Words!

Before we could construct actual sentences, we need to know many more things. We talked about vowels and consonants. When we use them in a proper order, we get words. How? Let’s have a quick look at it.

द् + ए + व् + अ = देव

म् + अ + ह् + ए + श् + अ = महेश

क् + अ + व् + इ + त् + आ = कविता

भ् + अ + ग् + अ + व् + आ + न् = भगवान्

न् + अ + द् + ई = नदी

If you carefully observe the above words, you will notice that although we find complete letters (consonants) in the words like देव, महेश, etc, they actually contain half letters like द्, व्, म्, ह्, श्, etc. It is only after adding vowels that we get complete letters.

Now let’s come to the last letter of each word. Try to find the ‘hidden’ last letter. The last letter in the word देव isn’t व, it is अ. The last letter in the word कविता isn’t ता, it is आ. If you don’t get this, read the above words once again.

            The last letter in every word is very important. We just saw that the last letter in the word देव is अ, so the word देव is called as अकारान्त (akaaraanta, meaning the word ending with ‘अ’). All the following words end with अ so they all are अकारान्त.

देश, राम, दन्त, नख, नर, असुर, दानव, पुण्य, पाप, केशव, गुण, दोष, जीवन, नयन

There are tens of thousands of such words. All the अकारान्त words are either masculine or neutral gender. How to identify them is indeed a difficult question for English people. This is because the rules are quite different. In English all humans are masculine or feminine. Not so with Sanskrit. Among the above words देश, राम, दन्त, नख, नर, असुर, दानव, केशव, गुण, दोष, etc are masculine and पुण्य, पाप, जीवन, नयन etc. are neutrals!  As per English rules देश (country), दन्त (tooth), नख (nail), पुण्य (good deed), पाप (sin), गुण (virtue), दोष (fault), जीवन (life), and नयन (eye), should have been neutral. This is because these are not human beings! This is why we use the pronoun ‘it’ instead of these words and not ‘he’. So we will have to remember which of the words are masculine, which are feminine and which are neutrals.