kRdanta-rUpa-mAla lookup

Goal

Produce data for digital dictionaries to easily lookup major kRdanta forms of all verb-roots using the kRdanta-rUpamAla data (already digitized, needs to fleshed out and filled up as described below). Essentially, we would need to get a learned vyAkaraNa vidvAn to fill up this spreadsheet by looking at the original text.

Importance

Sanskrit is the Hindu liturgical language. Often times, a scholar or student needs to look up correct forms arising out of verbal roots to correctly understand (or compose) sanskrit text. Example: to understand विष्ण॑वे निखुर्य॒पाय॒ स्वाहा᳚ , one might wonder if निखुर्य is नि + खुर् + ल्यप्.

Standard dictionaries mostly don’t provide this information (Just as simple English dictionaries wouldn’t have cared to include “going” or “gone” in their word list). So, one needs mastery over vyAkaraNa to deduce such forms (which are a LOT due to the richness and flexibility of sanskrit) - and this is very hard to achieve for most people. Looking up correct forms is far easier.

Knowing this, our predecessors have produced works such as kRdanta-rUpamAla - albeit they were designed for use as reference texts, before the advent of smart-phones and computers - so they had indirection like: “Same forms as in the case of this other root”, and table structure (defined just once in the beginning of the book). Now, it is far easier to look words up on the phone - but one has to fix the aforementioned shortcomings.

Resources needed

Each verbal root gives rise to around 60 forms in the text. There are 2062 roots. Allotting 30 minutes attention per root, one arrives at 1031 hours. I’ll get it done by a learned gentleman I’ve been employing for much of the past year. He’s very capable (I will supervise), and paid by the hour. Estimated cost is 2.5L.

Prior experience

We’ve published and distributed hundreds of dictionaries (including a primitive form of this kRdanta rUpa mAla) as part of the https://github.com/indic-dict/ repositories.