Learning Journal # 8
Sandhi, Sandhi, Sandhi. This will be the bane of my existence.
Sanskrit has so many rules!
Sandhi basically refers to the vowel and consonant shifts that occur when certain letters are next to each other. It’s kinda like how a/an works in English, or how le/l’ works in French. The vowels will be modified or dropped to become easier to say, or to flow better. Most of the time these changes make sense, but there’s just so many of them! There are both external rules (changes between words) and internal rules (changes within a word). A common rule would be that no two vowels should be next to each other.
There’s a lot of changes that I find make it harder to locate the case or gender/number of a word. For example, a rule is that in front of any vowel except ‘a’, the ending ‘h’ is dropped. Ex. narah icchati → nara icchati. Then you just keep adding rules for each vowel and type of consonant. It’s definitely going to take a lot of memorization!
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