Sanskrit In Computing

http://bhashaindia.com/patrons/Sanskrit/computing.aspx

By Sonia Pardesi Published on 17th June 2005
Introduction
The Indian culture, apart from consisting of a richness in tradition, can trace it’s roots to some of the most ancient languages to have evolved and existed in the world. Sanskrit being one of them, a classical language of India, is also one of the oldest languages of the world or rather the oldest language to have been recorded. Its evolution began with the Rig Veda (an ancient Sanskrit text composed around BC 2000), the Upanishads, Sama Veda, and Yajur Veda etc. The Aryan language, the Indic branch of the Indo-European family, came to India with the Aryan tribe. Through this language, have some of the various existing languages like Hindi, Sanskrit, Sindhi, Marathi, and Bengali, Assamese etc. evolved. Thus, Sanskrit belonged to this era. Early Sanskrit was known as Vedic Sanskrit (BC 2000-500; the Vedas were written sometime during this period), whilst Classical Sanskrit was the spoken language. It was the spoken language of only a few learned classes and was not for the common man.
Sanskrit, being the quintessential language of the Devanagari script (Hindu scriptures are written in Devanagari), has accompanying languages like Konkani, Hindi, Marathi etc. which are also written in the same script. The Devanagari script can be further traced from the ‘Brahmi’ language (an ancient language of India). Sanskrit has become a Scheduled language (A Schedule) and it belongs to the VIII Schedule of the Indian Constitution (of regional languages), although it is hardly spoken today.
Besides being an ancient language, sustaining itself in the modern world, and spreading far and wide, Sanskrit has taken a step further by achieving a breakthrough and being initiated into the world of computing since the last few years. It not only has been developed in the form of fonts and types, but has also facilitated scripting. Through this, it has been made available on the Web, with a number of websites being conceptualized on it.
Let’s look at Sanskrit via computing and its development
Devanagari (a syllabic alphabet consisting of consonants with vowel signs), being a descendant of the Brahmi script, has evolved into a highly cursive script. Sanskrit uses this script. In the past, encoding for Indian languages was not a major issue for news and information sites as they had their own fonts to download, but it used to be a long process. Now with the introduction of the Unicode standard (Utf-8 for Devanagari), it has become a more simple and quick process to supply and receive information in one’s own language. So emphasis has been laid upon developing these Unicode fonts and web pages. The Devanagari Encoding consists of codes that allow browsers and screen readers to process data in the appropriate language. The letters in codes are always in lower case. For e.g. Sanskrit might have a code like ‘sa’. Software companies, Microsoft being one of them, have introduced Devanagari keyboards for Sanskrit, Hindi, and Marathi. These have to be installed from the Windows system disk. Since 1990, encodings for Sanskrit have been developed and modified. At around this time an encoding for Classical Sanskrit and Classical Sanskrit Extended (CSX) was developed by John Smith, Dominick Wujastyk and other Indologists. In 1998, the CSX was modified to CSX+, which is still being used by Indologists (e.g. for the electronic files of the BORI edition of the Mahabharata).
As the CSX+ encoding was based on a particular code page, the old fonts were compatible with only the old Windows. Therefore, a new True type Font with the old CSX+ encoding was designed. This font (URW Palladio CSX+) takes care of all the internal aspects by the newer version of Windows.
An Indic True Type Font Package has been introduced by Elman Kniprath, which comprises of 15 True Type Fonts and a Microsoft Word for Windows DOT file that covers these languages. Sanskrit being one of them is also subjected to Phonetic Transcription. The old versions of 1.0 and 2.0 were incompatible with Unicode earlier, but the new versions 3.0 of these fonts are partly compatible with Unicode.
Books on Sanskrit have been advertised on websites pertaining to the language. E.g. the Rigveda Samhita, (a complete text in the Devanagari script), which has been written by, Prof. R.L.Kashyap and Prof. S. Sadagopan (published in 1998 by the Sri Aurobindo Kapali Sastry Institute of Vedic Culture) is a masterpiece of Indian Devanagari typography, thereby assisting Sanskrit students in their study.
Certain files are also available on Sanskrit websites to be downloaded by Sanskrit students on Rig Veda hymns. The web also promotes and encourages individuals to participate by reviewing, encoding, spreading the word about the particular site and implementing the available resources to make languages like Sanskrit easier (e.g. www.sanskritweb.net). It also consists of FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions), Sanskrit Link Pages and Mailing Lists-> where lively discussions take place in both Sanskrit and English languages. The topics discussed, may be Mahabharata shlokas posted with meanings, grammar, humor etc. In addition to this, the websites also provide tips on how to go about formats for printing documents (e.g. postscript and PDF [Acrobat]), and downloading fonts (from processing tools and also using the Itranslator). Certain sites also provide additional Sanskrit & scriptural documents available in Devnagari. One can also shop on these sites, which sell, audio/video cassettes on Sanskrit stotras.
The grammatical & phonetical know-how of languages like Hindi, Sanskrit, Konkani, etc available on the web facilitate user convenience by providing information on font usage. In the grammatical context Sanskrit, is a language, which brings out the differences in the meaning conveyed by the noun. This is made possible through the use of Suffixes, which distinguish each case. Due to this, Sanskrit packs a lot of information in a sentence. Thus, this shows that Sanskrit imparts much more information than what one sees from its grammatical construction. There are eight ways/cases of using a noun that have been identified in various languages of the world. In these languages the noun remains unchanged, while in Sanskrit & some ancient languages of the world like Greek & Latin the noun is modified with a specific suffix for each case. Primers generally address audiences in India where most languages are similar to Sanskrit. Therefore in traditional Sanskrit primers one is directly introduced to the cases.
Thus, the above explanation depicts how Sanskrit has been made easily available in the computing world thereby enabling easy access to information, and helping Sanskrit users find a simple way of processing & accessing data.