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The Rig Veda

in Sanskrit

Notes

This text was deposited some time ago in the RLIN by Robert Khan. There is no date for its completion. Rutgers thereafter forwarded the text to the Oxford Text Archive (OTA), where it was "found." They can be reached at archive@vax.ox.ac.uk The edition used was that of Aufrecht, 1877. Apparently, according to the RLIN, the edition was compiled by H. S. Ananthanarayana and W. P. Lehman. It is a "research-only" text. Reputedly, it was verified against Grassmann, 1876-77.

Ananthanarayana and Lehman's achievement is, as with any encoding of a text--especially a non-roman script language, quite momentous. Nonetheless, whether from their edition, their text-entry/storage protocol, or other factors, the text was significantly corrupt. Major sections were missing, others completely chaotic in their order, and the whole scheme of representing Devanagari in ASCII characters had to be deciphered.

Subsequently John Robert Gardner, at University of Iowa, collaborated with Avinash Sothaye in cross-checking this edited version. They employed Max Mueller, Aufrecht, and Barend Van Nooten's Metrically Restored RV (Harvard University Press, #50).

Credit should go next to Kim Poulsen, who found the text, Nandu Abhyankar for initiating its conversion, and Avinash Chopde for performing the conversion to ITRANS. ITRANS is the wetnurse of proper multi-lingual computing in non- roman scripts. Saving the scholar or enthusiast the trouble of learning a new keyboard map and keystrokes designed for torture, ITRANS uses regular ASCII alphabet characters to represent, phonetically, the various phonetics of the Sanskrit (and many others) alphabet (s). Nonetheless, some of these characters are less intuitive than others- R^I for the "r" svara, so this is transcribed "R," and several other conventions which, while familiar on the net, are not effective for the ITRANS coding. ITRANS proper allows machine conversion from simple ASCII to full Devanagari per Velthuis' fonts.

Lastly, the text was converted to HTML in 1999 at sacred-texts.com using a C program; in June 2004 additional programming was performed to convert it to Unicode. N.B.: the following hymns for which Sanskrit transliterations are available were apparently not translated by Griffith: 2:44-48, 3:63-69, and 6:76-84.