Error Analysis of Modern Sanskrit Literature

Abstract

Error Analysis in Modern Sanskrit Literature This work aims to examine the way in which errors in Modern Sanskrit usage are viewed by traditional Sanskrit scholarship. The work is a part of a bigger project to edit, annotate and discuss the three main modern works in this regard, namely, Vāgvyavahārādarśa and Śabdāpaśabdaviveka both by Charudev Shastri and Śuddhikaumudī by Janardan Hegde. All these three works put together, give us a collection of more than 1000 sentences that are deemed errorneous by the authors. The aim is to classify all these data under different heads and present them in the form of a tables like the ones added to this work in form of the Appendices. While listing erroneous sentences, the authors of these works also discuss the causes of errors which are very important to us. The methodology in analysing these works relies mainly in comprehending the discussions which explain the errors and to fathom the reasonings involved. The idea is to analyse these reasonings and arguments in as free and independent a manner as possible. For the purpose of the present work, we focus only on one of the three texts mentioned above, namely Vāgvyavahārādarśa. The Vāgvyavahārādarśa is divided into two parts. The second half of the work comprises of a corpus of 655 sentences deemed to be erroneous by the author, mainly from modern Sanskrit literature. This work attempts to discuss these errors in detail from a modern grammarian’s outlook and attempts to come up with a sound scheme for classifying them.