About and Sources
Where the texts come from, and how the pages were made.
What this is
Vedavani is a place to learn Sanskrit and Tamil chants line by line. Each line is shown in its own script, with a transliteration and an English translation. Click a word on one side and the matching word lights up on the other.
Where the texts come from
The Sanskrit and Tamil texts are taken from public collections and checked against a second source where one could be found. Each chant page names its main source under the title, and the chant's own record lists the readings that were changed and why. The main sources are sanskritdocuments.org, vignanam.org, Project Madurai, and for the Tamil hymns also aanmeegam.org, the Thirukkural site thirukkural.gokulnath.com, Tamil Wikisource, divyaprabandham.koyil.org and kaumaram.com.
The Bhagavad Gita was compared across four sources, and the differences are recorded.
Transliteration
The Roman spelling of Sanskrit is IAST, generated by a program from the Devanagari and then checked. The Tamil lines use the ISO 15919 system where the source had none. Vedic pitch accents are shown as strokes above and below the letters.
Translations
The English is written for this site, not copied. Each line keeps the original's order of ideas, so you can see which words answer which, but it is written as ordinary English that a learner can read. Where Sanskrit or Tamil packs a thought into one long compound, the English spells it out, so the English line is sometimes longer than the original.
Word links
The coloured boxes link a word or phrase in the original to its translation. Many Sanskrit and Tamil words are joined together in writing. Where a joined word hides a linked word, the box is drawn around only that part, with a dotted edge where it cuts through a written word. Some words are left unlinked when no clear English counterpart sits on the same line.
Limits
This is a learning aid and has not been reviewed by a traditional teacher. Chant by ear from a teacher, especially the Vedic texts. A few texts are reconstructed or have disputed endings, and their chant pages say so.