Traditional
31-540: Sayana ( IAST : Sāyaṇa, also called Sāyaṇācārya; died 1387) was a 14th-century Sanskrit Mimamsa scholar from the Vijayanagara Empire of peninsular India , near modern day Bellary , Karnataka . An influential commentator on the Vedas , he flourished under King Bukka Raya I and his successor Harihara II . More than a hundred works are attributed to him, among which are commentaries on nearly all parts of
62-433: A font, etc. It can be enabled in the input menu in the menu bar under System Preferences → International → Input Menu (or System Preferences → Language and Text → Input Sources) or can be viewed under Edit → Emoji & Symbols in many programs. Equivalent tools – such as gucharmap ( GNOME ) or kcharselect ( KDE ) – exist on most Linux desktop environments. Users of SCIM on Linux based platforms can also have
93-707: A modifier key to type letters with diacritical marks. For example, alt + a = ā. How this is set up varies by operating system. Linux/Unix and BSD desktop environments allow one to set up custom keyboard layouts and switch them by clicking a flag icon in the menu bar. macOS One can use the pre-installed US International keyboard, or install Toshiya Unebe's Easy Unicode keyboard layout. Microsoft Windows Windows also allows one to change keyboard layouts and set up additional custom keyboard mappings for IAST. This Pali keyboard installer made by Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator (MSKLC) supports IAST (works on Microsoft Windows up to at least version 10, can use Alt button on
124-556: A substantial portion of the Vedic interpretations of his predecessors." Swami Dayananda , the founder of the Arya Samaj , a Vedic revivalist organisation, did not give much significance to his Vedic commentaries. IAST The International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration ( IAST ) is a transliteration scheme that allows the lossless romanisation of Indic scripts as employed by Sanskrit and related Indic languages. It
155-435: Is actually glottal , not velar . Some letters are modified with diacritics : Long vowels are marked with an overline (often called a macron ). Vocalic (syllabic) consonants, retroflexes and ṣ ( / ʂ ~ ɕ ~ʃ/ ) have an underdot . One letter has an overdot: ṅ ( /ŋ/ ). One has an acute accent : ś ( /ʃ/ ). One letter has a line below: ḻ ( / ɭ / ) (Vedic). Unlike ASCII -only romanisations such as ITRANS or Harvard-Kyoto ,
186-684: Is based on a scheme that emerged during the 19th century from suggestions by Charles Trevelyan , William Jones , Monier Monier-Williams and other scholars, and formalised by the Transliteration Committee of the Geneva Oriental Congress , in September 1894. IAST makes it possible for the reader to read the Indic text unambiguously, exactly as if it were in the original Indic script. It is this faithfulness to
217-763: The ISO 15919 standard for transliterating Indic scripts emerged in 2001 from the standards and library worlds. For the most part, ISO 15919 follows the IAST scheme, departing from it only in minor ways (e.g., ṃ/ṁ and ṛ/r̥)—see comparison below. The Indian National Library at Kolkata romanization , intended for the romanisation of all Indic scripts , is an extension of IAST. The IAST letters are listed with their Devanagari equivalents and phonetic values in IPA , valid for Sanskrit , Hindi and other modern languages that use Devanagari script, but some phonological changes have occurred: * H
248-609: The Krishna Yajurveda . He was the pupil of Vishnu Sarvajna and of Shankarananda. Both Mādhavāchārya and Sāyaṇāchārya were said to have studied under Vidyatirtha of Sringeri , and held offices in the Vijayanagara Empire. Sāyaṇāchārya was a minister, and subsequently prime minister in Bukka Raya's court, and wrote much of his commentary with his brother and other Brahmins during his ministership. Sāyaṇa
279-459: The Rigveda, though it also contains mistakes and contradictions. While some 19th century Indologists were quite dismissive of Sayana's commentary, others were more appreciative. His commentary was used as a reference-guide by Ralph T. H. Griffith (1826–1906), John Muir (1810–1882), H. H. Wilson (1786–1860) and other 19th century European Indologists. According to Wilson, Sayana's interpretation
310-527: The Vedas as "lyrics" without the "theological" background of the interpretations of Yaska and Sayana, Max Müller (1823–1900) published a translation of the Rigvedic Samhitas together with Sayana's commentary. His contemporaries Pischel and Geldner were outspoken about the value of Sayana's commentary: German scholars Pischel and Geldner have expressed in unequivocal terms their opinion that in
341-589: The Vedas made manifest", written at the request of King Bukka of the Vijayanagara empire "to invest the young kingdom with the prestige it needed." He was probably aided by other scholars, using the interpretations of several authors. The core portion of the commentary was likely written by Sāyaṇāchārya himself, but it also includes contributions by his brother Mādhavāchārya, and additions by his students and later authors who wrote under Sāyaṇāchārya's name. "Sāyaṇa" (or also Sāyaṇamādhava ) by convention refers to
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#1732775510924372-605: The Vedas. He also wrote on a number of subjects like medicine, morality, music and grammar. Sāyaṇācārya was born to Mayana ( IAST : Māyaṇa) and Shrimati in a Brahmin family who lived in Hampi . He had an elder brother named Madhava (sometimes identified as Vidyaranya ) and a younger brother named Bhoganatha (or Somanatha). The family belonged to the Bharadvaja gotra , and followed the Taittiriya Shakha (school) of
403-639: The area of Sanskrit studies make use of free OpenType fonts such as FreeSerif or Gentium , both of which have complete support for the full repertoire of conjoined diacritics in the IAST character set. Released under the GNU FreeFont or SIL Open Font License , respectively, such fonts may be freely shared and do not require the person reading or editing a document to purchase proprietary software to make use of its associated fonts. Ralph T. H. Griffith Ralph Thomas Hotchkin Griffith (1826–1906)
434-459: The collective authorship of the commentary as a whole without separating such layers. Galewicz states that Sayana, a Mimamsa scholar, "thinks of the Veda as something to be trained and mastered to be put into practical ritual use", noticing that "it is not the meaning of the mantras that is most essential [...] but rather the perfect mastering of their sound form." According to Galewicz, Sayana saw
465-536: The consumer edition since XP. This is limited to characters in the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP). Characters are searchable by Unicode character name, and the table can be limited to a particular code block. More advanced third-party tools of the same type are also available (a notable freeware example is BabelMap ). macOS provides a "character palette" with much the same functionality, along with searching by related characters, glyph tables in
496-528: The diacritics used for IAST allow capitalisation of proper names. The capital variants of letters never occurring word-initially ( Ṇ Ṅ Ñ Ṝ Ḹ ) are useful only when writing in all-caps and in Pāṇini contexts for which the convention is to typeset the IT sounds as capital letters. For the most part, IAST is a subset of ISO 15919 that merges the retroflex (underdotted) liquids with the vocalic ones ( ringed below ) and
527-418: The matter of Vedic exegesis greater reliance ought to be placed on the orthodox Indian tradition represented by Yaska and Sayana than on modern philological methods. Linguistics may help one to understand the bare meaning of a Vedic word, but the spirit behind that word will not be adequately realised without due appreciation of the indigenous tradition. Modern scholarship is ambivalent. According to Jan Gonda ,
558-749: The opportunity to install and use the sa-itrans-iast input handler which provides complete support for the ISO 15919 standard for the romanization of Indic languages as part of the m17n library. Or user can use some Unicode characters in Latin-1 Supplement, Latin Extended-A, Latin Extended Additional and Combining Diarcritical Marks block to write IAST. Only certain fonts support all the Latin Unicode characters essential for
589-512: The original scripts that accounts for its continuing popularity amongst scholars. Scholars commonly use IAST in publications that cite textual material in Sanskrit, Pāḷi and other classical Indian languages. IAST is also used for major e-text repositories such as SARIT, Muktabodha, GRETIL, and sanskritdocuments.org. The IAST scheme represents more than a century of scholarly usage in books and journals on classical Indian studies. By contrast,
620-739: The position of principal at the Benares College in India and later lived in Kotagiri, Nilgiri. Griffith was more interested in translating Vedic books into English, and did most of his translations while living, teaching and researching in Kotagiri in the Nilgiris . His translation of the Rigveda follows the text of Max Müller 's six-volume Sanskrit edition. His readings generally follow
651-457: The purpose ( artha ) of the Veda as the " artha of carrying out sacrifice", giving precedence to the Yajurveda . For Sayana, whether the mantras had meaning depended on the context of their practical usage. This conception of the Veda, as a repertoire to be mastered and performed, takes precedence over the internal meaning or "autonomous message of the hymns." His commentary on the Rigveda
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#1732775510924682-471: The right side of the keyboard instead of Ctrl+Alt combination). Many systems provide a way to select Unicode characters visually. ISO/IEC 14755 refers to this as a screen-selection entry method . Microsoft Windows has provided a Unicode version of the Character Map program (find it by hitting ⊞ Win + R then type charmap then hit ↵ Enter ) since version NT 4.0 – appearing in
713-400: The short close-mid vowels with the long ones. The following seven exceptions are from the ISO standard accommodating an extended repertoire of symbols to allow transliteration of Devanāgarī and other Indic scripts , as used for languages other than Sanskrit. The most convenient method of inputting romanized Sanskrit is by setting up an alternative keyboard layout . This allows one to hold
744-422: The translations of the Rigveda published by Griffith and Wilson were "defective", suffering from their reliance on Sayana. Ram Gopal notes that Sayana's commentary contains irreconcilable contradictions and "half-baked" tentative interpretations which are not further investigated, but also states that Sayana's commentary is the "most exhaustive and comprehensive" of all available commentaries, embodying "the gist of
775-487: The transliteration of Indic scripts according to the IAST and ISO 15919 standards. For example, the Arial , Tahoma and Times New Roman font packages that come with Microsoft Office 2007 and later versions also support precomposed Unicode characters like ī . Many other text fonts commonly used for book production may be lacking in support for one or more characters from this block. Accordingly, many academics working in
806-572: The work of the great scholar Sayana , who was Prime Minister at the court of the King of Vijaynagar in what is now the District of Bellary in the Indian state of Karnataka during the fourteenth century. On his retirement he withdrew to Kotagiri , a hill station, some 7000 feet high, in the Nilgiris district , Madras , residing with his brother Frank, an engineer in the public works department of
837-403: Was a Sanskrit-language writer and commentator, and more than a hundred works are attributed to him, among which are commentaries on nearly all parts of the Vedas. Some of these works were actually written by his pupils, and some were written in conjunction with his brother, Vidyāraṇya or Mādhavacārya. His major work is his commentary on the Vedas , Vedartha Prakasha , literally "the meaning of
868-750: Was an English Indologist . He was a member of the Indian education service, and was among the first Europeans to translate the Vedas into English. He had lived in Oxford , Benares , and in Madras . Griffith was born at Corsley , Wiltshire , on 25 May 1826. The son of the Reverend R. C. Griffith (Chaplain to the Marquess of Bath 1830), he was a B.A. of Queen's College and was elected Boden Professor of Sanskrit on Nov 24, 1849. The Boden Sanskrit professorship
899-572: Was established in 1832 with money bequeathed to the university by Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Boden to assist in the conversion of the people of India to Christianity. Griffith took up this objective and translated the Vedic scriptures into English. He also produced translations of other Sanskrit literature, including a verse version of the Ramayana and the Kumara Sambhava of Kalidasa . He held
930-426: Was sometimes questionable, but had "a knowledge of his text far beyond the pretension of any European scholar", reflecting the possession "of all the interpretations which had been perpetuated by traditional teaching from the earliest times." Macdonell (1854–1930) was critical of Sayana's commentary, noting that many difficult words were not properly understood by Sayana. While Rudolf Roth (1821–1895) aimed at reading
961-884: Was translated from Sanskrit to English by Max Müller , 1823-1900. A new edition, prepared by the Vaidik Samshodhan Mandala (Vedic Research Institute) Pune, under the general editor V. K. Rajwade , was published in 1933 in four volumes. He has also written many lesser manuals called Sudhanidhis dealing with Prayaschitta ( expiation ), Yajnatantra ( ritual ), Purushartha (aims of human endeavour), Subhashita (Collection of moral sayings), Ayurveda (Indian traditional medicine), Sangita Sara (The essence of music), Prayaschitra , Alankara , and Dhatuvrddhi ( grammar ). According to Dalal, "his work influenced all later scholars, including many European commentators and translators." Sayana's commentary preserved traditional Indian understandings and explanations of