Samskrta translates as "made together," or regulated, as opposed to the vernacular, Prakrit, whose name means "natural." Scholars in northern India first synthesised Sanskrit, as it is called in the West, from local tongues around 1500 BCE, and it attained its current form around 300 BCE. Although parallel development and regional traditions make generalisation difficult, academic practices kept most written forms of Sanskrit more or less mutually coherent throughout its long golden age. Often called "the Latin of the East," Sanskrit once had auxiliary value throughout Asia and spawned modern languages such as Hindi and Urdu. Passkey to Eastern cultures, sacred to several religions, Sanskrit is perhaps the most nearly alive of the "dead" languages.
Hinduism and Buddhism are the religions most often associated with Sanskrit in the West. The first produced most of the Sanskrit literary works widely known in the West, while the second, with its tradition of missionary zeal, carried Sanskrit as far afield as Korea, Japan, and Mongolia. Most of the literature produced within China's sphere of influence is in Buddhist Sanskrit, a variation on the Indic tradition, written in kanji-based characters. Sanskrit has also been written in several other alphabets in the course of its long reign, including Brahmi, Arabic, and Roman. Today, the distinctive Devanagari system, developed by Indian scholars during the classical period, is considered standard.
Like all who speak or study non-Roman traditions, Sanskritists must overcome the Internet's bias toward the English character set to use their language online. Uploading blocks of text as graphics is the simplest tactic, but a pain for anyone who wants to search or manipulate the text. Various Roman transliteration schemes have been developed, such as Harvard-Kyoto, but Sanskrit's unique diacritical demands complicate this already anaemic solution. Diacriticals are not the only challenge for software developers, either. Devanagari characters hang from an incorporated upper line, rather than resting on an invisible lower line as European alphabets do. Also, two or three Devanagari letters sometimes combine to form a new character, or ligature, something like the German character ß. All of these issues must be addressed. Nevertheless, compatibility software is commercially available, and one common public domain package, ITRANS, converts Roman transliteration to Devanagari.
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