Pada (foot)

Pada or pāda is the Sanskrit term for "foot" (cognate to English foot, Latin pes, Greek pous), with derived meanings "step, stride; footprint, trace; vestige, mark". The term has a wide range of applications, including any one of four parts (as it were one foot of a quadruped), or any sub-division more generally, e.g. a chapter of a book (originally a section of a book divided in four parts).

In Sanskrit metre, pāda is the term for "metrical foot".

As a measure of length, a pada amounts to 12 or 15 fingers' breadth, or 1/2 or 1/3 or 3/7 of a Prakrama.

In Sanskrit grammar, a pada is any inflected word (noun or verb).

In Buddhist tradition, pāda is the term for a symbolic "Buddha's footprint". Buddha’s footprints symbolized his presence, and his image and iconography developed several centuries after he had died. There are also several landmarks venerated as "footprints" (pāda, also pādamudrā) of Hindu deities. For example, Sri Pada is a rock formation in Sri Lanka venerated as the footprint of Buddha in Buddhist tradition, the footprint of Shiva in Hindu tradition, and the footprint of Adam in Muslim tradition.

Marathi language

Marathi (English pronunciation: ⁱ/məˈrɑːti/; मराठी Marāṭhī [məˈɾaʈʰi]) is an Indo-Aryan language spoken predominantly by Marathi people of Maharashtra. It is the official language and co-official language in Maharashtra and Goa states of Western India respectively, and is one of the 23 official languages of India. There were 73 million speakers in 2001; Marathi ranks 19th in the list of most spoken languages in the world. Marathi has the fourth largest number of native speakers in India. Marathi has some of the oldest literature of all modern Indo-Aryan languages, dating from about 900 AD. The major dialects of Marathi are Standard Marathi and the Varhadi dialect. There are other related languages such as Khandeshi, Dangi, Vadvali and Samavedi. Malvani Konkani has been heavily influenced by Marathi varieties.

Marathi is strongly influenced by Sanskrit & is the Indo-Aryan language with 50% of vocabulary identical to the Sanskrit language . Additionally, it has some special grammatical features derived from Sanskrit that are not retained in other major Indian languages. For example, Marathi has inclusive as well as exclusive forms of 'we' and also a neuter gender which is rarely present in languages like Hindi and Punjabi and absent in Bengali. Also, it is one of the three Indo-Aryan languages retaining Sanskrit letter ळ (the others are Gujarati and Punjabi).