Noun Declensions -अ, -इ, and -उ Stems Posted
Starting with the noun declensions, I have begun to put up the tables. So far, a stems, i stems, and u stems are up. The sources for these and all the following tables are both Hart’s A Rapid Sanskrit Method and Whitney’s Sanskrit Grammar. (I forgot to mention in my first post that Whitney’s book from the late 19th century–I believe–does actually use a lot of Devanāgarī, but it is not an easy reference to use for quickly accessing tables, and the font is peculiar in places.) The tables were copied directly from my notes without proofing them against these original sources, which eventually intend to do. In my use of these tables, I have already found a number of mistakes. So, I am sure there are more. Assume that any mistakes found were introduced by me.
It is a fair amount of work to get the display of the Sanskrit right. Perhaps I have to amend my statement that it is relatively easy to represent Devanāgarī in a digital environment. It’s easier in word processors than Word Press (WP), though I don’t think it is anything particular to that content management system (CMS). It just required some tweaking to get it right. Now, I have a template. It should go faster. Copying the tables requires a bit of a work around. So I don’t have to recreate each table and copy the contents of each cell, I tried to copy the tables in toto using the WYSIWYG editor. However, this copies more of the word processor’s styling than desired. (I’m using Open Office.) The main issue was the rows had too much spacing in all directions. So to get around this, I copy the tables into a blank spreadsheet, then copy the table from the spreadsheet and paste it into the Word Press page’s WYSIWYG editor. This eliminated the extra space.
In terms of fonts, I had to use specific CSS styling, which thankfully this Word Press installation allows you to do. Stricter settings on the environment would forbid it, but I’m glad it’s available. I tried to choose a font for the Mac (DevenagariMT) and for the PC (Arial MS Unicode). It might just be defaulting to Arial MS Unicode even on the Mac. I have only done a little digging into what looks the best in the display of these tables. So these choices may change. But that would be a lot of work. So probably not. They seem fine to me, though any feedback is more than appreciated.
For markup geeks, the code I use for the tables is to wrap them in a <div> with a “style” attribute”:
<div style="font-family: 'Arial Unicode MS', 'DevanagariMT'; font-size: 1.25em;">
The increased font size makes it more readable to me. For Sanskrit embedded among English prose, I use <span> tags without the font size:
<span style="font-family: 'Arial Unicode MS', 'DevanagariMT';">
More tables will follow as time permits.