sanskrit??

Question

what does it mean as a word? sans scrit similar to "not with writing"? but i thought it has its own alphabet?

Answer 1

Sanskrit in its own language means something like "well-formed". The first element has nothing to do with French 'sans' 'without'.

The alphabet, or more accurately syllabary, used for writing Sanskrit (and Hindi and many others) is called Devanagari.

Answer 2

The word comes from sam + kRt, with the R being a vowel sound. When m and k come together, the m becomes a nasalized n, and an s is inserted. Wellformed, or perfected, is a good translation. Sanskrit is actually a mis-transliteration, or a phonetic rendering, of saMskRt, in which the kRt sounds more like kurt than krit. In devanagari, it looks like:

संस्कृत्

Definite wrong interpretation is sand script, the writing on the dunes--which is what I thought it was till I started studying it years ago.

Sanskrit actually did not have a written form until perhaps 3-4th century BCE, and is now written in several scripts, including english.