Beauty and extensibility of Sanskrit

People often ask us why we are calling our weapons as "astras" and why we are giving the names from Sanskrit literature rather than using English which is much more popular among internet community. We always tell them that Tankaar is all about astras (or weapons) and when we develop a astra we have to name it. Since the game borrows theme heavily from Indian Mythology, we fall short of English vocabulary for naming these astras. Names need to be short but still be different. It would be incorrect to say that English lacks variety or vocabulary. But it definitely lacks extensibility. A language is extensible when it strictly follows its roots. These small words and roots can later be joined like blocks to form longer and complex words. As English became more and more informal it lost touch with the roots and this is where it fails to deliver extensibility.

We all know that "Mother of English" is Latin. All the words we use nowadays have their roots in Latin. But English has become so much detached with Latin roots that very few of us know origin of the English words. When we want to make a custom vocabulary (which is generally required in fiction and games) what we have at our disposal are common words and not the roots. Moreover, English is not scientific enough to well define the "join" (or "Sandhi"as called in Sanskrit) of words. So in the end unless a fiction writer or game theme maker puts a lot of effort in breaking apart the language and then joining pieces together custom vocabulary cannot be developed.

Sanskrit (or even Hindi) is well connected with roots. All words have origin which can be easily traced. Sanskrit is completely pure without any distortions and even Hindi does not diverge too much from roots. This makes Sanskrit and Hindi ideal languages for making custom vocabulary of this game, which itself is based on Indian Mythology. One can play with the words like blocks. We developers are not experts of Sanskrit or Hindi, but we do have sound basics of both. This basic knowledge enabled us to coin new vocabulary which one sees in names of Astras. Obviously, we took help from Sanskrit dictionary which gave us a lot of synonyms to choose from. In short, its the beauty and extensibility of Sanskrit which make it so useful language for developing a custom vocabulary. So whenever you want to experiment with words try it in "Language of Gods" - Sanskrit. I am sure you will end up building a whole new  "world of words".