Comparing Sanskrit Texts for Critical Editions

Traditionally Sanskrit is written without blank, sentences can make thousands of characters without any separation. A critical edition takes into account all the different known versions of the same text in order to show the differences between any two distinct versions, in term of words missing, changed or omitted. This paper describes the Sanskrit characteristics that make text comparisons different from other languages, and will present different methods of comparison of Sanskrit texts which can be used for the elaboration of computer assisted critical edition of Sanskrit texts. It describes two sets of methods used to obtain the alignments needed. The first set is using the L.C.S., the second one the global alignment algorithm. One of the methods of the second set uses a classical technique in the field of artificial intelligence, the A* algorithm to obtain the suitable alignment. We conclude by comparing our different results in term of adequacy as well as complexity.