Course Description:

This course will open up the student to philosophic and poetic texts and introduce them to ideas that shaped the Indian world and beyond.

Sanskrit was spoken in the regions of North India as far back as 1500 BCE. While the spoken form of the language fell out of use with time, the literary use of Sanskrit persisted, with it being the language of records, poems, and philosophies. As such, today, students of Sanskrit rarely learn how to speak the language fluently. Instead, the focus is primarily on reading, and, to a lesser degree, writing.

The main purpose of this course is therefore to teach the student how to read and translate Sanskrit works as well as to understand the more subtle connotations present in the use of Sanskrit in texts. If requested, chanting Sanskrit works can be added to the curriculum, if the student would like to learn metres and prosody.

The course will begin with an introduction to the Devanagari script, before covering declensions and conjugations. Our work will culminate with readings from various texts and an independent translation project.