Jean François Pons

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Jean François Pons (1688–1752) was a French Jesuit who pioneered the study of Sanskrit in the West.

Sanskrit language of ancient India

Sanskrit is a language of ancient India with a history going back about 3,500 years. It is the primary liturgical language of Hinduism and the predominant language of most works of Hindu philosophy as well as some of the principal texts of Buddhism and Jainism. Sanskrit, in its variants and numerous dialects, was the lingua franca of ancient and medieval India. In the early 1st millennium CE, along with Buddhism and Hinduism, Sanskrit migrated to Southeast Asia, parts of East Asia and Central Asia, emerging as a language of high culture and of local ruling elites in these regions.

He published a survey of Sanskrit literature in 1743, where he described the language as "admirable for its harmony, copiousness, and energy", reporting on the parsimony of the native grammatical tradition, informing the works of de Brosses, Dow, Sinner, Voltaire, Monboddo, Halhed, Beauzée, and Hervás, and was plagiarized by John Cleland (1778).

Charles de Brosses French writer

Charles de Brosses, comte de Tournay, baron de Montfalcon, seigneur de Vezins et de Prevessin, was a French writer of the 18th century.

Alexander Dow British orientalist and writer

Alexander Dow was an Orientalist, writer, playwright and army officer in the East India Company.

Voltaire French writer, historian, and philosopher

François-Marie Arouet, known by his nom de plumeVoltaire, was a French Enlightenment writer, historian and philosopher famous for his wit, his criticism of Christianity, especially the Roman Catholic Church, and his advocacy of freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and separation of church and state.

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Varadarāja was a 17th-century Sanskrit grammarian. He compiled an abridgement of the work of his master, the Siddhānta Kaumudī of Bhaṭṭoji Dīkṣita, in three versions, referred to as madhya "middle", laghu "short" and sāra "substance, quintessence" versions of the Siddhāntakaumudī, the latter reducing the number of rules to 723. These are comparatively accessible introductions to the very technical grammar of Pāṇini himself, and the 1849 edition by Ballantyne was important to the understanding of native Indian grammatical tradition in Western scholarship.

William Norman Brown was a distinguished Indologist and Sanskritist who established the first academic department of South Asian Studies in North America and organized the American Oriental Society in 1926. He was the Professor of Sanskrit at the University of Pennsylvania for most of his academic career. He was president of the Association for Asian Studies in 1960. He is considered the founder of the field of South Asian Studies, which he pioneered in his career over four decades at the University of Pennsylvania, where he helped to found the Department of Oriental Studies (1931), and later single-handedly founded the Department of South Asia Regional Studies (1948). These departments are now survived by the departments of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, and South Asia Studies. W. Norman Brown also founded the American Institute of Indian Studies, which was located in the Van Pelt Library at the University of Pennsylvania.

<i>Matsya Purana</i> medieval era Sanskrit text, one of eighteen major Puranas

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