Indian Contribution to Linguistics—Panini

 Indian Contribution to Linguistics—Panini

The Origin of Indian Linguistics

[Strictly speaking, Panini is a grammarian, but his influence is far-reaching. There is hardly any field of study untouched by his innovative ideas. All students of English Literature must have some idea about Panini. The picture will become clear when you realize that Ferdinand de Saussure, Swiss linguist and semiotician, widely considered to be one of the founders of 20^th century linguistics, spent his life-time as a Professor of Sanskrit at the University of Geneva. Similarly many linguists and literary theoreticians like Edward Sapir, Leonard Bloomfield and Noam Chomsky were influenced by Panini.]

“The descriptive grammar of Sanskrit, which Panini brought to its perfection, is one of the greatest monuments of human intelligence and an indispensable model for the description of languages”—Leonard Bloomfield.

The Vedas are the oldest Sanskrit texts. One of their many themes is the power of speech. Hence, the ancient Indians placed such importance on preserving the Vedas as precisely as possible: speech was powerful, and holy speech deserved to be preserved exactly as it was first said.

With this in mind, the ancient Indians began devising ways to preserve the Vedas exactly. Plain memorization could never be enough, for distortions inevitably slip in. Instead, they eventually realized that it was important to describe language itself. At first, these explanations dealt with phonetics, the most fundamental part of speech. Indeed, the organizational scheme that we learned for the stops and nasals — starting with ‘ka’ and neatly progressing to ‘ma’ — was likely developed some time around 800 BCE.

As far as we know, this moment marks the beginning of linguistics, the rigorous and scientific study of language. But mere "description" of language slowly became more comprehensive, and as the musings of a few learned men became a rigorous and standardized study of language, the description of Sanskrit became more and more complete. Various theories of language's purpose and nature emerged, and different models were created for its use. But none excelled the one devised by Panini.

PANINI

We know almost nothing about Panini. Scholars guess that he lived between the 5th and 3rd centuries BCE. From his work, though, it is clear that he came at the end of a long line of Sanskrit linguists. His work was the culmination of perhaps centuries of study and debate. Indeed, his work was considered so perfect that the ancient Indians did not think the work of his predecessors worth keeping. For that reason, most of the tradition's history is lost to us. But, we still have its crown jewel.

The Ashtadhyayi

The Grammatical system elaborated by native Grammarians, is in itself most perfect, and those who have tested Panini's work will readily admit that there is no Grammar in any language that could vie with the wonderful mechanism of his eight books of Grammatical rules.

As far as we know, Panini produced only one work: the Ashtadhyayi (aṣṭādhyāyī), translating to "The Eight Chapters." This work, consisting of 3,959 aphoristic rules, fits on 35 printed pages, and it describes all of Classical Sanskrit. Essentially, it describes it by definition; the term "Classical Sanskrit" refers to the entire Sanskrit that follows Panini's model. The Ashtadhyayi also includes three "appendix" works.

The Ashtadhyayi is divided into eight chapters, each of which loosely follows certain theme. The first chapter, for instance, largely focuses on defining terms and explaining how the text should be read and interpreted. The Ashtadhyayi is known for its extreme brevity, its difficulty, and its unique terminology. Panini used a special system of notation that allowed him to describe Sanskrit in as little space as possible. Brevity was one of his main concerns.

Panini’s theory of morphological analysis was more advanced than any equivalent Western theory before the mid 20th century, and his analysis of noun compounds still forms the basis of modern linguistic theories of compounding, which have borrowed Sanskrit terms such as ‘bahuvrihi’ and  ‘dvandva’.

It was Panini who first enunciated  that grammatically, Sanskrit has eight cases for the noun (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, ablative, instrumental, vocative, and locative), three genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter), three numbers for verbs, nouns, pronouns, and adjectives (singular, dual, and plural), and three voices for the verb (active, middle, and passive). The language is very highly inflected. The ancient Indian scripts known as the Brahmi and Kharosthi alphabets have been employed to record Sanskrit. Both Brahmi and Kharosthi are thought to be of Semitic origin. The Devanagari characters, which are descended from Brahmi, also were, and still are, used for writing Sanskrit. The comparison of Sanskrit with the languages of Europe, especially by Sir William Jones, opened the way to the scientific study of language in Europe in the 18th century. In fact it would not be too far fetched to say that the study of Grammar began in Europe after the discovery of Sanskrit.

Ashtadhyayi has three associated texts.

The Shiva Sutras are a brief but highly organised list of phonemes.

The Dhatupatha is a lexical list of verbal roots sorted by present class.

The Ganapatha is a lexical list of nominal stems grouped by common properties

Panini's influence

Modern linguistics acknowledges it as the most complete generative grammar of any language yet written, and continues to adopt technical ideas from it.

The Ashtadhyayi defined Sanskrit once and for all. The perfection of Panini's model encouraged all authors to follow his grammatical rules. Eventually, adherence to Panini's rules became a sort of requirement. Even the most lyrical and intricate poems in Sanskrit follow the rules of the Ashtadhyayi, with only the rare exception.

What is surprising, though, is the influence that Panini's work has in the modern day. His work influenced great modern linguists like Ferdinand de Saussure and Noam Chomsky, and his style of notation is similar to Backus-Naur form, which is used to define both human languages and programming languages.

Nominative, accusative, genitive, dative= subjective, objective, possessive, indirect object

Ablative=Sanskrit nouns in this case often refer to a subject "out of" which or "from" whom something (an action, an object) has arisen or occurred—patram vṛkṣāt patati "the leaf falls from the tree".

INSTRUMENTAL CASE

In nominal use, Modern English expresses the instrumental meaning by use of adverbialphrases that begin with the words with, by, or using then followed by the noun indicating the instrument:

I wrote the note with a pen.

I wrote the note (by) using a pen.

रामो लेखन्या लिखति।

Rāmo lekhanyā likhati.

"Rāma writes with a pen".

VOCATIVE CASE

 A vocative expression is an expression of direct address where the identity of theparty spoken to is set forth expressly within a sentence. For example, in the sentence, "I don't know, John," 

John is a vocative expression that indicates the party being addressed—as opposed to the sentence, "I don't know John," where John is the direct object of the verb "know."

Kānte= o’ wife

LOCATIVE CASE

is a grammatical case which indicates a location. It corresponds vaguely to the English prepositions "in", "on", "at", and "by". 

kamalaani kaasare santi= LOTUSES ARE IN THE LAKE 

kasar= lake          Kasare= in the lake

Lecture notes by S. Sree Kumar.