Sriramodantam — Day 14
Meaning of the sloka
Then Vishnu, the enemy of Asuras, appeared before them and asked Brahma why he had come there with devas.
— A Bit of Sanskrit knowledge —
This sloka has some good usage of Sandhis (combining two words to form a complex word)
Sandhi is a phonetic joining of words while following certain rules, a well known example being Himalaya = Hima (snow) + Alaya (home).
Sanskrit thoughts and knowledge was passed down through the generations through chanting. Chanting makes it a lot easier to remember things since it has an inherent rhythm and many times the verses rhyme as well. To make prose and poetry easier to rhyme and rhythm, Sanskrit has numerous synonyms of varying lengths for majority of nouns. It then has a strict grammar for combining them so that lines can follow a specific cadence.
With these tools, longs lines of Sanskrit prose and poetry can be chanted to an almost hypnotic rhythm and can be memorized.
My primary source for meanings of the slokas is from the E-book published by http://hinduebooks.blogspot.com.
Om Namo Narayanaya
