PANINI AND SANSKRIT GRAMMAR - JUD EVANS - ATHENAEUM LIBRARY OF PHILOSOPHY

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PANINI AND SANSKRIT GRAMMAR


JUD EVANS

                                                               




PANINI AND SANSKRIT GRAMMAR




JUD EVANS

OCT 2010



PANINI AND SANSKRIT GRAMMAR

The most fascinating non-Western grammatical tradition, and the most germinal and independent - is that of India, which dates back at least two and one-half millennia and which culminates with the grammar of Panini whose date is usually given as being circa the 5th century BC. The Sanskrit grammar of Panini already comprises a fully formulated system, its author standing at the end of a long line of precursors of which sixty-four are named but whose works have entirely perished.

Panini himself uses the word 'Yavanani' which Katyayana explains as 'writing of the Yavanas' (i. e. Iaones or Greeks.) Although it is unlikely that Indian scholars could have come into first hand contact with Greek manuscripts before the invasion of Alexander in 327 BC, Panini could well have had contact with Greeks familiar with studies of rhetoric, since the Ionian Greeks had dealings with Persia from c. 540 BC, and many who were exiled settled in Persia well before 327 BC. They must, however, have grown familiar with Greek ideas before a grammarian would make a rule as to how to form from Yavana, 'Greek, ' a derivative form meaning 'Greek writing. ' Panini's grammar consists of nearly 4, 000 rules divided into eight chapters. It provides a collection of 2,000 roots.

Being composed with the maximum conceivable brevity, this grammar describes the entire Sanskrit language in all the details of its structure, with a unity which has never been equalled elsewhere. It is at once the shortest and fullest grammar in the world. The grammar of Panini is a 'sabdanusasana,' or 'Treatise on Words', the cardinal principle of which is, that all nouns are derived from verbs, and because of this belief it was natural that the Sanskrit copula should also be categorized as a verb. It is tempting to speculate that maybe it was Panini's inclusion of the copula as a verb that influenced the Greek grammarians to wrongfully classify the 'be' word as a verb, but there is no evidence that the early Greek grammarians ever read the Sanskrit grammar of Panini, although there was communication between the Greek classical world and that of the Indian northwest, and some of the ancient Vedic scholars may well have been known to the Greeks and possibly vice versa. For example, in 302 BC the Greek historian Megasthenes was known to have been the ambassador of Seleucus I Nicator, founder of the Seleucid Empire, to the court of Candragupta Maurya, Ashoka's grandfather in what is modern-day Patna.

Ashoka.

Ashoka's reign of the third century BC is comparatively well documented. He issued a large number of edicts, which were inscribed in many parts of the empire and were composed in Prakrit, Greek, and Aramaic, depending on the language current in a particular region. Greek and Aramaic inscriptions are limited to Afghanistan and the trans-Indus region. In one edict Ashoka referred to five Greek kings who were his neighbours and contemporaries and to whom he sent envoys, but no amount of cultural intercourse proves with certainty that there was any cross-fertilisation of linguistic theory and that the curious beliefs of the Indians that all words were essentially verbs influenced the Greeks when they were dividing up their lexicon into various word-types based on their perceived sentential function in a linguistic string. Certainly the renowned Greek grammarian Dionysius Thrax doesn't appear to have known of Panini and he is not mentioned anywhere in the Greek classical writings of antiquity that still survive. Panini's work very early acquired a canonical value, and has continued, for at least 2, 000 years, to be the standard of usage and the foundation of grammatical studies in Sanskrit. Panini's principle of brevity is, moreover, notably employed in the invention of technical terms.

Those of Panini's terms which are real words, whether they describe the phenomenon, as sam-dsa, 'compound' or express a category by an example, as dvi-gu ('two-cow'), 'numeral compound, ' are probably all borrowed from predecessors. But most of his technical terms are arbitrary groups of letters resembling algebraic symbols, and to an extent that obscures any real evidence of his actual classification of 'be' as a verb, but as has been said it was his belief that all nouns were derived from verbs and 'be' (bhu) was patently not a noun or noun-like in any way, it is logical to draw the conclusion that he considered it to be a verb or he created a distinct class of its own in which to place it, but there is no evidence that he did so. On account of the frequent obscurity of a work which sacrifices every consideration to brevity, attempts soon began to be made to explain it, and with the advance of grammatical knowledge, to correct and supplement its rules. Among the earliest attempts of this kind was the formulation, by unknown authors, of rules of interpretation  (Paribhasa), which Panini was supposed to have followed in his grammar.

Because the classificatory systems of parts of speech within Panini's original work have been updated many times by later scholars both Indian and occidental who where educated with western (Greek) notions of the copuletic function of 'be, ' it must have been natural for them to rearrange Panini's tables in such a manner that the 'be' word ended up in the verb section, particularly in view of the fact that it inflected in a like manner to the verbs forming the first conjugation of Sanskrit. In other words what happened was similar to the way in which the Latin-trained grammarians of the Germanic languages tried to coerce the 'be' complex into a Latinate conjugational straightjacket. This is evidenced by the modern disorderly and irregular state of the English 'be' inflectionary system, constituting as it does a bewildering mixture of two different verbs, and the varying degrees of paradigmatic abnormality of the copula in all the other languages of Europe. Those who followed and 'elucidated' Panini's great work also regarded his ancient grammar as more comprehensible particularly for western readers, if viewed through the lens of a Latin classificatory system.