The Letter with a Coined Word: Vocabulary and Marks in Sanskrit Composition
The Composition section offers 5 marks for a Sanskrit letter (patram). The printed situation: your school is holding a three-day book exhibition from 12 to 14 January; write to a friend in another town inviting him, explaining how to travel (by bus), and asking him to confirm by telephone. Candidate J's letter is neatly laid out, opens with priya mitra and closes with bhavadīyaḥ, includes the dates and the bus, but writes pustaka-pradarśanī for "exhibition" (a coinage), renders "phone" as मोबाइल in Devanagari, writes the date as 12-1-2024, and addresses the friend as bhavān throughout. Candidate K writes pure textbook Sanskrit with no English influence at all, but omits the bus and the request for confirmation, and dates the letter śrāvaṇa-māse. The section coordinator must fix a split of the 5 marks and decide how strictly to police vocabulary.
1. Rank the available ways of expressing a modern item such as "book exhibition" or "telephone" and state the test you would apply.
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Ranking, best first:
- An analyzable Sanskrit compound already in circulation, e.g. pustaka-pradarśanī: a reader can unpack it as pustakānāṃ pradarśanī ("a showing of books"). Coinage is not a fault if the compound is transparent and correctly formed.
- A plain Sanskrit paraphrase that avoids the problem: pustakāni darśayitvā or pustakānāṃ darśanaṃ bhaviṣyati.
- Transliteration in Devanagari such as मोबाइल - tolerated only where nothing short exists, and never in Latin script.
Test: can a competent reader recover the meaning without a dictionary and without English? If yes, the expression is acceptable in a composition item. Deviations that break Sanskrit morphology (an English verb with a Sanskrit ending, an indeclinable used in the wrong place) are errors; a well-formed coinage is not. Where the situation forces the issue (confirming the news), the cleanest solution is to ask for a reply patreṇa or likhitvā and leave the instrument out.
2. Propose a split of the 5 marks, then score J and K against it.
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Proposed split: 1 format (place, date, salutation, body, closing, signature); 2 content (invitation, dates and duration, travel by bus, request for confirmation - 0.5 each); 1 language (correct case endings, verb agreement, sandhi); 1 convention (consistent register, appropriate formulaic phrases).
J - about 4/5. Format 1; content 2 (all four points present, phone handled understandably); language 1; convention 0.5 (the numeral date and the transliterated word are minor blemishes, not failures).
K - about 3.5/5. Format 1; content 1 (invitation and dates only, so the two action points are missing); language 1; convention 1. The verdict that matters: K's Sanskrit is purer but the letter does not do the job it was set, so J's paper is the stronger one. Composition marks follow communication, with grammar as a separate component; they do not reward avoidance of content.
3. Is *bhavān* addressed to a friend an error? Explain what a marker should check instead.
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No. Bhavat is a polite address and is perfectly usable for a friend; Sanskrit letters routinely use it. The real error to look for is inconsistency: mixing bhavān with tvam forms, e.g. bhavān ... tava ... āgaccha. A letter that uses bhavān with third-person verbs throughout is grammatical and should be marked under convention as correct.
What the marker checks is agreement across the whole letter - pronoun, verb person and honorific level kept uniform from salutation to closing - not the choice of a particular honorific. Deducting for bhavān alone, while ignoring inconsistent verb forms, would be marking style rather than grammar.