Editor’s Preface

Charles Wikner’s A Practical Sanskrit Introductory is an excellent resource for the aspiring saṃskṛta student. I have personally learned a great deal from this little manual. It has been available online for years as a printable PDF or PostScript file, but has not, as far as I know, been made available as an easy-to-navigate, web-based resource.

Wikner released the guide into the public domain as a gift to mankind. The guide is designed not to be a comprehensive resource to teach the entire language. Rather, as Wikner says in the Preface, it equips the student to “intelligently apply Monier-Williams’s dictionary and the Dhātu-Pāṭha (a compendium of saṃskṛta root words) to the study of the scriptures.”

In 2001, in a letter to a student who was translating the guide into French, Wikner wrote the following:

The Introductory was produced as a service to mankind: so far as I am concerned, it is freely available in the public domain … Furthermore, I would encourage you to translate it and make it publicly available … Having waived all my personal rights, I am in no position to insist that you make your translation public, but can only encourage you to do so. I trust that that makes my position formally and legally clear … I wish you every success in your endeavours. May the Light continue to shine upon your studies!

I have used this guide for some time in my own personal study and translation work, and come back to it often as a reference. But it has always been somewhat inconvenient to use; it was only available as a 156 page PDF file with no clickable links, so there was a lot of scrolling back and forth between the table of contents and the relevant information.

That is why I decided to take up this project of updating Charles Wikner’s beautiful Introductory for the modern web. I retyped the entire guide to make it searchable (and search engine accessible)¹. I also recreated all the graphics with new hi-res versions.

Editorial Notes

I endeavored, for the most part, to keep Wikner’s original text intact, but I have made some changes throughout, mostly for stylistic reasons.

Many of the changes I made were to conform to the conventions of American English, e.g., “practising” to “practicing”. Wikner also uses ‘single quotes’ throughout the text, which I have changed to “double quotes”.

I also changed Wikner’s system of emphasizing text. In the original, Wikner uses bold text for transliterated Sanskrit, e.g., saṃskṛta, and underlines to emphasize English text. On the web, underlines are never used for emphasis, being reserved for hyperlinks. Therefore, I have opted to use italics for transliterated Sanskrit², e.g., saṃskṛta, and bold to emphasize English text. In the pronunciation instructions, I use the HTML <mark> tag to highlight relevant letters, e.g. k iss, k iln, ba ck .

Technical Details

This site uses various custom fonts to properly render the IAST transliterated and devanāgarī texts. In order to see the text as intended, please ensure that you are using a modern web browser (the latest versions of Firefox and Chrome, or Safari on macOS, work best), and make sure you have not disabled JavaScript or custom fonts (if you aren’t sure, then you probably haven’t).

Annotations

Throughout these lessons, I have added annotations to help remind the reader what certain Sanskrit terms mean. These are indicated by a faint, dotted underline under the relevant word, and are accessible by simply hovering your mouse over the word (or tapping the word, if you are on a mobile device). As an example, hover (or tap) the following Sanskrit words:

You should see a faint underline beneath each word, and a small box with explanatory text should appear when you hover or tap the word.

If you don't see the underline, or if nothing appears when you hover or tap, then your browser may not support the latest web standards (HTML5 and CSS3), and you should update to a more modern browser like Firefox or Chrome, and make sure you have JavaScript enabled.

Monier-Williams Dictionary

As stated above, this guide is designed to teach you how to teach yourself. It will teach you how to understand the construction of a word, so that you can trace it to its root using the Monier-Williams Sanskrit English Dictionary.

Beginning with Lesson 12, Wikner makes reference to the structure of the printed book and to particular page numbers, assuming that anyone reading these lessons has a copy of the dictionary handy. As part of my effort to make this course entirely available online, rather than assume the reader has a physical copy of the dictionary, I have, wherever possible, linked to the relevant pages of the high-resolution scanned edition on archive.org.

But for practical use, beyond the scope of this course, I highly recommend the Sanskrit-Lexicon online version created by the University of Cologne. It is entirely digital, searchable, and much more convenient than either a physical book or the scanned version.

Errata

If you encounter any misspellings, typos, or errors in transliteration, please let me know.

Donations

Bringing Charles Wikner’s A Practical Sanskrit Introductory to the web took hundreds of hours of work. This site and all the resources herein will always be free for all to use and enjoy. If you have found this website valuable and would like to help us keep it free, as well as expand our library of Sanskrit resources, your donations are very much appreciated.

My sincere hope is that many new people will find this guide as useful and valuable as I have, and it will be a vital resource for aspiring sādhakas for many years to come.