Varna (phoneme)

Shiksha (Sanskrit: शिक्षा IAST: śikṣā) is a Sanskrit word, which means "instruction, lesson, learning, study of skill". It also refers to one of the six Vedangas, or limbs of Vedic studies, on phonetics and phonology in Sanskrit.

Shiksha is the field of Vedic study of sound, focussing on the letters of the Sanskrit alphabet, accent, quantity, stress, melody and rules of euphonic combination of words during a Vedic recitation. Each ancient Vedic school developed this field of Vedanga, and the oldest surviving phonetic textbooks are the Pratishakyas. The Paniniya-Siksa and Naradiya-Siksa are examples of extant ancient manuscripts of this field of Vedic studies.

Shiksha is the oldest and the first auxiliary discipline to the Vedas, maintained since the Vedic era. It aims at construction of sound and language for synthesis of ideas, in contrast to grammarians who developed rules for language deconstruction and understanding of ideas. This field helped preserve the Vedas and the Upanishads as the canons of Hinduism since the ancient times, and shared by various Hindu traditions.

Shiksha literally means "instruction, lesson, study, knowledge, learning, study of skill, training in an art". It also refers to one of the six Vedangas, which studies sound, Sanskrit phonetics, laws of euphonic combination (sandhi), and the science of making language pleasant and understood without mistakes.Shiksha as a supplemental branch of the Vedas, included teaching proper articulation and pronunciation of Vedic texts. It was one of six fields of supplemental studies, others being grammar (Vyakarana), prosody (Chandas), ritual (Kalpa), etymology (Nirukta) and astrology (Jyotisha, calculating favorable time for rituals).

The roots of Shiksha can be traced to the Rigveda which dedicates two hymns 10.125 and 10.71 to revere sound as a goddess, and links the development of thought to the development of speech. The mid 1st-millennium BCE text Taittiriya Upanishad contains one of the earliest description of Shiksha as follows,

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