How Antonia Ruppel explains Sanskrit

OneWho she is

Antonia Ruppel grew up in Frankfurt, read Classics at Cambridge and took her doctorate there in 2008. She taught for nine years at Cornell University as Townsend Senior Lecturer in the Greek, Latin and Sanskrit Languages, then for four years at a secondary school in Surrey. At Oxford she was a postdoctoral researcher on the project Uncovering Sanskrit Syntax. She now teaches at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich and, online, at Yogic Studies. She lives in Frankfurt.

She has published Absolute Constructions in Early Indo-European (2012), The Cambridge Introduction to Sanskrit (2017) and An Introductory Sanskrit Reader (2021), and co-edited Veda-Sätze / Vedic Sentences (2024). This page draws on the first two.

The two books this page draws on

• 2012Absolute Constructions in Early Indo-European, Cambridge University Press, based on her 2008 doctoral thesis.
• 2017The Cambridge Introduction to Sanskrit, Cambridge University Press — a beginners' textbook, written for the classroom and for working alone.

TwoTwo questions about the same sentence

At the end of the 2012 monograph, Ruppel describes teaching an intensive Latin course the year before. When she reached the ablative absolute, she found herself explaining it to her students in exactly the way it had been explained to her at eleven: here is how you translate it into a modern language. Which is the method she criticises, on the opening pages of the same book, when she finds it in the scholarship.

She explains why she teaches it that way all the same. A student about to read the Crito or the First Catilinarian has little use for the history of the construction. More than that, she adds, the traditional approach may even be correct synchronically: in fifth-century BC literary Attic or first-century BC Latin prose, that is probably how the construction worked in a speaker's mind.

‘Absolute constructions’ will never be replaced by ‘temporal expressions with non-temporal heads’.

Absolute Constructions in Early Indo-European, p. 225

What follows takes the two questions in turn: the researcher's first, then the teacher's.

ThreeWhat makes a construction absolute

A Latin pupil meets the ablative absolute as a rule of translation: a noun and a participle in the ablative, rendered as a subordinate clause. Urbe deleta, “the city having been destroyed”, that is, “after the destruction of the city”. Ruppel shows that for close to two centuries the scholarship produced mostly descriptions of this kind — many of them descriptions of how to translate the thing rather than of the thing — and that the definitions on offer leaned too heavily on Greek, the one language where the construction is fully developed from its earliest texts.

Her own definition takes a single sentence: absolute constructions are expressions of time whose head noun — the word at the centre of the expression — has nothing temporal in it. The Vedic expression translated “at sunrise” means, word for word, “at the rising sun”: at its centre stands the sun, a thing, not a moment. For the sun to name a moment at all, it needs the attribute beside it, “rising”. That is what makes the attribute obligatory, in the way a predicate is obligatory in a clause.

Take the attribute away and see what is left

Ruppel closes her argument with two pairs of expressions, one Greek and one Vedic. In each pair, the first expression has at its centre a word that already means “dawn”; the second has the sun. The difference between them is small, and everything else follows from it.

FourHow to teach a language with very many forms

The 2017 textbook states its method in its first paragraph: to minimise the need for rote memorisation by maximising understanding of the underlying structures and patterns that produce the forms. Chapters introducing new forms alternate with chapters explaining the processes behind them — vowel gradation, sandhi, compounding, noun formation.

The second principle is that the student reads real Sanskrit early. Many textbooks keep the reader for months inside exercise sentences the author wrote. In Ruppel, passages from actual texts begin in Chapter 6, short and heavily annotated at first.

What the book does not promise is release from memorising. However well you grasp the patterns, she writes, Sanskrit stays a language with a great deal to hold in your head. Her study advice is correspondingly concrete: recite the paradigm aloud, top to bottom and bottom to top; if you play chess, walk the table by the knight's move; if your memory is visual, colour-code the cases; when you learn the word for a thing, picture the thing as you say it; small notes on the bathroom mirror work surprisingly well; and do not take on more than ten words at once.

One declension

This is the first noun table in the textbook: देव- deva-, “god”. Eight cases, three numbers — twenty-four slots, filled by seventeen forms, because some forms serve several cases at once. Those overlaps are the thing to understand rather than to memorise separately.

FiveThings she noticed

Between the grammar chapters, the textbook slips in short notes on style and vocabulary. They are where you see what a philologist actually notices while reading, and for an outside reader they are the best part of the book.

One word, six stanzas

Her advice for words with a wide range is to keep the basic sense in mind and work out, each time, what the word is doing in the sentence in front of you, rather than to learn a list of translations. In her notes on six stanzas from Bhagavadgītā 2, a single root takes three different senses.

SixWhat the teaching is for

The 2017 textbook carries a three-line dedication before its contents page.

This book is dedicated to my students. I hope that they have learned as much from me as I have from them.

The Cambridge Introduction to Sanskrit, dedication

On her own site, Ruppel writes that good teaching is for her the most fundamental way both to show respect for her students and to contribute to the strength of the fields she works in; and she argues for non-elitist access to ancient languages and texts.

It matches how the textbook is built: written so that someone without a teacher can use it alone, with more exercises than fit into a year of classes — precisely so that you can find as many as you need when something proves hard — and with the advice she gives the solitary learner: if setting yourself a topic for the day feels too open-ended, set yourself a time instead, forty-five minutes, or twenty on a busy day. In a focussed quarter of an hour, she writes, you can do more than you think.