he was responsible for releasing the English-language edition of "The Secret Book of Gnomes" series, by Dutch authors Wil Huygen and Rien Poortvliet, which quickly became a blockbuster success and was on "The New York Times" Best Seller list. He contracted Stewart's company to cater the book release party, where Stewart was introduced to Alan Mirken, head of Crown Publishing Group.


title: Martha Stewart

text: Mirken was impressed by Stewart's talent as a chef and hostess and later contacted her to develop a cookbook, featuring recipes and photos from the parties that Stewart hosted. The result was her first book, "Entertaining" (December 13, 1982), ghostwritten by Elizabeth Hawes.


title: Martha Stewart

text: Following the success of "Entertaining", Stewart released many more books under the Clarkson Potter publishing imprint, including "Martha Stewart's Quick Cook" (1983), "Martha Stewart's Hors d'Oeuvres" (1984), "Martha Stewart's Pies & Tarts" (1985), "Weddings" (1987), which was also ghostwritten by Elizabeth Hawes, "The Wedding Planner" (1988), "Martha Stewart's Secrets for Entertaining" (1988), "Martha Stewart's Quick Cook Menus" (1988), and "Martha Stewart's Christmas" (1989), among others. During this time, she also authored dozens of newspaper columns, magazine articles, and other pieces on homemaking, and made numerous television appearances on programs such as "The Oprah Winfrey Show" and "Larry King Live".


title: Martha Stewart

text: In 1990, Stewart signed with Time Publishing Ventures to develop a new magazine, "Martha Stewart Living", for which Stewart would serve as editor-in-chief. The first issue was released in late 1990 with an initial rate base of 250,000. Circulation would peak in 2002 at more than 2 million copies per issue.


title: Martha Stewart

text: In 1993, Stewart began a weekly half-hour television program, also called "Martha Stewart Living", based on her magazine. The show expanded to weekdays in 1997 and later to a full hour show in 1999 with half-hour episodes on weekends, and ran until 2004. Stewart also became a frequent contributor to NBC's "Today Show" and later to CBS's "The Early Show", and starred in several prime time holiday specials on the CBS network.


title: Martha Stewart

text: On the cover of their May 1995 issue, "New York Magazine" declared Stewart "the definitive American woman of our time".


title: Martha Stewart

text: In September 1997, with the assistance of business partner Sharon Patrick, Stewart was able to secure funding to purchase the various television, print, and merchandising ventures related to the Martha Stewart brand, and consolidate them into a new company, named Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia (MSLO). Stewart served as chairwoman, president, and CEO of the new company and Patrick became Chief Operations Officer. By organizing all of the brand's assets under one roof, Stewart thought she could promote synergy and have greater control of the brand's direction through the business's activities. That same month, Stewart announced in "Martha Stewart Living" the launch of a companion website and a catalogue business, called Martha by Mail. The company also had a direct-to-consumer floral business.


title: Martha Stewart

text: On October 19, 1999, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia went public on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol MSO. The initial public offering was set at US$18 per share (), and rallied to US$38 () by the end of trading, making Stewart a billionaire on paper and the first female self-made billionaire in the United States. The stock price slowly went down to $16 per share by February 2002. Stewart was then and continues to be the majority shareholder, commanding 96% control of voting power in the company.


title: Martha Stewart

text: In June 2022, Martha Stewart announced that she would be launching her first original podcast, entitled "The Martha Stewart Podcast," in partnership with iHeart Radio. On June 15, 2022, Stewart shared that Snoop Dogg would be the guest on the first episode of podcast, which debuted on June 22, 2022.


title: Martha Stewart

text: According to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Stewart avoided a loss of $45,673 by selling all 3,928 shares of her ImClone Systems stock on December 27, 2001, after receiving material, nonpublic information from Peter Bacanovic, her broker at Merrill Lynch. The day following her sale, the stock value fell 16%.


title: Martha Stewart

text: In the months that followed, Stewart drew heavy media scrutiny, including a "Newsweek" cover headlined "Martha's Mess". Notably, on June 25, 2002, CBS anchor Jane Clayson grilled Stewart on the air about ImClone during her regular segment on "The Early Show". Stewart continued chopping cabbage and responded: "I want to focus on my salad." On October 3, 2002, Stewart resigned her position, held for four months, on the board of directors of the New York Stock Exchange, following a deal prosecutors had made with Douglas Faneuil, an assistant to Bacanovic.


title: Martha Stewart

text: On June 4, 2003, Stewart was indicted by the government on nine counts, including charges of securities fraud and obstruction of justice. Stewart voluntarily stepped down as CEO and Chairwoman of MSLO, but stayed on as chief creative officer. She went on trial in January 2004. Prosecutors showed that Bacanovic had ordered his assistant to tell Stewart that the CEO of ImClone, Samuel D. Waksal, was selling all his shares in advance of an adverse Food and Drug Administration ruling. The FDA action was expected to cause ImClone shares to decline.


title: Martha Stewart

text: Monica Beam, a shareholder of MSLO, also brought a derivative suit against Stewart and other directors and officers of the company. It went before the Supreme Court of Delaware in 2004 and was ultimately dismissed.


title: Martha Stewart

text: After a highly publicized six-week jury trial, Stewart was found guilty in March 2004 of felony charges of conspiracy to obstruct, of obstruction of an agency proceeding, and of making false statements to federal investigators and was sentenced in July 2004 to serve a five-month term in a federal correctional facility and a two-year period of supervised release (including five months of electronic monitoring).


title: Martha Stewart

text: Bacanovic and Waksal were also convicted of federal charges and sentenced to prison terms. Stewart also paid a fine of $30,000.


title: Martha Stewart

text: In August 2006, the SEC announced that it had agreed to settle the related civil case against Stewart. Under the settlement, Stewart agreed to disgorge $58,062 (including interest from the losses she avoided), as well as a civil penalty of three times the loss avoided, or $137,019. She also agreed to a five-year ban from serving as a director, CEO, CFO, or any other officer role responsible for preparing, auditing, or disclosing financial results of any public company. In June 2008, the UK Border Agency refused to grant her a visa to enter the United Kingdom because of her criminal conviction for obstructing justice. She had been planning to speak at the Royal Academy on fashion and leisure industry matters.


title: Martha Stewart

text: Stewart wanted to go to prison in Connecticut or Florida. She did not want to serve at the Federal Prison Camp in Alderson, West Virginia, owing to its remote location; in 2004, her lawyer said that the remoteness would make it difficult for Stewart's then-90-year-old mother to visit. Judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum recommended to the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) that Stewart be given her first choice, Federal Correctional Institution, Danbury, or her second choice, Federal Correctional Complex, Coleman. However, a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Justice said the BOP would not send her to FCI Danbury, because the news media could too easily access the facility. The bureau could not send Stewart to FCC Coleman, because of complications from Hurricane Ivan; the Coleman complex filled because inmates from Federal Correctional Institution, Marianna, were moved to Coleman. Therefore, the Federal Bureau of Prisons assigned Stewart to Alderson. The spokesperson said he was concerned the assignment to Alderson could be perceived as being vindictive. Stewart's daughter, Alexis, said she believed the BOP "may have made a point of sending her far away."


title: Martha Stewart

text: Judge Cedarbaum ordered Stewart to report to her prison sentence before 2:00 p.m. on October 8, 2004. By September 27, 2004, Stewart received the BOP ID . At about 6:15 a.m. on October 8, 2004, she reported to FPC Alderson. Stewart said her prison nickname was "M. Diddy." While in confinement, she took a job and became an informal liaison between the administration and her fellow inmates. The "People" special "Scandals! That Rocked America" stated, "Some expected America's goddess of domestic perfection to fall into terminal despair." Stewart was released from FPC Alderson at 12:30 AM on March 4, 2005. She was then placed in a two-year term of supervised release; during five of those months, she was placed in home confinement with electronic monitoring. Stewart served her home confinement at her residence in Bedford, New York. She was allowed to leave her house for 48 hours per week for work-related visits. After her home confinement ended, but while her supervised release continued, she was required to remain employed and not to associate with people with criminal records. In addition, during the supervised release, she was required to receive permission from federal officials if she was going to leave the jurisdiction of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.


title: Martha Stewart

text: Following her release from prison in March 2005, Stewart launched a highly publicized comeback and was once again involved in "Martha Stewart Living". Offerings of her company's Martha Stewart Everyday line at Kmart were expanded to include a new line of ready-made home furnishings, and its mass market interior paint line became available at the larger Sears stores. However, the most heavily promoted aspect of her comeback was in television. Stewart returned to daytime television with "The Martha Stewart Show" and appeared in an adapted version of "The Apprentice" (called ""). Both shows premiered in September 2005, and both were produced by Mark Burnett. Her prime time "Apprentice" spin-off received poor ratings. "The Apprentice: Martha Stewart" was not renewed for a second season.


title: Martha Stewart

text: In October 2005, Stewart released a new book, titled "The Martha Rules", on starting and managing a new business, and a month later, her company released "Martha Stewart Baking Handbook". In October 2006, "Martha Stewart's Homekeeping Handbook", a reference book about looking after a house, was published by Clarkson Potter. She also is a regular contributor of cooking, crafts, and gardening segments on NBC's "Today" show. Stewart's daily talk show was nominated in six categories for the 33rd Daytime Emmy Awards in 2006, including Best Host and Best Show.


title: Martha Stewart

text: MSLO launched a line of houses that carry her name to be built by KB Home, initially in Cary, North Carolina, and ultimately in various other locations nationwide. The first homes, which were inspired by Stewart's homes in New York and Mount Desert Island in Maine, were completed in early 2006. Ultimately, 650 homes are planned, with prices from the low $200,000s to mid-$400,000s. A line of paper-based crafts for EK Success is also in development. In September 2007, she launched an upscale line of housewares for Macy's, which was the largest brand launch in Macy's history. Appearing in commercials for the line, Stewart stated she has designed more than 2,000 items exclusively for Macy's. The line includes bedding, bath, cookware, and dinnerware. In addition to television and merchandising, MSLO launched a 24-hour satellite radio channel with Sirius in November 2005, on which Stewart currently hosts a weekly call-in show.


title: Martha Stewart

text: Stewart also made a special appearance on the comedy-drama series "Ugly Betty", in the November 16, 2006, episode "Four Thanksgivings and a Funeral," in which she gave her friend Wilhelmina Slater (played by Vanessa Williams) tips on how to prepare a turkey. Justin Suarez (played by Mark Indelicato) is a fan of Stewart.


title: Martha Stewart

text: In July 2006, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia announced a multi-year agreement with FLOR, Inc., the eco-friendly manufacturer of high-style modular floor coverings, to manufacture and market a new line of Martha Stewart-branded carpet tiles. The Martha Stewart Floor Designs by FLOR line debuted in 2007 with the distinctive design and color palette associated with the Martha Stewart brand. The agreement with FLOR was part of the Martha Stewart organization's growing home furnishings program, which includes a wide range of products such as furniture with Bernhardt, wall color with Lowe's, and floor coverings with FLOR.


title: Martha Stewart

text: On September 14, 2007, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia announced that it had signed a partnership with E & J Gallo Winery to produce a wine brand with label Martha Stewart Vintage (for sale in six cities, in January 2008, at $15). The 15,000 cases to be sold included 2006 Sonoma County Chardonnay, 2005 Sonoma County Cabernet Sauvignon, and 2006 Sonoma County Merlot (for Atlanta, Boston, Charlotte, North Carolina, Denver, Phoenix, and Portland, Oregon). Martha Stewart also signed a contract with Costco to offer frozen and fresh food under the Kirkland Signature label.


title: Martha Stewart

text: In July 2008, craft items under the names "Martha Stewart Celebrate" and "Martha Stewart Create," two divisions of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, premiered in Walmart stores. The deal came about, in part, due to the closing of more than 600 Kmart stores in the U.S.


title: Martha Stewart

text: In a move from broadcast television to cable, on January 26, 2010, Hallmark Channel and Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia announced a multi-year strategic partnership. Her hour-long daytime television series "Martha", formerly "The Martha Stewart Show", moved to the Hallmark Channel on September 13, 2010. It aired on Hallmark for two seasons, before cancellation in early 2012, with the final episode airing on May 11, 2012.


title: Martha Stewart

text: "New York Magazine" reported in 2011 that Martha Stewart Living had only made a profit in one of the previous eight years. That same year, Stewart debuted a new 30-minute show, "Martha Bakes", on the Hallmark Channel.


title: Martha Stewart

text: Stewart made another foray into acting with a debut on the NBC legal drama "". She played a private school headmistress in the episode entitled "Learning Curve" (airdate April 2012).


title: Martha Stewart

text: A new television series, "Martha Stewart's Cooking School", debuted on PBS in October 2012. Each weekly, 30-minute episode covers cooking techniques and basics. It is based on her eponymous book.


title: Martha Stewart

text: In 2014, Stewart reportedly partnered with eBay to create the American Made Martha Stewart online store. This marketplace allows a platform to more than 400 American vendors and offers them a chance to grow their brand and popularize their products.


title: Martha Stewart

text: In the fall of 2016, VH1 premiered a new show featuring Martha and her friend Snoop Dogg called "Martha & Snoop's Potluck Dinner Party", featuring games, recipes, and musical guests. Snoop Dogg and Stewart also later starred together in a Super Bowl commercial for T-Mobile during Super Bowl LI in February 2017.


title: Martha Stewart

text: Marley Spoon is a new project of packaged and home-delivered ingredients and recipes for preparation at home. Stewart was originally a blind-tester and then joined CEO Fabian Siegel on a joint venture.


title: Martha Stewart

text: In June 2018, Martha started appearing as a recurring judge for "Chopped", a cooking competition on the Food Network. In October 2018, she appeared on "The Ellen DeGeneres Show" alongside Julia Roberts.


title: Martha Stewart

text: In February 2019, Canopy Growth (CGC), a Canadian marijuana company, announced that Stewart would join their company as an adviser.


title: Martha Stewart

text: A new gardening show called "Martha Knows Best" premiered on HGTV on July 31, 2020. In it, Stewart provides gardening help to individual callers and to some of her celebrity friends. She also demonstrates some of the projects and improvements at her large (150 acre) estate.


title: Martha Stewart

text: In 1961, she married Andrew Stewart, then a student at Yale Law School. Their only child, daughter Alexis, was born in 1965. The couple separated in 1987 and divorced in 1990. Subsequently, Martha Stewart dated Anthony Hopkins but ended the relationship after she saw "The Silence of the Lambs". She stated she was unable to avoid associating Hopkins with the character of Hannibal Lecter.


title: Martha Stewart

text: Stewart dated billionaire Charles Simonyi, who was an early employee of Microsoft and head of their software group, on and off for 15 years. She featured footage of him as a space tourist aboard Soyuz on her television show in 2007. They broke up around February 2008.


title: Martha Stewart

text: Stewart is an avid animal lover. Her pets include champion show Chow Chow dogs, French Bulldogs, Himalayan cats, a Fell Pony named Ben Chunch, and Friesian horses. Stewart no longer wears fur since her daughter opened her eyes about the issue.


title: Martha Stewart

text: Martha Kostyra, Stewart's mother, died at the age of 93 on November 16, 2007. Kostyra, also called "Big Martha" by her family, had appeared on "Martha Stewart Living" numerous times.


title: Martha Stewart

text: Stewart resides in Katonah, a hamlet of the town of Bedford, New York. She also maintains a residence on Mount Desert Island in Seal Harbor, Maine, known as 'Skylands,' the former summer estate of automobile designer and tycoon Edsel Ford, with gardens designed by renowned landscape architect Jens Jensen (1922).


title: Martha Stewart

text: In 2020, an appearance by Jimmy Kimmel on the TV show "Finding Your Roots" revealed that he and Stewart are cousins.


title: Martha Stewart

text: In 1997, Martha Stewart was honored with an Edison Achievement Award for her commitment to innovation throughout her career.


title: Martha Stewart

text: Martha Stewart has been portrayed and parodied in all forms of media. Two television films have been made out of her life story: "" (2003) and "" (2005). She was portrayed by Cybill Shepherd in both films.


title: Sanskrit

text: Sanskrit (; attributively , ; nominally , , ) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had diffused there from the northwest in the late Bronze Age. Sanskrit is the sacred language of Hinduism, the language of classical Hindu philosophy, and of historical texts of Buddhism and Jainism. It was a link language in ancient and medieval South Asia, and upon transmission of Hindu and Buddhist culture to Southeast Asia, East Asia and Central Asia in the early medieval era, it became a language of religion and high culture, and of the political elites in some of these regions. As a result, Sanskrit had a lasting impact on the languages of South Asia, Southeast Asia and East Asia, especially in their formal and learned vocabularies.


title: Sanskrit

text: Sanskrit generally connotes several Old Indo-Aryan language varieties. The most archaic of these is the Vedic Sanskrit found in the Rig Veda, a collection of 1,028 hymns composed between 1500 BCE and 1200 BCE by Indo-Aryan tribes migrating east from what are today Afghanistan across northern Pakistan and into northwestern India. Vedic Sanskrit interacted with the preexisting ancient languages of the subcontinent, absorbing names of newly encountered plants and animals; in addition, the ancient Dravidian languages influenced Sanskrit's phonology and syntax. "Sanskrit" can also more narrowly refer to Classical Sanskrit, a refined and standardized grammatical form that emerged in the mid-1st millennium BCE and was codified in the most comprehensive of ancient grammars, the "Aṣṭādhyāyī" ('Eight chapters') of Pāṇini. The greatest dramatist in Sanskrit, Kālidāsa, wrote in classical Sanskrit, and the foundations of modern arithmetic were first described in classical Sanskrit. The two major Sanskrit epics, the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa, however, were composed in a range of oral storytelling registers called Epic Sanskrit which was used in northern India between 400 BCE and 300 CE, and roughly contemporary with classical Sanskrit. In the following centuries, Sanskrit became tradition-bound, stopped being learned as a first language, and ultimately stopped developing as a living language.


title: Sanskrit

text: The hymns of the Rigveda are notably similar to the most archaic poems of the Iranian and Greek language families, the "Gathas" of old Avestan and "Iliad" of Homer. As the Rigveda was orally transmitted by methods of memorisation of exceptional complexity, rigour and fidelity, as a single text without variant readings, its preserved archaic syntax and morphology are of vital importance in the reconstruction of the common ancestor language Proto-Indo-European. Sanskrit does not have an attested native script: from around the turn of the 1st-millennium CE, it has been written in various Brahmic scripts, and in the modern era most commonly in Devanagari.


title: Sanskrit

text: Sanskrit's status, function, and place in India's cultural heritage are recognized by its inclusion in the Constitution of India's Eighth Schedule languages. However, despite attempts at revival, there are no first language speakers of Sanskrit in India. In each of India's recent decennial censuses, several thousand citizens have reported Sanskrit to be their mother tongue, but the numbers are thought to signify a wish to be aligned with the prestige of the language. Sanskrit has been taught in traditional gurukulas since ancient times; it is widely taught today at the secondary school level. The oldest Sanskrit college is the Benares Sanskrit College founded in 1791 during East India Company rule. Sanskrit continues to be widely used as a ceremonial and ritual language in Hindu and Buddhist hymns and chants.


title: Sanskrit

text: In Sanskrit, the verbal adjective "" is a compound word consisting of ('together, good, well, perfected') and "-" ('made, formed, work'). It connotes a work that has been "well prepared, pure and perfect, polished, sacred". According to Biderman, the perfection contextually being referred to in the etymological origins of the word is its tonal—rather than semantic—qualities. Sound and oral transmission were highly valued qualities in ancient India, and its sages refined the alphabet, the structure of words and its exacting grammar into a "collection of sounds, a kind of sublime musical mold", states Biderman, as an integral language they called "Sanskrit". From the late Vedic period onwards, state Annette Wilke and Oliver Moebus, resonating sound and its musical foundations attracted an "exceptionally large amount of linguistic, philosophical and religious literature" in India. Sound was visualized as "pervading all creation", another representation of the world itself; the "mysterious magnum" of Hindu thought. The search for perfection in thought and the goal of liberation were among the dimensions of sacred sound, and the common thread that wove all ideas and inspirations together became the quest for what the ancient Indians believed to be a perfect language, the "phonocentric episteme" of Sanskrit.


title: Sanskrit

text: Sanskrit as a language competed with numerous, less exact vernacular Indian languages called "Prakritic languages" (""). The term literally means "original, natural, normal, artless", states Franklin Southworth. The relationship between Prakrit and Sanskrit is found in Indian texts dated to the 1st millennium CE. Patañjali acknowledged that Prakrit is the first language, one instinctively adopted by every child with all its imperfections and later leads to the problems of interpretation and misunderstanding. The purifying structure of the Sanskrit language removes these imperfections. The early Sanskrit grammarian Daṇḍin states, for example, that much in the Prakrit languages is etymologically rooted in Sanskrit, but involves "loss of sounds" and corruptions that result from a "disregard of the grammar". Daṇḍin acknowledged that there are words and confusing structures in Prakrit that thrive independent of Sanskrit. This view is found in the writing of Bharata Muni, the author of the ancient "Natya Shastra" text. The early Jain scholar Namisādhu acknowledged the difference, but disagreed that the Prakrit language was a corruption of Sanskrit. Namisādhu stated that the Prakrit language was the ('came before, origin') and that it came naturally to children, while Sanskrit was a refinement of Prakrit through "purification by grammar".


title: Sanskrit

text: Sanskrit belongs to the Indo-European family of languages. It is one of the three earliest ancient documented languages that arose from a common root language now referred to as Proto-Indo-European language:


title: Sanskrit

text: Other Indo-European languages distantly related to Sanskrit include archaic and Classical Latin ( 600 BCE–100 CE, Italic languages), Gothic (archaic Germanic language, c. 350 CE), Old Norse ( 200 CE and after), Old Avestan (c. late 2nd millennium BCE) and Younger Avestan ( 900 BCE). The closest ancient relatives of Vedic Sanskrit in the Indo-European languages are the Nuristani languages found in the remote Hindu Kush region of northeastern Afghanistan and northwestern Himalayas, as well as the extinct Avestan and Old Persian – both are Iranian languages. Sanskrit belongs to the satem group of the Indo-European languages.


title: Sanskrit

text: Colonial era scholars familiar with Latin and Greek were struck by the resemblance of the Sanskrit language, both in its vocabulary and grammar, to the classical languages of Europe.


title: Sanskrit

text: In "The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World", Mallory and Adams illustrate the resemblance with the following examples of cognate forms (with the addition of Old English for further comparison):


title: Sanskrit

text: The correspondences suggest some common root, and historical links between some of the distant major ancient languages of the world.


title: Sanskrit

text: The Indo-Aryan migrations theory explains the common features shared by Sanskrit and other Indo-European languages by proposing that the original speakers of what became Sanskrit arrived in South Asia from a region of common origin, somewhere north-west of the Indus region, during the early 2nd millennium BCE. Evidence for such a theory includes the close relationship between the Indo-Iranian tongues and the Baltic and Slavic languages, vocabulary exchange with the non-Indo-European Uralic languages, and the nature of the attested Indo-European words for flora and fauna.


title: Sanskrit

text: The pre-history of Indo-Aryan languages which preceded Vedic Sanskrit is unclear and various hypotheses place it over a fairly wide limit. According to Thomas Burrow, based on the relationship between various Indo-European languages, the origin of all these languages may possibly be in what is now Central or Eastern Europe, while the Indo-Iranian group possibly arose in Central Russia. The Iranian and Indo-Aryan branches separated quite early. It is the Indo-Aryan branch that moved into eastern Iran and then south into South Asia in the first half of the 2nd millennium BCE. Once in ancient India, the Indo-Aryan language underwent rapid linguistic change and morphed into the Vedic Sanskrit language.


title: Sanskrit

text: The pre-Classical form of Sanskrit is known as "Vedic Sanskrit". The earliest attested Sanskrit text is the Rigveda, a Hindu scripture from the mid- to late-second millennium BCE. No written records from such an early period survive, if any ever existed, but scholars are generally confident that the oral transmission of the texts is reliable: they are ceremonial literature, where the exact phonetic expression and its preservation were a part of the historic tradition.


title: Sanskrit

text: However some scholars have suggested that the original Ṛg-veda differed in some fundamental ways in phonology compared to the sole surviving version available to us. In particular that retroflex consonants did not exist as a natural part of the earliest Vedic language, and that these developed in the centuries after the composition had been completed, and as a gradual unconscious process during the oral transmission by generations of reciters.


title: Sanskrit

text: The primary source for this argument is internal evidence of the text which betrays an instability of the phenomenon of retroflexion, with the same phrases having sandhi-induced retroflexion in some parts but not other. This is taken along with evidence of controversy, for example, in passages of the Aitareya-Āraṇyaka (700 BCE), which features a discussion on whether retroflexion is valid in particular cases.


title: Sanskrit

text: The Ṛg-veda is a collection of books, created by multiple authors from distant parts of ancient India. These authors represented different generations, and the mandalas 2 to 7 are the oldest while the mandalas 1 and 10 are relatively the youngest. Yet, the Vedic Sanskrit in these books of the Ṛg-veda "hardly presents any dialectical diversity", states Louis Renou – an Indologist known for his scholarship of the Sanskrit literature and the Ṛg-veda in particular. According to Renou, this implies that the Vedic Sanskrit language had a "set linguistic pattern" by the second half of the 2nd millennium BCE. Beyond the Ṛg-veda, the ancient literature in Vedic Sanskrit that has survived into the modern age include the "Samaveda", "Yajurveda", "Atharvaveda", along with the embedded and layered Vedic texts such as the Brahmanas, Aranyakas, and the early Upanishads. These Vedic documents reflect the dialects of Sanskrit found in the various parts of the northwestern, northern, and eastern Indian subcontinent.


title: Sanskrit

text: Vedic Sanskrit was both a spoken and literary language of ancient India. According to Michael Witzel, Vedic Sanskrit was a spoken language of the semi-nomadic Aryans who temporarily settled in one place, maintained cattle herds, practiced limited agriculture, and after some time moved by wagon trains they called . The Vedic Sanskrit language or a closely related Indo-European variant was recognized beyond ancient India as evidenced by the "Mitanni Treaty" between the ancient Hittite and Mitanni people, carved into a rock, in a region that now includes parts of Syria and Turkey. Parts of this treaty, such as the names of the Mitanni princes and technical terms related to horse training, for reasons not understood, are in early forms of Vedic Sanskrit. The treaty also invokes the gods Varuna, Mitra, Indra, and Nasatya found in the earliest layers of the Vedic literature.


title: Sanskrit

text: The Vedic Sanskrit found in the Ṛg-veda is distinctly more archaic than other Vedic texts, and in many respects, the Rigvedic language is notably more similar to those found in the archaic texts of Old Avestan Zoroastrian "Gathas" and Homer's "Iliad" and "Odyssey". According to Stephanie W. Jamison and Joel P. Brereton – Indologists known for their translation of the Ṛg-veda – the Vedic Sanskrit literature "clearly inherited" from Indo-Iranian and Indo-European times the social structures such as the role of the poet and the priests, the patronage economy, the phrasal equations, and some of the poetic metres. While there are similarities, state Jamison and Brereton, there are also differences between Vedic Sanskrit, the Old Avestan, and the Mycenaean Greek literature. For example, unlike the Sanskrit similes in the Ṛg-veda, the Old Avestan "Gathas" lack simile entirely, and it is rare in the later version of the language. The Homerian Greek, like Ṛg-vedic Sanskrit, deploys simile extensively, but they are structurally very different.


title: Sanskrit

text: The early Vedic form of the Sanskrit language was far less homogenous compared to the Classical Sanskrit as defined by grammarians by about the mid-1st millennium BCE. According to Richard Gombrich—an Indologist and a scholar of Sanskrit, Pāli and Buddhist Studies—the archaic Vedic Sanskrit found in the "Rigveda" had already evolved in the Vedic period, as evidenced in the later Vedic literature. Gombrich posits that the language in the early Upanishads of Hinduism and the late Vedic literature approaches Classical Sanskrit, while the archaic Vedic Sanskrit had by the Buddha's time become unintelligible to all except ancient Indian sages.


title: Sanskrit

text: The formalization of the Sanskrit language is credited to , along with Patanjali's and Katyayana's commentary that preceded Patañjali's work. Panini composed "" ('Eight-Chapter Grammar'). The century in which he lived is unclear and debated, but his work is generally accepted to be from sometime between the 6th and 4th centuries BCE.


title: Sanskrit

text: The was not the first description of Sanskrit grammar, but it is the earliest that has survived in full, and the culmination of a long grammatical tradition that Fortson says, is "one of the intellectual wonders of the ancient world." Pāṇini cites ten scholars on the phonological and grammatical aspects of the Sanskrit language before him, as well as the variants in the usage of Sanskrit in different regions of India. The ten Vedic scholars he quotes are Āpiśali, Kaśyapa, Gārgya, Gālava, Cakravarmaṇa, Bhāradvāja, Śākaṭāyana, Śākalya, Senaka and Sphoṭāyana. The of Panini became the foundation of Vyākaraṇa, a Vedānga.


title: Sanskrit

text: In the , language is observed in a manner that has no parallel among Greek or Latin grammarians. Pāṇini's grammar, according to Renou and Filliozat, is a classic that defines the linguistic expression and sets the standard for the Sanskrit language. Pāṇini made use of a technical metalanguage consisting of a syntax, morphology and lexicon. This metalanguage is organised according to a series of meta-rules, some of which are explicitly stated while others can be deduced. Despite differences in the analysis from that of modern linguistics, Pāṇini's work has been found valuable and the most advanced analysis of linguistics until the twentieth century.


title: Sanskrit

text: Pāṇini's comprehensive and scientific theory of grammar is conventionally taken to mark the start of Classical Sanskrit. His systematic treatise inspired and made Sanskrit the preeminent Indian language of learning and literature for two millennia. It is unclear whether Pāṇini himself wrote his treatise or he orally created the detailed and sophisticated treatise then transmitted it through his students. Modern scholarship generally accepts that he knew of a form of writing, based on references to words such as "Lipi" ('script') and ('scribe') in section 3.2 of the .


title: Sanskrit

text: The Classical Sanskrit language formalized by Pāṇini, states Renou, is "not an impoverished language", rather it is "a controlled and a restrained language from which archaisms and unnecessary formal alternatives were excluded". The Classical form of the language simplified the "sandhi" rules but retained various aspects of the Vedic language, while adding rigor and flexibilities, so that it had sufficient means to express thoughts as well as being "capable of responding to the future increasing demands of an infinitely diversified literature", according to Renou. Pāṇini included numerous "optional rules" beyond the Vedic Sanskrit's framework, to respect liberty and creativity so that individual writers separated by geography or time would have the choice to express facts and their views in their own way, where tradition followed competitive forms of the Sanskrit language.


title: Sanskrit

text: The phonetic differences between Vedic Sanskrit and Classical Sanskrit, as discerned from the current state of the surviving literature, are negligible when compared to the intense change that must have occurred in the pre-Vedic period between the Proto-Indo-Aryan language and Vedic Sanskrit. The noticeable differences between the Vedic and the Classical Sanskrit include the much-expanded grammar and grammatical categories as well as the differences in the accent, the semantics and the syntax. There are also some differences between how some of the nouns and verbs end, as well as the "sandhi" rules, both internal and external. Quite many words found in the early Vedic Sanskrit language are never found in late Vedic Sanskrit or Classical Sanskrit literature, while some words have different and new meanings in Classical Sanskrit when contextually compared to the early Vedic Sanskrit literature.


title: Sanskrit

text: Arthur Macdonell was among the early colonial era scholars who summarized some of the differences between the Vedic and Classical Sanskrit. Louis Renou published in 1956, in French, a more extensive discussion of the similarities, the differences and the evolution of the Vedic Sanskrit within the Vedic period and then to the Classical Sanskrit along with his views on the history. This work has been translated by Jagbans Balbir.


title: Sanskrit

text: The earliest known use of the word (Sanskrit), in the context of a speech or language, is found in verses 5.28.17–19 of the "Ramayana". Outside the learned sphere of written Classical Sanskrit, vernacular colloquial dialects (Prakrits) continued to evolve. Sanskrit co-existed with numerous other Prakrit languages of ancient India. The Prakrit languages of India also have ancient roots and some Sanskrit scholars have called these , literally 'spoiled'. The Vedic literature includes words whose phonetic equivalent are not found in other Indo-European languages but which are found in the regional Prakrit languages, which makes it likely that the interaction, the sharing of words and ideas began early in the Indian history. As the Indian thought diversified and challenged earlier beliefs of Hinduism, particularly in the form of Buddhism and Jainism, the Prakrit languages such as Pali in Theravada Buddhism and Ardhamagadhi in Jainism competed with Sanskrit in the ancient times. However, states Paul Dundas, a scholar of Jainism, these ancient Prakrit languages had "roughly the same relationship to Sanskrit as medieval Italian does to Latin." The Indian tradition states that the Buddha and the Mahavira preferred the Prakrit language so that everyone could understand it. However, scholars such as Dundas have questioned this hypothesis. They state that there is no evidence for this and whatever evidence is available suggests that by the start of the common era, hardly anybody other than learned monks had the capacity to understand the old Prakrit languages such as Ardhamagadhi.


title: Sanskrit

text: Colonial era scholars questioned whether Sanskrit was ever a spoken language, or just a literary language. Scholars disagree in their answers. A section of Western scholars state that Sanskrit was never a spoken language, while others and particularly most Indian scholars state the opposite. Those who affirm Sanskrit to have been a vernacular language point to the necessity of Sanskrit being a spoken language for the oral tradition that preserved the vast number of Sanskrit manuscripts from ancient India. Secondly, they state that the textual evidence in the works of Yaksa, Panini and Patanajali affirms that the Classical Sanskrit in their era was a language that is spoken () by the cultured and educated. Some "sutras" expound upon the variant forms of spoken Sanskrit versus written Sanskrit. The 7th-century Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Xuanzang mentioned in his memoir that official philosophical debates in India were held in Sanskrit, not in the vernacular language of that region.


title: Sanskrit

text: According to Sanskrit linguist professor Madhav Deshpande, Sanskrit was a spoken language in a colloquial form by the mid-1st millennium BCE which coexisted with a more formal, grammatically correct form of literary Sanskrit. This, states Deshpande, is true for modern languages where colloquial incorrect approximations and dialects of a language are spoken and understood, along with more "refined, sophisticated and grammatically accurate" forms of the same language being found in the literary works. The Indian tradition, states Winternitz (1996), has favored the learning and the usage of multiple languages from the ancient times. Sanskrit was a spoken language in the educated and the elite classes, but it was also a language that must have been understood in a wider circle of society because the widely popular folk epics and stories such as the "Ramayana", the "Mahabharata", the "Bhagavata Purana", the "Panchatantra" and many other texts are all in the Sanskrit language. The Classical Sanskrit with its exacting grammar was thus the language of the Indian scholars and the educated classes, while others communicated with approximate or ungrammatical variants of it as well as other natural Indian languages. Sanskrit, as the learned language of Ancient India, thus existed alongside the vernacular Prakrits. Many Sanskrit dramas indicate that the language coexisted with the vernacular Prakrits. The cities of Varanasi, Paithan, Pune and Kanchipuram were centers of classical Sanskrit learning and public debates until the arrival of the colonial era.


title: Sanskrit

text: According to Lamotte (1976), an Indologist and Buddhism scholar, Sanskrit became the dominant literary and inscriptional language because of its precision in communication. It was, states Lamotte, an ideal instrument for presenting ideas, and as knowledge in Sanskrit multiplied, so did its spread and influence. Sanskrit was adopted voluntarily as a vehicle of high culture, arts, and profound ideas. Pollock disagrees with Lamotte, but concurs that Sanskrit's influence grew into what he terms a "Sanskrit Cosmopolis" over a region that included all of South Asia and much of southeast Asia. The Sanskrit language cosmopolis thrived beyond India between 300 and 1300 CE.


title: Sanskrit

text: Reinöhl mentions that not only have the Dravidian languages borrowed from Sanskrit vocabulary, but they have also impacted Sanskrit on deeper levels of structure, "for instance in the domain of phonology where Indo-Aryan retroflexes have been attributed to Dravidian influence". Hock et al. quoting George Hart state that there was influence of Old Tamil on Sanskrit. Hart compared Old Tamil and Classical Sanskrit to arrive at a conclusion that there was a common language from which these features both derived – "that both Tamil and Sanskrit derived their shared conventions, metres, and techniques from a common source, for it is clear that neither borrowed directly from the other."


title: Sanskrit

text: Reinöhl further states that there is a symmetric relationship between Dravidian languages like Kannada or Tamil, with Indo-Aryan languages like Bengali or Hindi, whereas the same relationship is not found for non-Indo-Aryan languages, for example, Persian or English:


title: Sanskrit

text: Shulman mentions that "Dravidian nonfinite verbal forms (called in Tamil) shaped the usage of the Sanskrit nonfinite verbs (originally derived from inflected forms of action nouns in Vedic). This particularly salient case of the possible influence of Dravidian on Sanskrit is only one of many items of syntactic assimilation, not least among them the large repertoire of morphological modality and aspect that, once one knows to look for it, can be found everywhere in classical and postclassical Sanskrit".


title: Sanskrit

text: The main influence of Dravidian on Sanskrit is found to have been concentrated in the timespan between the late Vedic period and the crystallization of Classical Sanskrit. As in this period the Indo-Aryan tribes had not yet made contact with the inhabitants of the South of the subcontinent, this suggests a significant presence of Dravidian speakers in North India (the central Gangetic plain and the classical Madhyadeśa) who were instrumental in this substratal influence on Sanskrit.


title: Sanskrit

text: Sanskrit has been the predominant language of Hindu texts encompassing a rich tradition of philosophical and religious texts, as well as poetry, music, drama, scientific, technical and others. It is the predominant language of one of the largest collection of historic manuscripts. The earliest known inscriptions in Sanskrit are from the 1st century BCE, such as the Ayodhya Inscription of Dhana and Ghosundi-Hathibada (Chittorgarh).


title: Sanskrit

text: Though developed and nurtured by scholars of orthodox schools of Hinduism, Sanskrit has been the language for some of the key literary works and theology of heterodox schools of Indian philosophies such as Buddhism and Jainism. The structure and capabilities of the Classical Sanskrit language launched ancient Indian speculations about "the nature and function of language", what is the relationship between words and their meanings in the context of a community of speakers, whether this relationship is objective or subjective, discovered or is created, how individuals learn and relate to the world around them through language, and about the limits of language? They speculated on the role of language, the ontological status of painting word-images through sound, and the need for rules so that it can serve as a means for a community of speakers, separated by geography or time, to share and understand profound ideas from each other. These speculations became particularly important to the Mīmāṃsā and the Nyaya schools of Hindu philosophy, and later to Vedanta and Mahayana Buddhism, states Frits Staal—a scholar of Linguistics with a focus on Indian philosophies and Sanskrit. Though written in a number of different scripts, the dominant language of Hindu texts has been Sanskrit. It or a hybrid form of Sanskrit became the preferred language of Mahayana Buddhism scholarship; for example, one of the early and influential Buddhist philosophers, Nagarjuna (~200 CE), used Classical Sanskrit as the language for his texts. According to Renou, Sanskrit had a limited role in the Theravada tradition (formerly known as the Hinayana) but the Prakrit works that have survived are of doubtful authenticity. Some of the canonical fragments of the early Buddhist traditions, discovered in the 20th century, suggest the early Buddhist traditions used an imperfect and reasonably good Sanskrit, sometimes with a Pali syntax, states Renou. The Mahāsāṃghika and Mahavastu, in their late Hinayana forms, used hybrid Sanskrit for their literature. Sanskrit was also the language of some of the oldest surviving, authoritative and much followed philosophical works of Jainism such as the "Tattvartha Sutra" by Umaswati.


title: Sanskrit

text: The Sanskrit language has been one of the major means for the transmission of knowledge and ideas in Asian history. Indian texts in Sanskrit were already in China by 402 CE, carried by the influential Buddhist pilgrim Faxian who translated them into Chinese by 418 CE. Xuanzang, another Chinese Buddhist pilgrim, learnt Sanskrit in India and carried 657 Sanskrit texts to China in the 7th century where he established a major center of learning and language translation under the patronage of Emperor Taizong. By the early 1st millennium CE, Sanskrit had spread Buddhist and Hindu ideas to Southeast Asia, parts of the East Asia and the Central Asia. It was accepted as a language of high culture and the preferred language by some of the local ruling elites in these regions. According to the Dalai Lama, the Sanskrit language is a parent language that is at the foundation of many modern languages of India and the one that promoted Indian thought to other distant countries. In Tibetan Buddhism, states the Dalai Lama, Sanskrit language has been a revered one and called "legjar lhai-ka" or "elegant language of the gods". It has been the means of transmitting the "profound wisdom of Buddhist philosophy" to Tibet.


title: Sanskrit

text: The Sanskrit language created a pan-Indo-Aryan accessibility to information and knowledge in the ancient and medieval times, in contrast to the Prakrit languages which were understood just regionally. It created a cultural bond across the subcontinent. As local languages and dialects evolved and diversified, Sanskrit served as the common language. It connected scholars from distant parts of South Asia such as Tamil Nadu and Kashmir, states Deshpande, as well as those from different fields of studies, though there must have been differences in its pronunciation given the first language of the respective speakers. The Sanskrit language brought Indo-Aryan speaking people together, particularly its elite scholars. Some of these scholars of Indian history regionally produced vernacularized Sanskrit to reach wider audiences, as evidenced by texts discovered in Rajasthan, Gujarat, and Maharashtra. Once the audience became familiar with the easier to understand vernacularized version of Sanskrit, those interested could graduate from colloquial Sanskrit to the more advanced Classical Sanskrit. Rituals and the rites-of-passage ceremonies have been and continue to be the other occasions where a wide spectrum of people hear Sanskrit, and occasionally join in to speak some Sanskrit words such as .


title: Sanskrit

text: Classical Sanskrit is the standard register as laid out in the grammar of , around the fourth century BCE. Its position in the cultures of Greater India is akin to that of Latin and Ancient Greek in Europe. Sanskrit has significantly influenced most modern languages of the Indian subcontinent, particularly the languages of the northern, western, central and eastern Indian subcontinent.


title: Sanskrit

text: Sanskrit declined starting about and after the 13th century. This coincides with the beginning of Islamic invasions of South Asia to create, and thereafter expand the Muslim rule in the form of Sultanates, and later the Mughal Empire. Sheldon Pollock characterises the decline of Sanskrit as a long-term "cultural, social, and political change". He dismisses the idea that Sanskrit declined due to "struggle with barbarous invaders", and emphasises factors such as the increasing attractiveness of vernacular language for literary expression.


title: Sanskrit

text: With the fall of Kashmir around the 13th century, a premier center of Sanskrit literary creativity, Sanskrit literature there disappeared, perhaps in the "fires that periodically engulfed the capital of Kashmir" or the "Mongol invasion of 1320" states Pollock. The Sanskrit literature which was once widely disseminated out of the northwest regions of the subcontinent, stopped after the 12th century. As Hindu kingdoms fell in the eastern and the South India, such as the great Vijayanagara Empire, so did Sanskrit. There were exceptions and short periods of imperial support for Sanskrit, mostly concentrated during the reign of the tolerant Mughal emperor Akbar. Muslim rulers patronized the Middle Eastern language and scripts found in Persia and Arabia, and the Indians linguistically adapted to this Persianization to gain employment with the Muslim rulers. Hindu rulers such as Shivaji of the Maratha Empire, reversed the process, by re-adopting Sanskrit and re-asserting their socio-linguistic identity. After Islamic rule disintegrated in South Asia and the colonial rule era began, Sanskrit re-emerged but in the form of a "ghostly existence" in regions such as Bengal. This decline was the result of "political institutions and civic ethos" that did not support the historic Sanskrit literary culture.


title: Sanskrit

text: Scholars are divided on whether or when Sanskrit died. Western authors such as John Snelling state that Sanskrit and Pali are both dead Indian languages. Indian authors such as M Ramakrishnan Nair state that Sanskrit was a dead language by the 1st millennium BCE. Sheldon Pollock states that in some crucial way, "Sanskrit is dead". After the 12th century, the Sanskrit literary works were reduced to "reinscription and restatements" of ideas already explored, and any creativity was restricted to hymns and verses. This contrasted with the previous 1,500 years when "great experiments in moral and aesthetic imagination" marked the Indian scholarship using Classical Sanskrit, states Pollock.


title: Sanskrit

text: Other scholars state that the Sanskrit language did not die, only declined. Hanneder disagrees with Pollock, finding his arguments elegant but "often arbitrary". According to Hanneder, a decline or regional absence of creative and innovative literature constitutes a negative evidence to Pollock's hypothesis, but it is not positive evidence. A closer look at Sanskrit in the Indian history after the 12th century suggests that Sanskrit survived despite the odds. According to Hanneder,


title: Sanskrit

text: The Sanskrit language scholar Moriz Winternitz states, Sanskrit was never a dead language and it is still alive though its prevalence is lesser than ancient and medieval times. Sanskrit remains an integral part of Hindu journals, festivals, Ramlila plays, drama, rituals and the rites-of-passage. Similarly, Brian Hatcher states that the "metaphors of historical rupture" by Pollock are not valid, that there is ample proof that Sanskrit was very much alive in the narrow confines of surviving Hindu kingdoms between the 13th and 18th centuries, and its reverence and tradition continues.


title: Sanskrit

text: According to Robert Goldman and Sally Sutherland, Sanskrit is neither "dead" nor "living" in the conventional sense. It is a special, timeless language that lives in the numerous manuscripts, daily chants, and ceremonial recitations, a "heritage language" that Indians contextually prize, and which some practice.


title: Sanskrit

text: When the British introduced English to India in the 19th century, knowledge of Sanskrit and ancient literature continued to flourish as the study of Sanskrit changed from a more traditional style into a form of analytical and comparative scholarship mirroring that of Europe.


title: Sanskrit

text: The relationship of Sanskrit to the Prakrit languages, particularly the modern form of Indian languages, is complex and spans about 3,500 years, states Colin Masica—a linguist specializing in South Asian languages. A part of the difficulty is the lack of sufficient textual, archaeological and epigraphical evidence for the ancient Prakrit languages with rare exceptions such as Pali, leading to a tendency of anachronistic errors. Sanskrit and Prakrit languages may be divided into Old Indo-Aryan (1500 BCE–600 BCE), Middle Indo-Aryan (600 BCE–1000 CE) and New Indo-Aryan (1000 CE–present), each can further be subdivided into early, middle or second, and late evolutionary substages.


title: Sanskrit

text: Vedic Sanskrit belongs to the early Old Indo-Aryan stage, while Classical Sanskrit to the later Old Indo-Aryan stage. The evidence for Prakrits such as Pali (Theravada Buddhism) and Ardhamagadhi (Jainism), along with Magadhi, Maharashtri, Sinhala, Sauraseni and Niya (Gandhari), emerge in the Middle Indo-Aryan stage in two versions—archaic and more formalized—that may be placed in early and middle substages of the 600 BCE–1000 CE period. Two literary Indo-Aryan languages can be traced to the late Middle Indo-Aryan stage and these are "Apabhramsa" and "Elu" (a literary form of Sinhalese). Numerous North, Central, Eastern and Western Indian languages, such as Hindi, Gujarati, Sindhi, Punjabi, Kashmiri, Nepali, Braj, Awadhi, Bengali, Assamese, Oriya, Marathi, and others belong to the New Indo-Aryan stage.


title: Sanskrit

text: There is an extensive overlap in the vocabulary, phonetics and other aspects of these New Indo-Aryan languages with Sanskrit, but it is neither universal nor identical across the languages. They likely emerged from a synthesis of the ancient Sanskrit language traditions and an admixture of various regional dialects. Each language has some unique and regionally creative aspects, with unclear origins. Prakrit languages do have a grammatical structure, but like Vedic Sanskrit, it is far less rigorous than Classical Sanskrit. While the roots of all Prakrit languages may be in Vedic Sanskrit and ultimately the Proto-Indo-Aryan language, their structural details vary from Classical Sanskrit. It is generally accepted by scholars and widely believed in India that the modern Indo-Aryan languages – such as Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, and Punjabi – are descendants of the Sanskrit language. Sanskrit, states Burjor Avari, can be described as "the mother language of almost all the languages of north India".


title: Sanskrit

text: The Sanskrit language's historic presence is attested across a wide geography beyond South Asia. Inscriptions and literary evidence suggests that Sanskrit language was already being adopted in Southeast Asia and Central Asia in the 1st millennium CE, through monks, religious pilgrims and merchants.


title: Sanskrit

text: South Asia has been the geographic range of the largest collection of the ancient and pre-18th-century Sanskrit manuscripts and inscriptions. Beyond ancient India, significant collections of Sanskrit manuscripts and inscriptions have been found in China (particularly the Tibetan monasteries), Myanmar, Indonesia, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Thailand, and Malaysia. Sanskrit inscriptions, manuscripts or its remnants, including some of the oldest known Sanskrit written texts, have been discovered in dry high deserts and mountainous terrains such as in Nepal, Tibet, Afghanistan, Mongolia, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Kazakhstan. Some Sanskrit texts and inscriptions have also been discovered in Korea and Japan.


title: Sanskrit

text: In India, Sanskrit is among the 22 official languages of India in the Eighth Schedule to the Constitution. In 2010, Uttarakhand became the first state in India to make Sanskrit its second official language. In 2019, Himachal Pradesh made Sanskrit its second official language, becoming the second state in India to do so.


title: Sanskrit

text: Sanskrit shares many Proto-Indo-European phonological features, although it features a larger inventory of distinct phonemes. The consonantal system is the same, though it systematically enlarged the inventory of distinct sounds. For example, Sanskrit added a voiceless aspirated "tʰ", to the voiceless "t", voiced "d" and voiced aspirated "dʰ" found in PIE languages.


title: Sanskrit

text: The most significant and distinctive phonological development in Sanskrit is vowel merger. The short "*e", "*o" and "*a", all merge as "a" (अ) in Sanskrit, while long "*ē", "*ō" and "*ā", all merge as long "ā" (आ). Compare Sanskrit "nāman" to Latin "nōmen". These mergers occurred very early and significantly impacted Sanskrit's morphological system. Some phonological developments in it mirror those in other PIE languages. For example, the labiovelars merged with the plain velars as in other satem languages. The secondary palatalization of the resulting segments is more thorough and systematic within Sanskrit. A series of retroflex dental stops were innovated in Sanskrit to more thoroughly articulate sounds for clarity. For example, unlike the loss of the morphological clarity from vowel contraction that is found in early Greek and related southeast European languages, Sanskrit deployed "*y", "*w", and "*s" intervocalically to provide morphological clarity.


title: Sanskrit

text: The cardinal vowels ("svaras") "i" (इ), "u" (उ), "a" (अ) distinguish length in Sanskrit. The short "a" (अ) in Sanskrit is a closer vowel than ā, equivalent to schwa. The mid vowels ē (ए) and ō (ओ) in Sanskrit are monophthongizations of the Indo-Iranian diphthongs "*ai" and "*au". The Old Iranian language preserved "*ai" and "*au". The Sanskrit vowels are inherently long, though often transcribed "e" and "o" without the diacritic. The vocalic liquid "r̥" in Sanskrit is a merger of PIE "*r̥" and "*l̥". The long "r̥" is an innovation and it is used in a few analogically generated morphological categories.


title: Sanskrit

text: According to Masica, Sanskrit has four traditional semivowels, with which were classed, "for morphophonemic reasons, the liquids: y, r, l, and v; that is, as y and v were the non-syllabics corresponding to i, u, so were r, l in relation to r̥ and l̥". The northwestern, the central and the eastern Sanskrit dialects have had a historic confusion between "r" and "l". The Paninian system that followed the central dialect preserved the distinction, likely out of reverence for the Vedic Sanskrit that distinguished the "r" and "l". However, the northwestern dialect only had "r", while the eastern dialect probably only had "l", states Masica. Thus literary works from different parts of ancient India appear inconsistent in their use of "r" and "l", resulting in doublets that are occasionally semantically differentiated.


title: Sanskrit

text: Sanskrit possesses a symmetric consonantal phoneme structure based on how the sound is articulated, though the actual usage of these sounds conceals the lack of parallelism in the apparent symmetry possibly from historical changes within the language.


title: Sanskrit

text: Sanskrit had a series of retroflex stops originating as conditioned alternants of dentals, albeit by Sanskrit they had become phonemic.


title: Sanskrit

text: Regarding the palatal plosives, the pronunciation is a matter of debate. In contemporary attestation, the palatal plosives are a regular series of palatal stops, supported by most Sanskrit sandhi rules. However, the reflexes in descendant languages, as well as a few of the sandhi rules regarding "ch", could suggest an affricate pronunciation.


title: Sanskrit

text: "jh" was a marginal phoneme in Sanskrit, hence its phonology is more difficult to reconstruct; it was more commonly employed in the Middle Indo-Aryan languages as a result of phonological processes resulting in the phoneme.


title: Sanskrit

text: The palatal nasal is a conditioned variant of n occurring next to palatal obstruents. The "anusvara" that Sanskrit deploys is a conditioned alternant of postvocalic nasals, under certain sandhi conditions. Its "visarga" is a word-final or morpheme-final conditioned alternant of s and r under certain sandhi conditions.


title: Sanskrit

text: The voiceless aspirated series is also an innovation in Sanskrit but is significantly rarer than the other three series.


title: Sanskrit

text: While the Sanskrit language organizes sounds for expression beyond those found in the PIE language, it retained many features found in the Iranian and Balto-Slavic languages. An example of a similar process in all three is the retroflex sibilant ʂ being the automatic product of dental s following i, u, r, and k.


title: Sanskrit

text: Sanskrit deploys extensive phonological alternations on different linguistic levels through "sandhi" rules (literally, the rules of "putting together, union, connection, alliance"), similar to the English alteration of "going to" as "gonna". The Sanskrit language accepts such alterations within it, but offers formal rules for the "sandhi" of any two words next to each other in the same sentence or linking two sentences. The external "sandhi" rules state that similar short vowels coalesce into a single long vowel, while dissimilar vowels form glides or undergo diphthongization. Among the consonants, most external "sandhi" rules recommend regressive assimilation for clarity when they are voiced. These rules ordinarily apply at compound seams and morpheme boundaries. In Vedic Sanskrit, the external "sandhi" rules are more variable than in Classical Sanskrit.


title: Sanskrit

text: The internal "sandhi" rules are more intricate and account for the root and the canonical structure of the Sanskrit word. These rules anticipate what are now known as the Bartholomae's law and Grassmann's law. For example, states Jamison, the "voiceless, voiced, and voiced aspirated obstruents of a positional series regularly alternate with each other (p ≈ b ≈ bʰ; t ≈ d ≈ dʰ, etc.; note, however, c ≈ j ≈ h), such that, for example, a morpheme with an underlying voiced aspirate final may show alternants with all three stops under differing internal sandhi conditions". The velar series (k, g, gʰ) alternate with the palatal series (c, j, h), while the structural position of the palatal series is modified into a retroflex cluster when followed by dental. This rule creates two morphophonemically distinct series from a single palatal series.


title: Sanskrit

text: Vocalic alternations in the Sanskrit morphological system is termed "strengthening", and called "guṇa" and in the preconsonantal versions. There is an equivalence to terms deployed in Indo-European descriptive grammars, wherein Sanskrit's unstrengthened state is same as the zero-grade, "guṇa" corresponds to normal-grade, while is same as the lengthened-state. The qualitative ablaut is not found in Sanskrit just like it is absent in Iranian, but Sanskrit retains quantitative ablaut through vowel strengthening. The transformations between unstrengthened to "guṇa" is prominent in the morphological system, states Jamison, while is a particularly significant rule when adjectives of origin and appurtenance are derived. The manner in which this is done slightly differs between the Vedic and the Classical Sanskrit.


title: Sanskrit

text: Sanskrit grants a very flexible syllable structure, where they may begin or end with vowels, be single consonants or clusters. Similarly, the syllable may have an internal vowel of any weight. Vedic Sanskrit shows traces of following the Sievers–Edgerton law, but Classical Sanskrit does not. Vedic Sanskrit has a pitch accent system (inherited from Proto-Indo-European) which was acknowledged by Pāṇini, states Jamison; but in his Classical Sanskrit the accents disappear. Most Vedic Sanskrit words have one accent. However, this accent is not phonologically predictable, states Jamison. It can fall anywhere in the word and its position often conveys morphological and syntactic information. The presence of an accent system in Vedic Sanskrit is evidenced from the markings in the Vedic texts. This is important because of Sanskrit's connection to the PIE languages and comparative Indo-European linguistics.


title: Sanskrit

text: Sanskrit, like most early Indo-European languages, lost the so-called "laryngeal consonants (cover-symbol "*H") present in the Proto-Indo-European", states Jamison. This significantly impacted the evolutionary path of the Sanskrit phonology and morphology, particularly in the variant forms of roots.


title: Sanskrit

text: Because Sanskrit is not anyone's native language, it does not have a fixed pronunciation. People tend to pronounce it as they do their native language. The articles on Hindustani, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya and Bengali phonology will give some indication of the variation that is encountered. When Sanskrit was a spoken language, its pronunciation varied regionally and also over time. Nonetheless, Panini described the sound system of Sanskrit well enough that people have a fairly good idea of what he intended.


title: Sanskrit

text: The basis of Sanskrit morphology is the root, states Jamison, "a morpheme bearing lexical meaning". The verbal and nominal stems of Sanskrit words are derived from this root through the phonological vowel-gradation processes, the addition of affixes, verbal and nominal stems. It then adds an ending to establish the grammatical and syntactic identity of the stem. According to Jamison, the "three major formal elements of the morphology are (i) root, (ii) affix, and (iii) ending; and they are roughly responsible for (i) lexical meaning, (ii) derivation, and (iii) inflection respectively".


title: Sanskrit

text: The root structure has certain phonological constraints. Two of the most important constraints of a "root" is that it does not end in a short "a" (अ) and that it is monosyllabic. In contrast, the affixes and endings commonly do. The affixes in Sanskrit are almost always suffixes, with exceptions such as the augment "a-" added as prefix to past tense verb forms and the "-na/n-" infix in single verbal present class, states Jamison.


title: Sanskrit

text: According to Ruppel, verbs in Sanskrit express the same information as other Indo-European languages such as English. Sanskrit verbs describe an action or occurrence or state, its embedded morphology informs as to "who is doing it" (person or persons), "when it is done" (tense) and "how it is done" (mood, voice). The Indo-European languages differ in the detail. For example, the Sanskrit language attaches the affixes and ending to the verb root, while the English language adds small independent words before the verb. In Sanskrit, these elements co-exist within the word.


title: Sanskrit

text: Both verbs and nouns in Sanskrit are either thematic or athematic, states Jamison. "Guna" (strengthened) forms in the active singular regularly alternate in athematic verbs. The finite verbs of Classical Sanskrit have the following grammatical categories: person, number, voice, tense-aspect, and mood. According to Jamison, a portmanteau morpheme generally expresses the person-number-voice in Sanskrit, and sometimes also the ending or only the ending. The mood of the word is embedded in the affix.


title: Sanskrit

text: These elements of word architecture are the typical building blocks in Classical Sanskrit, but in Vedic Sanskrit these elements fluctuate and are unclear. For example, in the "Rigveda" preverbs regularly occur in tmesis, states Jamison, which means they are "separated from the finite verb". This indecisiveness is likely linked to Vedic Sanskrit's attempt to incorporate accent. With nonfinite forms of the verb and with nominal derivatives thereof, states Jamison, "preverbs show much clearer univerbation in Vedic, both by position and by accent, and by Classical Sanskrit, tmesis is no longer possible even with finite forms".


title: Sanskrit

text: While roots are typical in Sanskrit, some words do not follow the canonical structure. A few forms lack both inflection and root. Many words are inflected (and can enter into derivation) but lack a recognizable root. Examples from the basic vocabulary include kinship terms such as "mātar-" (mother), "nas-" (nose), "śvan-" (dog). According to Jamison, pronouns and some words outside the semantic categories also lack roots, as do the numerals. Similarly, the Sanskrit language is flexible enough to not mandate inflection.


title: Sanskrit

text: The Sanskrit words can contain more than one affix that interact with each other. Affixes in Sanskrit can be athematic as well as thematic, according to Jamison. Athematic affixes can be alternating. Sanskrit deploys eight cases, namely nominative, accusative, instrumental, dative, ablative, genitive, locative, vocative.


title: Sanskrit

text: Stems, that is "root + affix", appear in two categories in Sanskrit: vowel stems and consonant stems. Unlike some Indo-European languages such as Latin or Greek, according to Jamison, "Sanskrit has no closed set of conventionally denoted noun declensions". Sanskrit includes a fairly large set of stem-types. The linguistic interaction of the roots, the phonological segments, lexical items and the grammar for the Classical Sanskrit consist of four Paninian components. These, states Paul Kiparsky, are the "Astadhyaayi", a comprehensive system of 4,000 grammatical rules, of which a small set are frequently used; "Sivasutras", an inventory of "anubandhas" (markers) that partition phonological segments for efficient abbreviations through the "pratyharas" technique; "Dhatupatha", a list of 2,000 verbal roots classified by their morphology and syntactic properties using diacritic markers, a structure that guides its writing systems; and, the "Ganapatha", an inventory of word groups, classes of lexical systems. There are peripheral adjuncts to these four, such as the "Unadisutras", which focus on irregularly formed derivatives from the roots.


title: Sanskrit

text: Sanskrit morphology is generally studied in two broad fundamental categories: the nominal forms and the verbal forms. These differ in the types of endings and what these endings mark in the grammatical context. Pronouns and nouns share the same grammatical categories, though they may differ in inflection. Verb-based adjectives and participles are not formally distinct from nouns. Adverbs are typically frozen case forms of adjectives, states Jamison, and "nonfinite verbal forms such as infinitives and gerunds also clearly show frozen nominal case endings".


title: Sanskrit

text: The Sanskrit language includes five tenses: present, future, past imperfect, past aorist and past perfect. It outlines three types of voices: active, passive and the middle. The middle is also referred to as the mediopassive, or more formally in Sanskrit as (word for another) and (word for oneself).


title: Sanskrit

text: The paradigm for the tense-aspect system in Sanskrit is the three-way contrast between the "present", the "aorist" and the "perfect" architecture. Vedic Sanskrit is more elaborate and had several additional tenses. For example, the "Rigveda" includes perfect and a marginal pluperfect. Classical Sanskrit simplifies the "present" system down to two tenses, the perfect and the imperfect, while the "aorist" stems retain the aorist tense and the "perfect" stems retain the perfect and marginal pluperfect. The classical version of the language has elaborate rules for both voice and the tense-aspect system to emphasize clarity, and this is more elaborate than in other Indo-European languages. The evolution of these systems can be seen from the earliest layers of the Vedic literature to the late Vedic literature.


title: Sanskrit

text: Sanskrit recognizes three numbers—singular, dual, and plural. The dual is a fully functioning category, used beyond naturally paired objects such as hands or eyes, extending to any collection of two. The elliptical dual is notable in the Vedic Sanskrit, according to Jamison, where a noun in the dual signals a paired opposition. Illustrations include "dyāvā" (literally, "the two heavens" for heaven-and-earth), "mātarā" (literally, "the two mothers" for mother-and-father). A verb may be singular, dual or plural, while the person recognized in the language are forms of "I", "you", "he/she/it", "we" and "they".


title: Sanskrit

text: There are three persons in Sanskrit: first, second and third. Sanskrit uses the 3×3 grid formed by the three numbers and the three persons parameters as the paradigm and the basic building block of its verbal system.


title: Sanskrit

text: The Sanskrit language incorporates three genders: feminine, masculine and neuter. All nouns have inherent gender. With some exceptions, personal pronouns have no gender. Exceptions include demonstrative and anaphoric pronouns. Derivation of a word is used to express the feminine. Two most common derivations come from feminine-forming suffixes, the "-ā-" (आ, Rādhā) and "-ī-" (ई, Rukmīnī). The masculine and neuter are much simpler, and the difference between them is primarily inflectional. Similar affixes for the feminine are found in many Indo-European languages, states Burrow, suggesting links of the Sanskrit to its PIE heritage.


title: Sanskrit

text: Pronouns in Sanskrit include the personal pronouns of the first and second persons, unmarked for gender, and a larger number of gender-distinguishing pronouns and adjectives. Examples of the former include "ahám" (first singular), "vayám" (first plural) and "yūyám" (second plural). The latter can be demonstrative, deictic or anaphoric. Both the Vedic and Classical Sanskrit share the "sá/tám" pronominal stem, and this is the closest element to a third person pronoun and an article in the Sanskrit language, states Jamison.


title: Sanskrit

text: The Sanskrit language formally incorporates poetic metres. By the late Vedic era, this developed into a field of study; it was central to the composition of the Hindu literature, including the later Vedic texts. This study of Sanskrit prosody is called "chandas", and is considered one of the six Vedangas, or limbs of Vedic studies.


title: Sanskrit

text: Sanskrit prosody includes linear and non-linear systems. The system started off with seven major metres, according to Annette Wilke and Oliver Moebus, called the "seven birds" or "seven mouths of Brihaspati", and each had its own rhythm, movements and aesthetics wherein a non-linear structure (aperiodicity) was mapped into a four verse polymorphic linear sequence. A syllable in Sanskrit is classified as either "laghu" (light) or "guru" (heavy). This classification is based on a "matra" (literally, "count, measure, duration"), and typically a syllable that ends in a short vowel is a light syllable, while those that end in consonant, "anusvara" or "visarga" are heavy. The classical Sanskrit found in Hindu scriptures such as the "Bhagavad Gita" and many texts are so arranged that the light and heavy syllables in them follow a rhythm, though not necessarily a rhyme.


title: Sanskrit

text: Sanskrit metres include those based on a fixed number of syllables per verse, and those based on fixed number of morae per verse. The Vedic Sanskrit employs fifteen metres, of which seven are common, and the most frequent are three (8-, 11- and 12-syllable lines). The Classical Sanskrit deploys both linear and non-linear metres, many of which are based on syllables and others based on diligently crafted verses based on repeating numbers of morae (matra per foot).


title: Sanskrit

text: Metre and rhythm is an important part of the Sanskrit language. It may have played a role in helping preserve the integrity of the message and Sanskrit texts. The verse perfection in the Vedic texts such as the verse Upanishads and post-Vedic "Smṛti" texts are rich in prosody. This feature of the Sanskrit language led some Indologists from the 19th century onwards to identify suspected portions of texts where a line or sections are off the expected metre.


title: Sanskrit

text: The metre-feature of the Sanskrit language embeds another layer of communication to the listener or reader. A change in metres has been a tool of literary architecture and an embedded code to inform the reciter and audience that it marks the end of a section or chapter. Each section or chapter of these texts uses identical metres, rhythmically presenting their ideas and making it easier to remember, recall and check for accuracy. Authors coded a hymn's end by frequently using a verse of a metre different than that used in the hymn's body. However, Hindu tradition does not use the Gayatri metre to end a hymn or composition, possibly because it has enjoyed a special level of reverence in Hinduism.


title: Sanskrit

text: The early history of writing Sanskrit and other languages in ancient India is a problematic topic despite a century of scholarship, states Richard Salomon – an epigraphist and Indologist specializing in Sanskrit and Pali literature. The earliest possible script from South Asia is from the Indus Valley civilization (3rd/2nd millennium BCE), but this script – if it is a script – remains undeciphered. If any scripts existed in the Vedic period, they have not survived. Scholars generally accept that Sanskrit was spoken in an oral society, and that an oral tradition preserved the extensive Vedic and Classical Sanskrit literature. Other scholars such as Jack Goody argue that the Vedic Sanskrit texts are not the product of an oral society, basing this view by comparing inconsistencies in the transmitted versions of literature from various oral societies such as the Greek, Serbian, and other cultures. This minority of scholars argue that the Vedic literature is too consistent and vast to have been composed and transmitted orally across generations, without being written down.


title: Sanskrit

text: "Lipi" is the term in Sanskrit which means "writing, letters, alphabet". It contextually refers to scripts, the art or any manner of writing or drawing. The term, in the sense of a writing system, appears in some of the earliest Buddhist, Hindu, and Jaina texts. Pāṇini's "Astadhyayi", composed sometime around the 5th or 4th century BCE, for example, mentions "lipi" in the context of a writing script and education system in his times, but he does not name the script. Several early Buddhist and Jaina texts, such as the "Lalitavistara Sūtra" and "Pannavana Sutta" include lists of numerous writing scripts in ancient India. The Buddhist texts list the sixty four "lipi" that the Buddha knew as a child, with the Brahmi script topping the list. "The historical value of this list is however limited by several factors", states Salomon. The list may be a later interpolation. The Jain canonical texts such as the "Pannavana Sutta" – probably older than the Buddhist texts – list eighteen writing systems, with the Brahmi topping the list and Kharotthi (Kharoshthi) listed as fourth. The Jaina text elsewhere states that the "Brahmi is written in 18 different forms", but the details are lacking. However, the reliability of these lists has been questioned and the empirical evidence of writing systems in the form of Sanskrit or Prakrit inscriptions dated prior to the 3rd century BCE has not been found. If the ancient surface for writing Sanskrit was palm leaves, tree bark and cloth—the same as those in later times, these have not survived. According to Salomon, many find it difficult to explain the "evidently high level of political organization and cultural complexity" of ancient India without a writing system for Sanskrit and other languages.


title: Sanskrit

text: The oldest datable writing systems for Sanskrit are the Brāhmī script, the related Kharoṣṭhī script and the Brahmi derivatives. The Kharosthi was used in the northwestern part of South Asia and it became extinct, while the Brahmi was used all over the subcontinent along with regional scripts such as Old Tamil. Of these, the earliest records in the Sanskrit language are in Brahmi, a script that later evolved into numerous related Indic scripts for Sanskrit, along with Southeast Asian scripts (Burmese, Thai, Lao, Khmer, others) and many extinct Central Asian scripts such as those discovered along with the Kharosthi in the Tarim Basin of western China and in Uzbekistan. The most extensive inscriptions that have survived into the modern era are the rock edicts and pillar inscriptions of the 3rd century BCE Mauryan emperor Ashoka, but these are not in Sanskrit.


title: Sanskrit

text: The Brahmi script for writing Sanskrit is a "modified consonant-syllabic" script. The graphic syllable is its basic unit, and this consists of a consonant with or without diacritic modifications. Since the vowel is an integral part of the consonants, and given the efficiently compacted, fused consonant cluster morphology for Sanskrit words and grammar, the Brahmi and its derivative writing systems deploy ligatures, diacritics and relative positioning of the vowel to inform the reader how the vowel is related to the consonant and how it is expected to be pronounced for clarity. This feature of Brahmi and its modern Indic script derivatives makes it difficult to classify it under the main script types used for the writing systems for most of the world's languages, namely logographic, syllabic and alphabetic.


title: Sanskrit

text: The Brahmi script evolved into "a vast number of forms and derivatives", states Richard Salomon, and in theory, Sanskrit "can be represented in virtually any of the main Brahmi-based scripts and in practice it often is". From the ancient times, it has been written in numerous regional scripts in South and Southeast Asia. Most of these are descendants of the Brahmi script. The earliest datable "varnamala" Brahmi alphabet system, found in later Sanskrit texts, is from the 2nd century BCE, found in Sughana, Haryana. It shows a "schoolboy's writing lessons", states Salomon.


title: Sanskrit

text: Many modern era manuscripts are written and available in the Nagari script, whose form is attestable to the 1st millennium CE. The Nagari script is the ancestor of Devanagari (north India), Nandinagari (south India) and other variants. The Nāgarī script was in regular use by 7th century CE, and had fully evolved into Devanagari and Nandinagari scripts by about the end of the first millennium of the common era. The Devanagari script, states Banerji, became more popular for Sanskrit in India since about the 18th century. However, Sanskrit does have special historical connection to the Nagari script as attested by the epigraphical evidence.


title: Sanskrit

text: The Nagari script has been thought of as a northern Indic script for Sanskrit as well as the regional languages such as Hindi, Marathi, and Nepali. However, it has had a "supra-local" status as evidenced by 1st-millennium CE epigraphy and manuscripts discovered all over India and as far as Sri Lanka, Burma, Indonesia, and in its parent form, called the Siddhamatrka script, found in manuscripts of East Asia. The Sanskrit and Balinese languages Sanur inscription on Belanjong pillar of Bali (Indonesia), dated to about 914 CE, is in part in the Nagari script.


title: Sanskrit

text: The Nagari script used for Classical Sanskrit has the fullest repertoire of characters consisting of fourteen vowels and thirty three consonants. For Vedic Sanskrit, it has two more allophonic consonantal characters (the intervocalic ळ "ḷa", and ळ्ह "ḷha"). To communicate phonetic accuracy, it also includes several modifiers such as the "anusvara" dot and the "visarga" double dot, punctuation symbols and others such as the "halanta" sign.


title: Sanskrit

text: Other scripts such as Gujarati, Bangla, Odia and major south Indian scripts, states Salomon, "have been and often still are used in their proper territories for writing Sanskrit". These and many Indian scripts look different to the untrained eye, but the differences between Indic scripts is "mostly superficial and they share the same phonetic repertoire and systemic features", states Salomon. They all have essentially the same set of eleven to fourteen vowels and thirty-three consonants as established by the Sanskrit language and attestable in the Brahmi script. Further, a closer examination reveals that they all have the similar basic graphic principles, the same "varnamala" (literally, "garland of letters") alphabetic ordering following the same logical phonetic order, easing the work of historic skilled scribes writing or reproducing Sanskrit works across South Asia. The Sanskrit language written in some Indic scripts exaggerate angles or round shapes, but this serves only to mask the underlying similarities. Nagari script favours symmetry set with squared outlines and right angles. In contrast, Sanskrit written in the Bangla script emphasizes the acute angles while the neighbouring Odia script emphasizes rounded shapes and uses cosmetically appealing "umbrella-like curves" above the script symbols.


title: Sanskrit

text: In the south, where Dravidian languages predominate, scripts used for Sanskrit include the Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam and Grantha alphabets.