Beginning Sanskrit II
Dermot Killingley
University of Newcastle–upon-Tyne
Volume II of Beginning Sanskrit, containing Lessons 23 to 47, continues building on the foundations of phonology, grammar and vocabulary that have been laid in Volume I. It begins with five lessons on the Devanagari script, starting with the consonant characters and gradually introducing additional features. From the fifth lesson onwards, each lesson contains a story in Devan~g~ri script, giving practice in the material that has been learnt in that and the earlier lessons. The study of grammar resumes with the inflection of adjectives and pronominal adjectives. Feminine nouns have hitherto been used only in the nominative, but the case forms of these nouns are introduced half-way through the volume, incidentally giving greater variety to the stories by allowing fuller roles to female characters. Once the inflection of the main class of adjectives has been mastered, the student is introduced to perfective participles, which are inflected in the same way. The consonant-stem noun inflection is then introduced, leading to the similarly inflected progressive (conventionally called 'present') participle. The dual forms, which have not been used in Volume I, are introduced in this volume. Various important syntactic features, including the passive construction which is very widely used in Sanskrit, are introduced in the course of the lessons.
The stories, which are an integral part of the graded method followed in this course, are longer than in Volume I, and become progressively closer to their originals. Each lesson ends with exercises designed to enable the student to produce correct Sanskrit sentences using the material that has been learnt. The volume ends with a cumulative vocabulary which includes all the words listed in Volume I.
ISBN 9783895862007. LINCOM Language Coursebooks 02. 242pp.1997.
