In part 1 of this topic, I discussed some preliminary obstacles in the way of āryīkaraṇa. No doubt there would be more complexities going forward but we can tackle these for now.

I will now present some ideas have I in my attempts to make writing material covenient and simpler in Sanskrit. And I would like to emphasis on convenient here, because for the reasons I discussed earlier, it makes no sense to try and shift the system wholesale into Sanskrit. Instead of being productive, it is simply going to dissuade people away from any such attempts. So let me start with something extremely simple: writing dates.

Any practicing Hindu uses two calendars, the Gregorian for all the civil considerations and the pancāṅga-s for all dhārmika tasks. There should be an attempt, however small-scale, to write tithī-s whenever possible either instead of or along with the Gregorian dates. Gregorian date formats are various but standardized: dd/mm/yyyy, dd-mm-yy, mm/dd/yy, etc., and there is also the timezone difference but whatever be the diversities it is a standard and you can very easily understand any format and also convert the timezones if you know the hour-differential. Keeping convenience in mind, here is what I propose:

tithī (pakṣa number) - māsa (initial of the first pakṣa) - samvatsara

14(1) - 09 (कृ) - 2080
14(2) - 08 (शु) - 2080

…which reads like “mārgashīrsha kṛṣṇapakṣa caturdashī” or “kārttikā kṛṣṇapakṣa caturdashī” of 2080 vikrama samvatsara. The pakṣa number will be relative to the pakṣa the month starts from, arthāt the pancāṅga-s that follow pūrṇimā tithī would have shuklapakṣa as 1 and amāvāsyā tithī as 2 and vice versa. To make it clear which is which, the initial of the starting pakṣa can be written adjacent to the māsa number. So, 09(कृ) denotes that the month of mārgashīsha in the pancāṅga followed here begins with kṛṣṇapakṣa. Adjustments can be made accordingly for other formats. In this way, the difference between pancāṅga-s can be accounted for. We have a flexibility in this case, but it must be understood that there will be some loss of diveristy when we commit to standardization. It will not be without a cause of course. There must exist an understanding of the principle of representation, rather than the content itself. Without such understanding among the implementers, all of this is amounts to shūnya.

While this is my recommendation, I would encourage for more intuitive ways to use tithī-s for civil matters, if such a way exists. Something else to consider is how would we represent a day when two tithī-s fall on the same day, because tithī-s are lunar and we are accustomed to follow calendars built on solar calculations. So, is using tithī-s even a good idea? These things can only be judged when lots of people implement them for trial and error.

Let us consider a more complex case now: representation of Mathematical problems. This is a subject our ancestors excelled at. And they wrote out all the problems, instead of using notations like we do today. Probably some variables could have been used, but nothing close to modern day notations such as ∑,∫,∴, etc. And these symbols are largely just Greek or Latin letters. And usage of these scripts is understandable given the regions where modern Mathematics developed. We can put off the discussion for noting a method like summation or integration for now and focus on just the variables, to make a quick point.

Typically, Latin letters like a, b, p, q, x, y or Greek letters like α, β, γ, δ and others are used as required in different problems and methods. We can very well use devanāgarī script and use the letters क, ख, ग ityādi but there are couple of considerations here. Devanāgarī letters are a little more complicated to make than Greeco-Latin, and especially Latin. Not only that, since pairs of letters like (a, b), (x, y) are chosen because they are consecutive in the alphabet list and not arbitrarily, it only makes sense to use consecutives like (क, ख), (ग, घ) in our attempts too, but this puts strain on the pronunciation a little to properly differentiate the sparsha sounds from mahāprāṇa. I support this, since shikṣā is a vedāṅga. But I can understand if people would like to use more spaced out sounds like क, च, ग so there is no lapse in pronunciation at all. That being said, just as European scholars used Greek as a “dead” script to represent some of their variables, we too can use the Brāhmī script. Every major Indian script derives in some way from Brāhmī, but Brāhmī itself has not been in use for over a millenium. This is not an attempt to “revive” the script, merely use its characters like Greek characters are used.

Some characters like 𑀓(क), 𑀚(ज), 𑀢(ट) might need to be avoided until Brāhmī is standardized, since these can cause confusion against the more popular notations of similar designs. That being said, let us try and see how this can work in action:

f(𑀯) = 𑁫𑀯 ‍+ 𑁩

सततगणन 𑀯 
एतस्य क्रिया f(𑀯) श्रेणौ [𑀲𑀸, 𑀦𑀺]

अधुना वयम् एतत् 𑀯 अङ्काः गति इच्छयते प्रति 𑀲 क्षणेषु

एतत् क्रिया F(𑀯) उपयोगतः दर्शय शक्नोसि

अत्र F(𑀯) f(𑀯) क्रियायाः समुच्च्य 𑀯 अङ्केषु

ततः

 𑀯𑀺F(𑀯) 
——————— [𑀯 = 𑀲𑀸...𑀯] = f(𑀯)
  𑀯𑀺𑀯

एतत् अन्तरगणितस्य मूल प्रमेयस्य प्रथम भागः

The above snippet, is an attempt to depict the First Part of the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus in Sanskirt, however amateur, with Brāhmī characters in use. The notation of f() to represent a function is retained so that some of it is recognizable. Here, 𑀯 is a variable, literally vikārī and is represented by the Brāhmī character of the same sound va. The range [𑀲𑀸, 𑀦𑀺] reads [sā, ni], which are just the first and last svara-s from Indian musical notes (because that too is a “range”, and I needed something more concrete to represent rather than just consecutive letters or other technicalities discussed before). 𑀯𑀺 reads vi for vibheda, modern word for differentiation, to represent dy/dx notation.

It is not clean, maybe even awkward to read and harder to understand, but you would not recognize it if it was written out in Russian, Chinese or Japanese either (assuming people reading this are not familiar with these languages). It is not because you simply do not know how to interpret this, you are also not used to reading complicated material in Sanskrit. But there is no other alternative but to keep pushing for these until better people over a period of time can make such representations cleaner and people get used to it. This is going to be a generational effort, with everyone understanding that some writing habits must be conceded and some must be adopted.

These are some proposals of mine. They are basic and meant to get the point across. I will endeavor to try and implement somethings in Chemistry too, considering the vast system of naming conventions followed in Organic Chemistry would work very well with Sanskrit. But that is one for the future.

The strength of Sanskrit, however beautifully depicted in poetry, must not be isolated to it. It was used at one point for everything in the high culture, and me hopes that ārya-s will use it again one day, churning its vast capabilities.