The Cambridge Introduction to Sanskrit

A verb, broadly speaking, is a word that expresses an action (such as English she runs, I am singing, they laughed).

This section will give an overview of (1) what kinds of information Sanskrit verb forms can express and (2) how they express them. This involves introducing some new concepts and terminology. It will be helpful to read this section more than once: when you have read everything through and looked at the examples at the bottom, the first paragraphs may make more sense than when you first read them.

THE CATEGORIES OF THE SANSKRIT VERB

We say that the Sanskrit verb is ‘marked for’ – that is, uses different forms to express – the following grammatical categories: person and number; tense, mood and voice.

In the category of person, Sanskrit and English alike differentiate between first, second and third. The first person refers to the speaker (‘I’); the second to the person spoken to (‘you’); and the third person to someone or something spoken about (‘he/she/it’). Again like English, Sanskrit has a singular and a plural number: the singular refers to just one thing or person (‘I’, ‘she’, ‘the chocolate cake’ etc.), while the plural refers to several (‘we’, ‘they’, ‘the cats’ etc.). Yet unlike English, Sanskrit also has a dual number, used to refer to exactly two of something; this should be translated into English either exactly as e.g. ‘we two, the two of us’, ‘the two of them’, ‘the two brothers’, or simply as a plural ‘we’, ‘they’, ‘the brothers’.

Tense is the term for time as it is expressed in verbs. Once again like English, Sanskrit verbs can refer to the present (such as ‘I run’), and are then said to stand in the present tense; they can refer to the future (‘I will run’); or they can refer to the past (‘I ran’).