I am very glad to announce that my Handbook of Sanskrit Philology has reached a second edition which shows, without presumption, that it may be allowed to rest on its own merits. The first edition was published in November 1987, and was exhausted within five years of its publication. By the end of March 1993, not a single copy was left with me. Though it had a great demand all these years. I had a mind to revise the entire book with more materials than it contains now. But as time is getting on, and as my hands are always full and preoccupied with some other works. I could not get any chance to do so. But in the meantime, Shri Debasish Bhattacharya of Sanskrit Pustak Bhandar, Calcutta, has been pressurising me to reprint the first edition even without additions and alterations. Considering the demand of the book and the paucity of my time. I had to concede his proposal but with some additions and alterations, the outcome of which is the publication of this volume.
It goes without saying that many useful materials are added to this edition in the Appendix and within the book wherever possible. A few printing errors of the earlier edition are also removed. Additional bibliographical notes will. I believe, be helpful to the readers. I have made an humble endeavour to improve this edition without making the size of the book bulky. In short, any one who compares this edition with its earlier one will see at once the between the two.
As Sanskrit is vast and intricate, I dare not even claim to have attained the standard of perfection, and yet I can affirm at the same time that I have done what I could to bring the present edition to the level of the scholarship of the day. Wackernagel's Altindische Grammatik, consisting of six parts without verb (not yet published), and containing over 5000 pages, does not still claim to be a complete book of Sanskrit grammar or linguistics, not to speak of the present one which runs into just a little over four hundred pages. And yet I do believe that not a single essential point of the subject is overlooked, and so a thorough study of the present edition will definitely give a good grasp of the subject, and will positively enhance the knowledge of Sanskrit philology, a subject which has been living in the realm of sad and doleful neglect nearly for the last fifty years.
Every language has a history of its own. It has its antecedents as well as its descendants. The antecedents are the history and pre-history of a language, and the descendants are the off-shoots of that language, if any. through the process of its evolution. As a result, a language can be studied from various points of view. These are Descriptive (or Synchronic). Historical (or Diachronic). Comparative (or Panchronic). Philosophical or Psychological.
It is said in general that languages are not isolated pheno mena; they have their descendants as well as antecedents. Sometimes they descend from some other languages, or from the earliest forms of the same language, and as time rolls on they are merged into other languages, or newer forms of the same language. Sanskrit, therefore, is not an isolated language; it has its antecedents as well as its consequences. The antece dents of Sanskrit are immediately Vedic (often known as chandah or mantra) and remotely Indo-Iranian and still more remotely Indo-European. Its consequences are the Prakrit languages and then the New Indo-Aryan languages (such as, Bengali, Hindi, Maithill, Punjabi, Rajasthäni, Gujarati, Marath etc) spoken throughout Northern India from east to west. Indo-European (IE) is, therefore, the parent language of Sanskrit.
**Contents and Sample Pages**
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