Boston College

Department of Slavic & Eastern Languages
Department of Classical Studies

SL327 / CL 332 Sanskrit (S,3)
MWF1 Lyons 208

Course description
Textbooks
Course requirements

The grammar of the classical language of India, supplemented through reading selections from the classical literature and an introductory study of comparative Indo-Iranian linguistics.

No prerequisites, but familiarity with an inflectional language (e.g. Latin, Greek, Russian, German) is helpful.

Offered triennially.

This course will require faithful attendance at and partcipation in lectures and recitations as well as 9-10 hours per week of outside study per week.

Principal textbooks.

Coulson, Michael

Complete Sanskrit. A Teach Yourself guide. Revised by Richard Gombrich and James Benson.

(McGraw-Hill) New York, 2011 [3ed]

ISBN13: 978-007175266-4

Lanman, Charles Rockwell

A Sanskrit reader. Text, vocabulary and notes.

(Harvard UP) Cambridge MA, 1884.

[Still in print and also in numerous pirate editions, this remains the Sanskrit reader.
Be sure that you have all three parts (text, vocabulary, notes), usually cheaper in one volume, but you may find advatages in having three separate parts to avoid constant flipping back and forth.

Whitney, William Dwight

Sanskrit grammar, including both the classical language and the older dialects of Veda and Brahmana.

(Harvard UP) Cambridge MA, 1889.

Still in print and also in numerous pirate editions, this remains the Sanskrit grammar reference in English and a model of how to write a grammar.

Whitney, William Dwight

The roots, verb forms, and primary derivatives of the Sanskrit verb...

(American Oriental Society) New Haven CT, 1945(r/Leipzig 1885).

I shall also post a listing of helpful references for this course at our course BbVista site: http://cms.bc.edu.
Your BbVista ID is the same as your BC userName.
Your password is the same as your BC password (e.g. as for Agora).
You can also access this site through Agora and BCPortal.

The Seminar library in the Department of Slavic & Eastern Languages (Lyons 210) houses a useful non-circulating reference collection for linguistics and some Sanskrit and Indo-Iranian reference materials. The card catalogue is being prepared for on-line distribution.

We shall be progressing in Coulson at better than one lesson per week and will begin reading from Lanman's Reader around mid-semester, beginning with the Nalopākhyānam and finishing, if all goes well, with a few hymns from the Veda.
By the end of semester you should be in a position to read any standard text (however slowly) with the aid of a dictionary and reference grammar.

Try not to fall behind in preparation, for herein lies the greatest peril.

• Keep moving,
• invest your time well,
• ask questions,
• and always spend time reviewing old material before moving on to a new assigment.

I expect you to have prepared, but if, for some reason, you have not, you should still come to class but let me know beforehand not to call on you.
Otherwise you will incur a zero for ‘absence’, as against an F for ‘unprepared’.
Also, if you offer a plausible excuse, I put the F or 0 in parentheses and only average it in if too many appear.
Note: for all exercises F = 55%, but an absence = 0%

Become well acquainted with and follow the university's policy on academic integrity as posted at http://www.bc.edu/integrity

I will assume that you have already had your lunch and that you will not disturb class decorum by eating or drinking during the lecture.

I consider the use of laptops and music players and PDAs and mobile phones as out of place during the lecture.
If you have a disability or special need requiring the use of an electronic device, please speak with me about this.
You will actually find that taking notes by hand and then transcribing them later gives you a better overview of the material than typing away during class (and it avoids the temptation to read eMail or web-surf).
Also, I have no objection if you want to record the lecture unobtrusively.