Contact

If you have questions about The Clay Sanskrit Library, please send your email to: theclaysanskritlibrary@gmail.com

Technical Help

Documents on this site are provided in Portable Document Format (.pdf). To read documents in this format you may need to download and install the free Acrobat reader, if you do not have it installed already.

Click on here which takes you to the Adobe Web site from where you can download the latest version of the Acrobat reader for free. (Apple Mac OS X users: You can open PDFs using the ‘Preview’ application which is preinstalled.)

Problems Viewing Special Characters on this Website

If you are using an antiquated web browser (including Internet Explorer 5.2) that does not support Unicode (the current standard universal character set), then that explains why you are experiencing difficulties viewing the especial characters on this website.

Thus the following word, for example, will appear to contain question marks rather than the diacritics regularly used in transliterating Sanskrit: saṃskṛtabhāṣā
If this is your situation, may we advise you to avail yourself of a new browser like Mozilla, the free, modern, browser that is available in different versions to run on every kind of operating system (Macintosh, Microsoft, Linux etc.).

If you do not have any suitable Unicode fonts installed on your computer, you will need to download one in order to view this website’s special characters. For best readability we recommend different fonts for different platforms.

Mac/Linux: Gentium (zipped, 968kb)
Windows: Times Ext Roman (.exe file, 800kb, by courtesy of Bahá’í Computer & Communication Association)

Windows users can also use the same Gentium font, but it may look very rugged in Windows environment, especially on laptop LCDs. Windows XP users who nevertheless wish to use Gentium can switch on and adjust font smoothing with Microsoft’s ClearType Tuner online. Simply go to this page using Internet Explorer and follow the steps. It can only be activated using IE, but once activated, you will see its effect system-wide, including in other web browsers.
Alternatively, you can download ClearType Tuner PowerToy, the same tool that can be installed locally and run from Control Panel.

Should you desire to know more about the different Unicode fonts, we recommend the annotated list (with links to download individual fonts) provided at: http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/.

Help on Sanskrit Transcription and Pronunciation

If you are at an early stage of learning Sanskrit or new to the CSL style of transliterating the Sanskrit text, you will no doubt find the below two files useful. Both documents are included in our volumes.

CSL Front Matter (6pp, 1.3mb) This document describes how we transliterate the Sanskrit text in the Roman alphabet and includes a guide to pronunciation. It also explains our system of representing phonetic fusion (sandhi).

Sandhi Table (1p, 808kb) A must-have aid for all learners of Sanskrit for identifying word-breaks and beginnings of words. The table systematically lays out possible combinations of phonetic fusion (sandhi) of adjacent words in Sanskrit.