Hyderabad: Professor Peter Scharf of the international faculty of the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad (IIITH) has created a digital Sanskrit Library at IIITH. Professor Scharf is a Sanskrit scholar, and Paninian grammar expert.
The digital library will make it easier for researchers to access original Sanskrit manuscripts, texts, and lexical resources.
Explaining the process, Prof Scharfe said, “The first project we had was to take digital texts and digital dictionaries and integrate them with linguistic software. This would help people read the texts more easily. If the sandhi (interword phonetic changes) in Sanskrit had been analy-sed, they could click on a word, and a morphological analyser would present the possible morphological analyses and corresponding stems, and you could click on the stem and look up the word in a digital dictionary."
He collaborated with Gerard Huet, a computer scientist in Paris, who was creating a Sanskrit parser at his Sanskrit Heritage site.
Prof Scharf was introduced to Sanskrit at the age of 15 when his brother returned from a teacher-training course in the Transcendental Meditation programme (TM) founded by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and taught his whole family to practise it.
