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Sanskrit Prosody
Sanskrit prosody or Chandas refers to one of the six Vedangas, or limbs of Vedic studies.James Lochtefeld (2002), "Chandas" in The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Hinduism, Vol. 1: A-M, Rosen Publishing, , page 140 It is the study of poetic metres and verse in Sanskrit. This field of study was central to the composition of the Vedas, the scriptural canons of Hinduism; in fact, so central that some later Hindu and Buddhist texts refer to the Vedas as ''Chandas''. The Chandas, as developed by the Vedic schools, were organized around seven major metres, each with its own rhythm, movements and aesthetics. Sanskrit metres include those based on a fixed number of syllables per verse, and those based on fixed number of morae per verse. Extant ancient manuals on Chandas include Pingala's ''Chandah Sutra'', while an example of a medieval Sanskrit prosody manual is Kedara Bhatta's ''Vrittaratnakara''. The most exhaustive compilations of Sanskrit prosody describe over 600 metres. This i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Vedanga
The Vedanga ( ', "limb of the Veda-s"; plural form: वेदाङ्गानि ') are six auxiliary disciplines of Vedic studies that developed in Vedic and post-Vedic times.James Lochtefeld (2002), "Vedanga" in The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Hinduism, Vol. 1: A-M, Rosen Publishing, , pages 744-745 List of the Vedanga #Shiksha (Sanskrit: शिक्षा ', "instruction, teaching"): phonetics, phonology, pronunciation. This auxiliary discipline has focused on the letters of the Sanskrit alphabet, accent, quantity, stress, melody and rules of euphonic combination of words during a Vedic recitation. # Chanda (Sanskrit: छन्द ', "metre"): prosody.James Lochtefeld (2002), "Chandas" in The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Hinduism, Vol. 1: A-M, Rosen Publishing, , page 140 This auxiliary discipline has focused on the poetic meters, including those based on fixed number of syllables per verse, and those based on fixed number of morae per verse. # Vyakarana (Sanskrit: व्� ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Manasollasa
The ' also known as ''Abhilashitartha Chintamani'', is an early 12th-century Sanskrit text composed by the Kalyani Chalukya king Someshvara III, who ruled in present-day Karnataka. It is an encyclopedic work covering topics such as polity, governance, ethics, economics, astronomy, astrology, rhetoric, veterinary medicine, horticulture, perfumes, food, architecture, games, painting, poetry, dance and music. The text is a valuable source of socio-cultural information on 11th- and 12th-century India. The encyclopedic treatise is structured as five sub-books with a cumulative total of 100 chapters. It is notable for its extensive discussion of arts, particularly music and dance. It is also notable for including chapters on food recipes and festivals, many of which are a part of modern Indian culture. Another medieval era Sanskrit text with the title ''Mānasollāsa'' also exists, consisting of devotional praise hymns ('' stōtra''), and it is different from the encyclopedic treatis ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Molossus (poetry)
A molossus (; from Greek ) is a metrical foot used in Greek and Latin poetry. It consists of three long syllables. Examples of Latin words constituting molossi are ''audiri, cantabant, virtutem''. In English poetry, syllables are usually categorized as being either stressed or unstressed, rather than long or short, and the unambiguous molossus rarely appears, as it is too easily interpreted as two feet (and thus a metrical fault) or as having at least one destressed syllable. Perhaps the best example of a molossus is the repeated refrain of ''no birds sing'' in the first and last verse of John Keats's poem "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" (1819) especially for the way it forces the reader to slow down, which is the poetic essence of this metrical foot. The title of Lord Tennyson's poem "Break, Break, Break" (1842) is sometimes cited as a molossus, but in context it can only be three separate feet: Clement Wood proposes as a more convincing instance: ''great white chief'', of whi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tribrach (poetry)
A tribrach is a metrical foot used in formal poetry and Greek and Latin verse. In quantitative meter (such as the meter of classical verse), it consists of three short syllables occupying a foot, replacing either an iamb (u –) or a trochee (– u). In accentual-syllabic verse (such as formal English verse), the tribrach consists of a run of three short syllables substituted for a trochee. A "tribrach word" is a word consisting of three short syllables, such as Latin "shining" or Greek "you have".W. M. Lindsay (1919), ''Early Latin Verse'', pp. 105–6. An English equivalent would be a word with three short syllables such as ''Canada'' or ''passenger''. The origin of the word tribrach is the Greek , derived from the prefix - "three" and the adjective "short". Terminology The name is first recorded in the Roman writer Quintilian (1st century AD). According to Quintilian, an alternative name for a tribrach was a "trochee": "Three short syllables make a , but those who gi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Prosody (Greek)
Prosody (from Middle French , from Latin , from Ancient Greek (), 'song sung to music', 'pronunciation of syllable') is the theory and practice of versification. Prosody Greek poetry is based on syllable length, not on syllable stress, as in English. The two syllable lengths in Greek poetry are long and short. It is probable that in the natural spoken language there were also syllables of intermediate length, as in the first syllable of words such as τέκνα /''tékna''/ 'children', where a short vowel is followed by a plosive + liquid combination; but for poetic purposes such syllables were treated as either long or short. Thus in the opening speech of the play ''Oedipus Tyrannus'', Sophocles treats the first syllable of τέκνα /''tékna''/ as long in line 1, but as short in line 6. Different kinds of poetry use different patterns of long and short syllables, known as meters (UK: metres). For example, the epic poems of Homer were composed using the pattern , – u u ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Acronym
An acronym is a type of abbreviation consisting of a phrase whose only pronounced elements are the initial letters or initial sounds of words inside that phrase. Acronyms are often spelled with the initial Letter (alphabet), letter of each word in all caps with no punctuation. For some, an initialism or alphabetism connotes this general meaning, and an ''acronym'' is a subset with a narrower definition; an acronym is pronounced as a word rather than as a sequence of letters. In this sense, ''NASA'' () is an acronym, but ''United States, USA'' () is not. The broader sense of ''acronym'', ignoring pronunciation, is its original meaning and in common use. . Dictionary and style-guide editors dispute whether the term ''acronym'' can be legitimately applied to abbreviations which are not pronounced as words, and they do not agree on acronym space (punctuation), spacing, letter case, casing, and punctuation. The phrase that the acronym stands for is called its . The of an acron ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sandhi
Sandhi ( ; , ) is any of a wide variety of sound changes that occur at morpheme or word boundaries. Examples include fusion of sounds across word boundaries and the alteration of one sound depending on nearby sounds or the grammatical function of the adjacent words. Sandhi belongs to morphophonology. Sandhi occurs in many languages, e.g. in the phonology of Indian languages (especially Sanskrit, Tamil, Sinhala, Telugu, Marathi, Hindi, Pali, Kannada, Bengali, Assamese and Malayalam). Many dialects of British English show linking and intrusive R. A subset of sandhi called tone sandhi more specifically refers to tone changes between words and syllables. This is a common feature of many tonal languages such as Burmese and Chinese. Types Internal and external sandhi Sandhi can be either: * internal, at morpheme boundaries within words, such as ''syn- + pathy'': ''sympathy'', or * external, at word boundaries, such as the pronunciation "''tem books''" for ''ten books' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Visarga
In Sanskrit phonology, Visarga () is the name of the voiceless glottal fricative, written in Devanagari as '' . It was also called, equivalently, ' by earlier grammarians. The word ''visarga'' () literally means "sending forth, discharge". Visarga is an allophone of and in pausa (at the end of an utterance). Since is a common inflectional suffix (of nominative singular, second person singular, etc.), visarga appears frequently in Sanskrit texts. In the traditional order of Sanskrit sounds, visarga and anusvāra appear between vowels and stop consonants. The precise pronunciation of visarga in Vedic texts may vary between Śākhās. Some pronounce a slight echo of the preceding vowel after the aspiration: will be pronounced , and will be pronounced . Visarga is not to be confused with colon. Types The visarga is commonly found in writing, resembling the punctuation mark of colon or as two tiny circles one above the other. This form is retained by most Indic scripts ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Anusvara
Anusvara ( ; , , ), also known as Bindu ( ; ), is a symbol used in many Indic scripts to mark a type of nasal sound, typically transliterated or in standards like ISO 15919 and IAST. Depending on its location in a word and the language for which it is used, its exact pronunciation can vary. In the context of ancient Sanskrit, ''anusvara'' is the name of the particular nasal sound itself, regardless of written representation. Sanskrit In Vedic Sanskrit, the anusvāra () was an allophonic (derived) nasal sound. The exact nature of the sound has been subject to debate. The material in the various ancient phonetic treatises points towards different phonetic interpretations, and these discrepancies have historically been attributed to either differences in the description of the same pronunciation or to dialectal or diachronic variation. In a 2013 reappraisal of the evidence, Cardona concludes that these reflect real dialectal differences. The environments in which the anusv ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pratishakhyas
Pratishakhya ( '), also known as Parsada ('), are Vedic-era manuals devoted to the precise and consistent pronunciation of words. These works were critical to the preservation of the Vedic texts, as well as the accurate ritual recitations and analyses of the Vedas, particularly when isolated words interact after they have been joined in ''sandhi'' procedures. Each Vedic school (''parisad'', or ''parsad'') and geographic branch ('' sakha'') developed their own manuals, explaining why they have come to be called ''parsada'' or ''pratisakhya''. The manuals are parts of the Shiksha Vedanga: works dealing with the phonetic aspects of the Sanskrit language used in the Vedas. Each Veda has a ''pratishakhya'' for each school. Many ''pratishakhyas'' have survived into the modern age, and, according to Hartmut Scharfe, all except one (''Taittiriya pratisakhya'') are based upon "recitation of isolated words". Pratishakhyas begin with word-for-word recitation, and then supply rules for th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Shiksha
''Shiksha'' (, ) is a Sanskrit word, which means "instruction, lesson, learning, study of skill".Sir Monier Monier-Williams A DkSanskrit-English Dictionary: Etymologically and Philologically Arranged with Special Reference to Cognate Indo-European Languages, Oxford University Press (Reprinted: Motilal Banarsidass), , page 1070 It also refers to one of the six Vedangas, or limbs of Vedic studies, on phonetics and phonology in Sanskrit. ''Shiksha'' is the field of Vedic study of sound, focussing on the letters of the Sanskrit alphabet, accent, quantity, stress, melody and rules of euphonic combination of words during a Vedic recitation. Each ancient Vedic school developed this field of ''Vedanga'', and the oldest surviving phonetic textbooks are the '' Pratishakyas''. The ''Paniniya-Shiksha'' and ''Naradiya-Shiksha'' are examples of extant ancient manuscripts of this field of Vedic studies. ''Shiksha'' is the oldest and the first auxiliary discipline to the Vedas, maintained ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mora (linguistics)
A mora (plural ''morae'' or ''moras''; often symbolized μ) is a smallest unit of timing, equal to or shorter than a syllable, that theoretically or perceptually exists in some spoken languages in which phonetic length (such as vowel length) matters significantly. For example, in the Japanese language, the name of the city '' Ōsaka'' () consists of three syllables (''O-sa-ka'') but four morae (), since the first syllable, ''Ō'', is pronounced with a long vowel (the others being short). Thus, a short vowel contains one mora and is called ''monomoraic'', while a long vowel contains two and is called ''bimoraic''. Extra-long syllables with three morae (''trimoraic'') are relatively rare. Such metrics based on syllables are also referred to as syllable weight. In Japanese, certain consonants also stand on their own as individual morae and thus are monomoraic. The term comes from the Latin word for 'linger, delay', which was also used to translate the Greek word : ('time') in it ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
