Learning Journal # 12
This journal talks about the tatpurushah, a type of Sanskrit compound. Sanskrit is in love with compound words. We’re familiar with these in English, but Sanskrit takes it way farther, to the point where you basically can have limitlessly long words. There’s some poems that have words that take up dozens of lines because the compound rules were enacted to keep on adding adjective to noun to sound poetic. Anyways, the tatpurushah is basically a rule for creating compounds. An English example is “singer-songwriter”. In Sanskrit, it’s seen in the combination of “krsno hastah” (black hand) into “krshnahastah”. It involves a lot of samdhi changes (shifts in vowels to make a word easier to say). There’s pretty standardized rules though, so all it takes it practice to be able to recognize and form the tatpurushah words.
Ex. “sundaraa ashvaah” (beautiful horse) → sundaraashvaah
“Niilaani phalaani” → nilaaphalani
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