This volume constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the First and Second International Symposia on Sanskrit Computational Linguistics, held in Rocquencourt, France, in October 2007 and in Providence, RI, USA, in May 2008 respectively. The 11 revised full papers of the first and the 12 revised papers of the second symposium presented with an introduction and a keynote talk were carefully reviewed and selected from the lectures given at both events. The papers address several topics such as the structure of the Paninian grammatical system, computational linguistics, lexicography, lexical databases, formal description of sanskrit grammar, phonology and morphology, machine translation, philology, and OCR.

This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Sanskrit Computational Linguistics, held in New Delhi, India, in December 2010. The 18 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers can be categorized under following broad areas such as phonology and speech technology; morphology and shallow parsing; syntax, semantics and parsing; lexical resources, annotation and search; machine translation and ambiguity resolution.

With nearly a quarter of the world’s population, members of at least five major language families plus several putative language isolates, South Asia is a fascinating arena for linguistic investigations, whether comparative-historical linguistics, studies of language contact and multilingualism, or general linguistic theory. This volume provides a state-of-the-art survey of linguistic research on the languages of South Asia, with contributions by well-known experts. Focus is both on what has been accomplished so far and on what remains unresolved or controversial and hence offers challenges for future research. In addition to covering the languages, their histories, and their genetic classification, as well as phonetics/phonology, morphology, syntax, and sociolinguistics, the volume provides special coverage of contact and convergence, indigenous South Asian grammatical traditions, applications of modern technology to South Asian languages, and South Asian writing systems. An appendix offers a classified listing of major sources and resources, both digital/online and printed.

The ancient Indian linguistic tradition has been influential in the development of modern linguistics, yet is not well known among modern Western linguists. This unique book addresses this gap by providing an accessible introduction to the Indian linguistic tradition, covering its most important achievements and ideas, and assessing its impact on Western linguistics. It shows how ancient Indian methods of linguistic analysis can be applied to a number of topical issues across the disciplines of modern linguistics-spanning phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and computational linguistics. Exploring the parallels, differences, and connections in how both traditions treat major issues in linguistic science, it sheds new light on a number of topical issues in linguistic theory. Synthesizing existing major work on both sides, it makes Indian linguistics accessible to Western linguists for the first time, as well as making ideas from mainstream linguistics more accessible to students and scholars of Indian grammar.

About the Book The National Mission for Manuscripts was established in February 2003 by the Ministry of Culture, Government of India with the purpose of locating, documenting, preserving and disseminating the knowledge content of India’s handwritten manuscripts, said to be the largest collection of handwritten knowledge documents in the world. While looking ahead to reconnect with the knowledge of the past, the Mission is in the process of trying to re-contextualize the knowledge contained in manuscripts for the present and the future generations. The Mission launched a lecture series titled “Tattvabodha” in January 2005. Since then, a monthly lecture series is organized in Delhi and other academic centres all over the country. Tattvabodha has established itself as a forum for intellectual discourse, debate and discussion. Eminent scholars representing different aspects of India’s knowledge systems have addressed and interacted with highly receptive audiences over the course of the past few years. This volume, seventh in the series, consists of twelve papers — eleven in English and one in Hindi — presented by well-known and upcoming scholars in different Tattvabodha lectures organized by the Mission. The volume finds its merit in varied subjects across Indian knowledge system such as Accessing Manuscripts in the Digital Age; Physics in Ancient Indian Knowledge System; Critical and Comparative Review of the Principal Upaniṣads; The Concept of Śiva in Śiva-rahasya; The Rāmacaritam of Ciraman; Editing of Ayurvedic Manuscripts; The Dravyanāmākara Nighaṇṭu; Tribal Heritage and Indigenous Philosophical Wisdom of Odisha; Glimpses of Archival Manuscripts; Gāndhārī: A Key Mother Figure of the Mahābhārata; Depiction of Indian Culture in Sanskrit Inscriptions of Cambodia; Phāsī Kathā-Paramparā aura Ārabyayāminī.

Computer Processing of Sanskrit Nominal Inflections: Methods and Implementation is the result of Research and Development (R&D) at the Master of Philosophy (MPhil) level at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. The title of the dissertation was “Machine Recognition and Morphological Analysis of Subanta-Padas.” The work, which is based on the reverse engineering implementation of Panini’s Sanskrit Grammar, brings together new and original studies in the area of computational linguistics, language technology and natural language processing with reference to parsing Sanskrit nominal inflections. On the surface level, Panini has defined rules in a forward looking generative fashion which makes reverse analysis necessary for parsing. Since parsing inflections is the first basic step towards complete analysis, the present work has relevance for any larger system that may evolve in future.