1 Why Bhāṣikā¹

Adhyētā has been on an unofficial hiatus for a while as I am prone to falling into the Knuth trap:² you shelve the work you are doing in order to fix a minor irritant in the workflow and years pass before you can get back to the original work.

The idea for the website originated on the Ambuda Discord in late 2024 when I discovered Stephen Krashen and his comprehensible input hypothesis. I started proofreading old issues of the Sanskrit Chandamama and saw my vocabulary improve drastically. Within a few days, I had built what would become the application that runs Adhyētā.

During this process, I realized that I needed a structured solution to store the proofreading data. So I repurposed a markup language based on S-expressions that I created some years ago: SXML.

The entire ingestion pipeline was written in Python. I even did an MVP for a basic reader that let you mark known words so that you could track your vocabulary improvement. There was a long list of features that I never found the time to implement as other work intervened.

I also became active on r/sanskrit and started r/adhyeta, WhatsApp and Arattai groups to help people learn the language using interlinear translation. That work is still going on.

Returning to the hiatus, the problems are manifold:

• The hit-and-miss OCR quality of Sanskrit texts even with LLMs.
• The horrendous nature of Python: not only is it slow, but it has so many footguns. I keep raising various issues with the language every chance I get.
• The tightly coupled architecture of the Adhyētā server.

These make adding content to the server a chore.

I also got sidetracked building:

• A reusable three-stage document markup language called DML.
• An OCR engine based on template matching called Mogra.
• A language, compiler and runtime to replace Python: the Ajagara system with the Aja programming language and the Gara virtual machine.
• A completely regular conlang based on Sanskrit called Saralā.
• A font rendering system for resource-constrained systems called bfont.

The list goes on, and each topic probably merits its own log.

I started learning Bānglā earlier this year and found, again, that there are almost no resources for people who want to learn to read Indic languages. You have the courses to learn speaking, audiobooks, and all kinds of resources on YouTube and elsewhere, but nothing that takes the idea of comprehensible input and marries it to actual content. This was the third instance in the recent past that I encountered this problem: with Tamiḻ, then Sanskrit, and now Bānglā.

So, I have decided to work on a solution: an interlinear reader with ready content. Unlike Adhyētā, which is a labor of love, Bhāṣikā would be a commercial product, but with a generous free tier. The goal is to help serious readers and learners, not milk casual ones.

As for this particular devlog, I have been writing about all the stuff that happens with languages, machine and human,³ and everything related to it, in random places all over the internet: Discord, WhatsApp, Reddit, Hacker News. I thought it made sense for the writing to have a home even if I happened to be the only reader. And this is where I plan to put it.

So, welcome to Bhāṣikā, and keep reading!