BARCELONA, SPAIN, January 26, 2006: HPI note: Catalan is Spain’s second most widely spoken language. It is spoken or understood by as many as 12 million people who live in northwestern Spain and the Balearic Islands, in Andorra and also in parts of France and Italy. translated from Spanish.
Enciclopedia Catalan publishing house of Barcelona (in collaboration with the provincial government) has just released the first Sanskrit-Catalan dictionary that translates and explains more than 50,000 words of this sacred language making it the most modern of all the European volumes according to the translator, Oscar Pujol.
The Diccionari Sanscrit-Catala includes a comprehensive range of themes from mythology to yoga, offers encyclopedic explanations on Hinduism and Indian culture and includes for the first time a double etymology, traditional grammatical Sanskrit and a comparative western one. It utilizes an alphabetical index of all its romanicised entrances which allows the consultation of words without the need of knowing Devanagari, the Sanskrit alphabet. This volume is the first dictionary of such size between Sanskrit and any Romance language.
In an interview granted to Europa Press, Oscar Pujol explained that this dictionary has been twelve years in the making and that “it began as a ‘hobby’ and finished being a profession.” In 1980, Pujol made a trip to India for tourism. Indian culture “made a very deep impression.” On that trip, he read the English translation of the Bhagavad Gita and from that moment he wanted to learn the original language of the work. He began to learn Sanskrit on his own but soon he enrolled at Banaras Hindu University to complete his study, earning his doctorate in Sanskrit Grammar in 1999.
Years before, a delegation from the University of the Balearic Islands visited the university in Banaras. During that visit the idea arose to create a dictionary with the collaboration of the Balearic and Catalan Governments.
The author affirmed that the objective of the dictionary is to be useful to both Sanskrit students and the Catalan and international community providing an “update of the Sanskrit lexicography.” Pujol indicated that while other dictionaries include around 150,000 words he has made a selection centered in the classic Sanskrit and eliminated compound words.
Pujol said that there has been “a crisis” in the Sanskrit studies because an update of the methods was necessary, and that now there is a “new way to understand” this language “going to its roots without comparing it to other Indo-European languages.”