SANSKRIT: A VAARADHI TO ENGLISH VOCABULARY

Words, the building blocks of language, illumine everything. Words are, in general, acquired through a constant exposure to language during the critical period in the first language acquisition. In second language acquisition, on the other hand, the teaching-learning setting of words poses to be a highly challenging task for teachers as well as learners on the ground of various morphological inflections and phonological patterns of the words of L2 which may be different from those of the L1 of the learner. Sanskrit, an ancient and scholarly language, is the indweller of all Indian languages because of which an Indian can fairly make out the words of Sanskrit and does not require a formal learning of it. As established by the West, it also has a very close connection to Indo-European languages and thus English. The English teaching community in India has been on a relentless quest to come up with even better word-teaching practices for so many decades now. If the community can make use of the phenomenon of morphological and phonological transformations between Sanskrit and English, it will not only help the students learn words but also make them own the L2 through the Sanskrit words. The present paper concentrates on the morphological and phonological transformation of words between Sanskrit and English which is by no means exhaustive. The impetus set here is expected to stir up the interest in the teachers to carry out some research on the phenomenon and thus provide the learners the incentive for better learning.