Héritage du Sanskrit

Sanskrit is the primary culture-bearing language of India, with a continuous production of literature in all ?elds of human endeavor over the course of four millennia. Precededbyastrongoraltraditionofknowledgetransmission, records of written Sanskrit remain in the form of inscriptions dating back to the ?rst centuryB. C. E. Extantmanuscriptsin Sanskritnumber over30million, one h- dred times those in Greek and Latin combined, constituting the largest cultural heritage that any civilization has produced prior to the invention of the printing press. Sanskrit works include extensive epics; subtle and intricate philosophical, mathematical, medical, legal, and scienti?c treatises; and imaginative and rich literary, poetic, anddramatictexts. WhiletheSanskritlanguageisofpreeminent importance to the intellectual and cultural heritage of India, the importance of the intellectual and cultural heritage of India to the rest of the world during the pastfewmillennia andinthe presenteracanhardlybe overestimated. The int- lectualandculturalheritageofIndia hasbeen amajorfactor inthedevelopment of the world's religions, languages, literature, arts, sciences, and history. Sanskritdocumentsaremovingintothedigitalmedium. Recentdecadeshave witnessed the growth of machine-readable Sanskrit texts in archives such as 1 the Thesaurus Indogermanischer Text- und Sprachmaterialien (TITUS), Ky- 2 3 oto University, Indology, the Gottingen ] Register of Electronic Texts in In- 4 dian Languages. The last few years have witnessed a burgeoning of digital images of Sanskrit manuscripts and books hosted on-line.
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