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I have been using this search engine for Sanskrit grammar: https://sanskrit.inria.fr/DICO/grammar.html, specifically declension, and I was wondering about some results returned by the search.

Indeed, I tried looking for the declension of the Sanskrit words kil and kila and the results are the following:

https://sanskrit.inria.fr/cgi-bin/SKT/sktdeclin.cgi?lex=SH&q=kila&t=VH&g=Mas&font=roma

https://sanskrit.inria.fr/cgi-bin/SKT/sktdeclin.cgi?lex=SH&q=kil&t=VH&g=Mas&font=roma

Many cases in the declension of both words are the same, for example the accusative case is kilam for both kil and kila.

However, by searching in Sanskrit-English dictionaries, it seems that kil is a verb, so it shouldn’t have a declension with cases, and kila is an adverb, which is indeclinable.

So why is this declension search engine reporting these results? Could it refer to another word (a noun, more specifically)?

Also, is kilam a valid Sanskrit word? If so, what is its meaning?

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    Try entering some completely random words – it still ‘works’. Presumably, if it doesn’t have a manually entered declension table for a search term, it just looks at the ending of the word, guesses which declension it ought to be in based on that, and then shows the forms as they would be in that declension, with no guarantee that the word actually exists. I just tried with ksmubrna, which is definitely not a Sanskrit word, and it showed up just fine. Also note that verbs in Sanskrit are denoted by roots, so kil would not exist as an actual form of the verb, only as a dictionary entry.
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Commented Jul 14, 2022 at 7:58
  • thank you @JanusBahsJacquet. Does this mean that, e.g., kilam doesn't exist as a proper Sanskrit word and it was made up by the engine by adding the accusative form to the root?
    – user3764418
    Commented Jul 14, 2022 at 8:34
  • I don’t know Sanskrit well enough to know for sure if it exists or not, but it’s definitely true that this declension engine listing it doesn’t mean that it does exist. It may exist as a form of some word by coincidence, but if kila is not actually a noun (or adjective), then it definitely doesn’t exist as the accusative case of that word.
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Commented Jul 14, 2022 at 8:37

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There is no extant noun kil in Sanskrit (no root-class nouns end in /l/). The website made up forms according to the rules that its creator wrote. It will also inflect the non-existent and impossible "noun" nsirkp. From this, we can conclude that (1) the program is not linked to a dictionary and (2) it doesn't encode any information about possible words. It does at least eliminate any illegal letters, turning nzirfp into nśirṅp and just rejecting jās (which is an actual word). It returns nothing for jās as a masculine noun, but gives completely incorrect results if you enter jaas or jaa as a feminine noun. I could not discover an entry that result in the correct inflection of the stem pitar-.

In other words, the website produces outputs, but it does not work.

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  • thank you @user6726. So should one conclude that also kilam doesn't exist as a word in Sanskrit?
    – user3764418
    Commented Jul 15, 2022 at 7:31
  • Grammatically is is possible, as acc.sg of kila "play, game".
    – user6726
    Commented Jul 15, 2022 at 14:30

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