Voice (प्रयोग) - Everything that you must know | Learn Sanskrit

This article is a summary of Voices (प्रयोग) in Sanskrit with an additional explanation about active (kartari) voice and passive (karmani) voices.

Introduction

• In Sanskrit – voice means प्रयोग (प्र + युज् = construction/arrangement)
• Sentence is a group of words which makes complete sense, which conveys some meaning
• Verb denotes an action, which completes the meaning of a sentence. It is a very important factor of a sentence
• Subject is that component which does the action in a sentence – doer of the action
• Object is a thing/person on which the subject performs the action
• Voice is the correlation of subject, object and verb

• Transitive verb expects an object – the sentence does not make complete sense if the object is not present
• If object is not present in sentences like – बालकः पठति or बालिका खादति – are the verbs पठति and खादति transitive or intransitive?
• The same trick is to be used – Who? And What? – Though the answer to What? Is not present in the sentence, it does not mean that the verb is intransitive. We can get possible answers
• If we get answer to the question What? Then the verb has to be intransitive

• In Sanskrit sentence, case of the word is very important, not the position of the word! The cases have specific meanings, so the case of words is important
• The first word in a sentence may not necessarily be the subject of the sentence. The case of the words should, therefore, be identified
• Nominative case- subject, Accusative case – object
• First person – अहम् आवाम् वयम्
• Second person – त्वम् युवाम् यूयम्
• Third person – all other nouns and pronouns except these six

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