# How Antonia Ruppel explains Sanskrit

She has taught Latin, Greek and Sanskrit for close to twenty years, wrote the Sanskrit textbook published by Cambridge University Press, and a monograph on the absolute construction — expressions like “at sunrise”, which name a moment using a word with nothing temporal in it: the sun. In the monograph she asks where the construction came from; in class she shows students how to translate it. She knows which of the two the person in front of her needs.

_Marius Comper · 10 September 2026 · From her two books_

## One. Who 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.

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

## Two. Two 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.

## Three. What 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.

### ἅμα δ’ ἠοῖ φαινομένηφι

“together with dawn, when it appears” — Homer, Iliad 9.618

ἠοῖ “dawn” (dative singular) · φαινομένηφι “appearing”

At the centre stands ἠοῖ, “dawn”. Dawn is itself a moment.

Without the attribute: What is left is ἅμα δ’ ἠοῖ, “together with dawn”. Still a moment. The attribute was not obligatory, so the expression is not absolute.

### ἅμα δ’ ἠελίῳ καταδύντι

“together with the sun, when it sets” — Homer, Iliad 1.592

ἠελίῳ “the sun” (dative singular) · καταδύντι “setting”

At the centre stands ἠελίῳ, “the sun”. A sun is not a moment.

Without the attribute: What is left is ἅμα δ’ ἠελίῳ, “together with the sun”. It no longer names a moment. The attribute was obligatory, so the expression is absolute.

### uchántyām uṣási

“at dawn, when it flashes” — Rigveda 1.184.1

uṣási “dawn” (locative singular) · uchántyām “flashing”

At the centre stands uṣási, “dawn”. As in Greek, dawn is itself a moment.

Without the attribute: What is left is uṣási, “at dawn”. Still a moment. The expression is not absolute.

### sū́rye udyatí

literally “at the rising sun”, that is, “at sunrise” — Rigveda 8.27.19

sū́rye “sun” (locative singular) · udyatí “going up”

At the centre stands sū́rye, “the sun”. A thing, not a moment.

Without the attribute: What is left is sū́rye, “at the sun”. It no longer names a moment. The expression is absolute — and it is the only one of its kind in the whole Rigveda.

**What the argument does not claim**

The reconstruction is hers and remains a proposal: working from the attested expressions, Ruppel argues that the locative was the original case of the construction in Proto-Indo-European, and that the starting point was expressions of natural time — dawn, night, the seasons.
She writes explicitly that the first absolute construction could have formed around any other marker by which the passage of time was measured: a seasonal wind, a bird, the first snow, an object used in ritual. The sun appears in the argument because expressions involving the sun are attested across several languages, not because it has been shown to be where everything began.
And she adds something no simple test can carry: for many old expressions there is no way to decide whether a speaker felt them as absolute. Without explicit statements from ancient grammarians, she says, the question stays open.

## Four. How 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.

| Case | Singular | Dual | Plural |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Nominative | देवः devaḥ | देवौ devau | देवाः devāḥ |
| Vocative | देव deva | देवौ devau | देवाः devāḥ |
| Accusative | देवम् devam | देवौ devau | देवान् devān |
| Instrumental | देवेन devena | देवाभ्याम् devābhyām | देवैः devaiḥ |
| Dative | देवाय devāya | देवाभ्याम् devābhyām | देवेभ्यः devebhyaḥ |
| Ablative | देवात् devāt | देवाभ्याम् devābhyām | देवेभ्यः devebhyaḥ |
| Genitive | देवस्य devasya | देवयोः devayoḥ | देवानाम् devānām |
| Locative | देवे deve | देवयोः devayoḥ | देवेषु deveṣu |

That is one noun, of one stem class. The textbook runs to Chapter 40.

## Five. Things 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.

### The root

√युज् yuj

“to link”. It is related to English yoke, and can be used in exactly that sense. You link things so that they do together what they cannot do alone; or you link things that belong to one another — pairs of oxen, a bow and an arrow, the mind and the past, which is to say you remember it.

### Bhagavadgītā 2.45

निर्-योग-क्षेम- nir-yoga-kṣema-

“without yoga and comfort”, that is, unconcerned with them. Here, she notes, yoga is perhaps to be understood as “link to possession”, that is, “gain; wealth”.

### Bhagavadgītā 2.49

बुद्धि-योग- buddhi-yoga-

“the yoga of understanding”, as against कर्म-योग- karma-yoga-, “the yoga of action”, which had just been described. The third approach in the passage.

### Bhagavadgītā 2.50

युक्त- yukta-

the participle of the same root, here “disciplined, focussed”. In the same line, √युज् in the middle voice with the dative means “link yourself to”.

### What she asks of students

The basic sense, then the context

Remember that the root means “to link”, she writes, and when you meet it in a sentence, try to see which exact notion is in use there. It is a basic technique of translating anywhere, but the more freely a word is used, the more it matters.

**One qualification**

These notes are explanations for students translating a particular passage, not definitions of the word “yoga”. Ruppel herself keeps the root, the participle and the noun distinct, and keeps her “perhaps” where the context does not decide.

### The earth has many names

The earth was perceived as female, and the words for it are grammatically feminine. A number of them are feminine forms of adjectives:

- पृथिवी- pṛthivī- — “the broad one”
- मही- mahī- — “the great one”
- अचला- acalā- — “the non-moving one”
- अनन्ता- anantā- — “the endless one”
- भूमि- bhūmi- — from भू- bhū-, literally “being”

Her observation: in literary texts, an important idea gathers many words around it. In the epics, the earth and battle have the most.

### Men like tigers

A warrior's strength is expressed through strong animals, especially bulls and tigers. पुरुष-व्याघ्र- puruṣa-vyāghra- is word for word “man-tiger”, meaning “a tiger among men”, and so “an extremely strong man”.

In the Mahābhārata, heroes are addressed this way: भरत-ऋषभ- bharata-ṛṣabha-, “bull among the Bharatas”. The hyphens are hers, to show the compounding; Sanskrit does not use them.

### The word said twice

Repeating a word describes a repeated action or a continuous state:

- पुनर् पुनर् punar punar — “again and again”
- युगे युगे yuge yuge — “from age to age, throughout the ages”
- श्वः श्वः śvaḥ śvaḥ — “tomorrow and the tomorrow after that; on many days from now on”

### Going towards a state

A verb meaning “to go”, with the accusative, usually marks the place you are going to. Sanskrit also uses it with abstract nouns, and then it cannot be translated literally:

- शान्तिम् अधिगच्छति śāntim adhigacchati — literally “he goes towards peace”, that is, “he becomes peaceful”
- सिद्धिं गच्छति siddhiṃ gacchati — “goes to success”, that is, “finds success”
- विस्मयं गच्छति vismayaṃ gacchati — “goes towards astonishment”, that is, “is astonished”


## Six. What 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.

## Seven. Sources

Every Greek and Sanskrit form on this page is copied from a printed page of the two books, together with her translations. The Vedic expressions are given in transliteration, as she prints them in the monograph.

- A. M. Ruppel, The Cambridge Introduction to Sanskrit, Cambridge University Press, 2017. ISBN 978-1-107-08828-3. Companion materials at cambridge-sanskrit.org.
- Antonia Ruppel, Absolute Constructions in Early Indo-European, Cambridge Classical Studies, Cambridge University Press, 2012. ISBN 978-0-521-76762-0. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139019736.
- Her own site: antoniaruppel.com, accessed 10 September 2026.
- Her researcher profile at the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics, University of Oxford, on the project Uncovering Sanskrit Syntax: ling-phil.ox.ac.uk, accessed 10 September 2026.

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Written by Marius Comper from Antonia Ruppel’s published books. Any misreadings are mine.
mariuscomper.uk