The Sanskrit grammatical tradition of vyākaraṇa is one of the six Vedanga
disciplines. It has its roots in late Vedic India, and includes the famous work,
Aṣṭādhyāyī, of Pāṇini (ca. 5th century BC).
The impetus for linguistic analysis and grammar in India originates in the need to be able to obtain a strict interpretation
for the Vedic texts. The work of the very early Indian grammarians have been lost; for example,
the work of Sakatayana (ca. 8th c. BC) is known only from cryptic references by
Yaska (ca. 7th c. BC) and Panini. One of the views of Sakatayana
that was to prove controversial in coming centuries was that most nouns are etymologically derivable from verbs.
In his monumental work on etymology, Nirukta, Yaska supported this claim based on
the large number of nouns that were derived from verbs through a derivation process that became known as krit-pratyaya;
this relates to the nature of the root morphemes.
Yaska also provided the seeds for another debate, whether textual meaning inheres in the word (Yaska's view) or in the
sentence (see Panini, and later grammarians such as Prabhakara or Bhartrihari). This debate continued into the 14th and 15th c. AD, and is relevant even today perhaps, with
the debate on the Dynamic Turn in Semantics, which says that meaning in language is
dynamically created and it may not be possible to compose the meaning from
those of the words[1].
Pāṇini's school
A few centuries after Yaska, Pāṇini's extensive analysis of the processes of phonology, morphology and syntax, the Aṣṭadhyāyī, laid down the basis for centuries of commentaries and
expositions by following Sanskrit grammarians. Pāṇini's approach was amazingly formal; his
production rules for deriving complex structures and sentences represent modern
finite state machines. Indeed many of the developments in Indian Mathematics, especially the place value
notational system may have originated from Pāṇinian analysis.
Panini's grammar consists of four parts:
- Śivasūtra: phonology (notations for phonemes
specified in 14 lines)
- Aṣṭadhyāyī: morphology (construction rules for complexes)
- Dhātupāṭha: list of roots (classes of verbal roots)
- Gaṇapāṭha: lists classes of primitive nominal stems
Commentators on Panini and some of their views:
- Kātyāyana (linguist and mathematician, c. 300 BC): that the word-meaning
relation is siddha, i.e. given and non-decomposable, an idea that the Sanskriticist Ferdinand de Saussure called arbitrary. Word meanings refer to universals that are inherent
in the word itself (close to a nominalist position).
- Patanjali (linguist and yoga sutras, c. 200 BC) - author of Mahabhashya. The notion of shabdapramânah - that the evidentiary value of words is inherent in them,
and not derived externally. Not to be confused with the founder of the Yoga system.
- The Nyaya school, close to the realist position
(as in Plato). Considers the word-meaning relation as created through human convention. Sentence
meaning is principally determined by the main noun. uddyotkara, Vachaspati (sound-universals or phonemes)
- The Mimamsa school. E.g. sentence meaning relies mostly on the verb (corresponds to the
modern notion of linguistic head). Kumarila
Bhatta (7th c.), prabhakara (7th c. AD).
- Bhartrihari (c. 5th c. AD) that meaning is determined by larger contextual units than the
word alone (holism).
- The Buddhist school, including Nagarjuna
(logic/philosophy, c. 150 AD) Dignaga (semantics and logic, c.5th c. AD), Dharmakirti.
Predecessors referred to in Ashtadhyayi include Sakatayana, and Gargya.
Early Modern Indian linguists who revived Panini's school include Bhattoji Dikshita
and Varadaraja.
Medieval Accounts
The earliest external historical accounts of Indian grammatical tradition is from Chinese Buddhist pilgrims to India from the 7th century [2].
- Xuanzang (602-664)
- I Ching (634-713)
- Fazang (643-712)
The Indica of Al-Biruni (973-1048), dating to ca. 1030 contains detailed descriptions of all branches of Hindu science.
Similar to the Chinese Buddhists, Tibetan Buddhism aroused interest in India among
its followers. Taranatha (born 1573) in his treatise of the history of Buddhism in India
(completed around 1608) speaks about Panini and provides some information about grammars, but not
in the manner of a person familiar with their content.
Modern Sanskrit grammarians
Beginning of Western scholarship
19th century
20th century to present
- Bernhard Geiger
- Leonard Bloomfield
- Paul Thieme
- Louis Renou
- Herman Buiskool
- Bimal Krishna Matilal
- Johannes Bronkhorst
- George Cardona
- Madhav Deshpande
- SD Joshi
- Paul Kiparsky
- Frits Staal
- Michael Witzel
- Kshetresa Chandra Chattopadhyaya
- Vagish Shastri
- Sri Sribhuti Krishna Goswami
- Sri Pundrik Goswami
References
- ^ Bimal Krishna Matilal (1990). The word and the world: India's contribution to the study of
language. Oxford. Chapter
8 deals with the compositionality vs holistic debate in linguistics.
- ^ Frits Staal, A Reader on the
Sanskrit Grammarians, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1972), reprint by Motilal
Banarsidass, Delhi (1985), ISBN 81-208-0029-X.
- Coward, Harold G., and K. Kunjunni Raja, eds., The Philosophy of the Grammarians, Volume V of Encyclopedia of Indian
Philosophies, ed. Karl Potter, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.
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