Wiktionary talk:About Sanskrit

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Why don't transliterations get wikified & get their own entries? Also, if that is the decision, then this page sould be a little clearer that they must not be wikified. Lastly, it isn't clear to me (not speaking any language that uses Sanskrit script) that transliterations are transliterations, in the current format recommended...is this something that can be changed? --Connel MacKenzie 22:51, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

there are lots of Sanskrit dictionaries in IAST, so I don't see why Wiktionary should discriminate against IAST (the de-facto standard in western editions). 19:43, 29 January 2007 (UTC)
If you want to edit a policy or draft policy page on the wikt, at least create a user account and log in. Also: deletion of content is seriously discouraged. Reverted. Robert Ullmann 22:28, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

it is completely bizarre to keep Sanskrit entries in Devanagari in en-wiktionary. Devanagari entries can be a nice-to-have extra, but they are useless for

  • marking accentuation using diacritics
  • marking morphology using hyphens

IAST should clearly be recommended. --Dbachmann 16:25, 8 January 2010 (UTC)

Accents and hyphens are supposed to be used in transliterations (the usual tr= parameter to {{infl}}, {{t}} etc.). We ignore them in Devanagari (which does have Unicode support for Vedic accents) because they're not a part of "regular orthography". (we do so for many other languages, e.g. with vowel lengths macrons for Latin which are displayed only in the inflection line). I understand your case for Latin script and the problem of associating Sanskrit with Devanagari implying Hindu connections, but I really wonder is it worth all the trouble, with the Western scholarship using prevalently Devanagari for Sanskrit for more than a century... Unlike e.t. Tocharian which we add in Latin transcription because its script is note available in Unicode (and it won't for a long time to come), the problem of Sanskrit is that there are so many scripts to choose from. --Ivan Štambuk 19:16, 8 January 2010 (UTC)

The point is that Hindi Wiktionary will naturally use Devanagari for Sanskrit entries, just like the Bengali or Tamil Wiktionaries will use Bengali or Tamil scripts for the same Sanskrit words. There is no reason why English Wiktionary shouldn't use the most widespread script used for Sanskrit in English speaking contexts, which is IAST. I do not think that Western scholarship uses prevalently Devanagari for Sanskrit. If it uses any Indic script, that script will be Devanagari, but IAST used as least as often, already because of its objective advantages such as hyphenation, accentuation etc. --Dbachmann 11:05, 27 August 2010 (UTC)

Visarga (ः)[edit]

What is the consensus about visarga ? Do we include it in entry names, or should we show it in the headword, or is this something for an alternate-spelling entry? I realize it alternates with म् स् depending on what follows, but if people are going to see it in texts, we should at least acknowledge that it exists in a great many terms. Chuck Entz (talk)

It's anusvara (ं) that alternates with म्. Visarga alternates with स् and sometimes र्. But it's wider than just visarga or just visarga and anusvara: the question is, what do we do with sandhi forms in general? They aren't exactly alternative spellings. Maybe we need a template {{sandhi form of}}, the way the mutated forms of the Celtic languages are marked with {{mutation of}}. —Angr 18:07, 18 June 2012 (UTC)
Oops! I thought I put स्, but I copied-and-pasted it to save time and grabbed the wrong character.
My reason for asking was that a new user did an inappropriate move to the visarga form (the page had entries in Hindi and a couple of other languages, so reverting was a no-brainer), but when I went to point out our standards for which forms to use as the lemma, I couldn't find anything.
We should at the very least specify the preferred form (even if it's the root without endings) for the lemma of each inflected POS.
It wouldn't hurt to have sandhi tables here- or at least links to them on WP or elsewhere. It would be nice if we could have enough information accessible from WT:ASA so someone could start with a random word from a text and figure out the lemma form in order to look it up. At least we should show the main sandhi variants for the usual alternating final consonants like स्/(ः) and म्/(ं). Chuck Entz (talk) 02:10, 19 June 2012 (UTC)
For nouns, I think the lemma form should be (and as far as I know this is already the general practice here) the stem without any ending, same as is given in well-respected reference works like Whitney and Monier-Williams. Thus, the main entry for the word meaning "horse" should be at [[अश्व]]. But, just as we have "form-of" entries for each non-nominative case form in Latin ([[eque]], [[equum]], [[equi]], [[equo]], [[equos], [[equis]]), we should have "form-of" entries for all the cases in Sanskrit. So while the main entry—the one containing the etymology, the gloss, synonyms, categories, and so forth—is at [[अश्व]], we should also have [[अश्वस्]] with the gloss "nominative singular of अश्व (aśva)". And for s-stems, of course, the lemma form itself ends in -स्, so the main entry of the word for "race" would be [[जनस्]]. Then sandhi variants like [[जनः]] and [[जनो]] would be glossed as "sandhi variant of जनस् (janas)" or the like, and [[अश्वः]] and [[अश्वो]] would also be glossed as "sandhi variant of अश्वस् (aśvas)" even though that's only a "form-of" entry itself. Does that make sense? I know what I mean, but I'm not sure I'm explaining it clearly. —Angr 20:44, 19 June 2012 (UTC)