Sanskrit Grammar

Rating:
Summary: A classic
Review: Fresh, readable, and a treasure. I used this book at the University of Washington and it is as great as ever.

Rating:
Summary: A classic
Review: Fresh, readable, and a treasure. I used this book at the University of Washington and it is as great as ever.

Rating:
Summary: Exhaustive and well organized reference work
Review: We have been using Whitney's Grammar in addition to Whitney's Roots and the Lanman Reader for the purposes of learning Sanskrit this year. Our professor teaches from a historical linguistic perspective for which this book is fairly well suited. This book is most remarkable for its extremely well organized format and exhaustive treatment of the forms. The inclusion of Vedic forms is very nice. The Sanskrit Reader by Charles R. Lanman is the perfect complement to this reference grammar. The excellent notes in Lanman's reader refer the student to Whitney's Grammar, the vocabulary is helpful and the stories are delightful. Whitney's Grammar is a must for a thorough grasp of the forms though.

Rating:
Summary: Exhaustive and well organized reference work
Review: We have been using Whitney's Grammar in addition to Whitney's Roots and the Lanman Reader for the purposes of learning Sanskrit this year. Our professor teaches from a historical linguistic perspective for which this book is fairly well suited. This book is most remarkable for its extremely well organized format and exhaustive treatment of the forms. The inclusion of Vedic forms is very nice. The Sanskrit Reader by Charles R. Lanman is the perfect complement to this reference grammar. The excellent notes in Lanman's reader refer the student to Whitney's Grammar, the vocabulary is helpful and the stories are delightful. Whitney's Grammar is a must for a thorough grasp of the forms though.

Rating:
Summary: Classic work in the field
Review: Whitney is the prototype for Sanskrit grammars in English. I suspect the author had in mind Allen and Greenough's Latin grammar or H.W. Smythe's Greek grammar when designing the numeric scheme for each point, theme, and paradigm. It is a very useful system of notation for referencing from other works.

I can't honestly see going through this lesson by lesson with most students who are not dedicated to long term research in the field and want to begin reading Sanskrit without learning every arcane morphological exception. This book serves as an indispensible reference work by including Vedic forms as well as accentation in the paradigms, which I would imagine is more authoritative than Coulson's simple rules. The book is long and comprehensive, and like Smythe and Greenough, has gained the respect of being "the" authoritative source. It is a wonderful book for learning troublesome concepts correctly and more fully than several of the shorter grammars treat them.