Sanskrit is not just a language it is Truth manifested as sound thus the study of Sanskrit under a competent teacher is a means to the realization of the Truth.
We all need to take time to learn and understand Sanskrit. Ye 'vasthitāḥ pratyanīkeṣ u yodhāḥ Īs "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." Swami Tapasyananda has "I am the mighty world destroying Time." Srila Prabhupada has "Time I am, destroyer of the worlds.".
I don't know how close he was to the original when he translated 11.32 He read the Bhagavad Gita in the original Sanskrit and translated it. Robert Oppenheimer who taught themselves Sanskrit. Of course there are many people, including J. While I knew that devo is an inflection or variant of deva, I didn't know the samdhi. There are words and phrases I can pick out when transliterated into the Latin alphabet, as in the case of devo Maheshwara. I do understand the phonology and different phonemes (the retroflex /s/, /n/, etc.), but I have not learned their devanagari representations. Hey, that works for me! It is a great idea, though he may feel put upon. Here Namaḥ does not become Namo because the Visarga is followed by the letter Ś which does not belong to the Haś group. Here Namaḥ becomes Namo because the Visarga is followed by the letter Bha and this belongs to the Haś group. The letters which are in the Haś group are: ha, ya, va, ra, la, ja, ma, ña, ṇ a, na, jha, bha, ja, ba, ga, ḍ a, da, gha, ḍ ha, dha. It means that if the Visarga is followed by words belonging to the Haś group, then the Visarga becomes U and then to O. H changes to Avagraha before A: Namoastu te.īoth Namo and Namaḥ mean the same to salute.
H is elided before a vowel: Nama Īśvarāya. Namo before words beginning with g, j, d, y, r, l, v, h (Namo Gaṇ apataye, Vāsudevāya) H changes to S: Namaste, etc. Namaḥ before words beginning with k, kh, p, ph. Namo is just a Saṁ dhi form of Namaḥ, the Visarga H changing to O before a soft consonant.