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The Sanskrit grammatical tradition of vyākaraṇa (Devanagari व्याकरण) is one of the six Vedanga disciplines. It has its roots in late Vedic India, and includes the famous work, Aṣṭādhyāyī, of Pāṇini (ca. 4th century BCE).

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 has been lost; for example, the work of Sakatayana (roughly 8th c. BCE) is known only from cryptic references by Yaska (ca. 6th-5th c. BCE) 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. CE, and has echos in the present day in current debates about semantic compositionality.

Contents 1 Pre-Pāṇinian schools 2 Pāṇini's school 3 Medieval Accounts 4 Mughal period 5 Modern Sanskrit grammarians 5.1 Beginning of Western scholarship 5.2 19th century 5.3 20th century to present 6 References 7 See also

[edit] Pre-Pāṇinian schools

Panini's Ashtadhyayi, which is said to have eclipsed all other contemporary schools of grammar, mentions the names of eleven^{[citation needed]} schools of Sanskrit grammar that preceded it. The scholars representative of these schools are:

• Aindra
• Śākaṭāyana
• Āpiśali (Pan. 6.1.92)
• Śākalya
• Kāṣakṛtsna
• Gārgya
• Gālava (Nir. 4.3)
• Kāśyapa (Pan. 8.4.67)
• Senaka (Pan. 5.4.112)
• Sphoṭāyana (Pan. 6.1.123)
• Candravarmaṇa^{[citation needed]}
• Kuṇaravāḍava (Pan. 3.2.14; 7.3.1)

There is no surviving evidence of any of these schools that predates Panini except for Yāska's Nirukta. Yāska was a grammarian in the tradition of Śākaṭāyana who predated Panini by about a century. In Yāska's time, nirukta "etymology" was in fact a school in opposition to vyakarana "grammar" According to the nairuktas or "etymologists", all nouns are derived from s verbal root. Yāska defends this view and attributes it to Śākaṭāyana. Yāska also reports the view of Gārgya, who opposed Śākaṭāyana who held that certain nominal stems were 'atomic' and not to be derived from verbal roots^[1]

Of the remaining schools, we know only what Yaska, Panini and later authors attribute to them, their original works being lost. Śākalya is held to be the author of the padapatha of the Rigveda (a word-by-word analysis of the mantra text).

[edit] Pāṇini's school

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, 3rd c. BCE): 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, 2nd c. BCE) - 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. CE).
• Bhartṛhari (c. 6th c. CE) that meaning is determined by larger contextual units than the word alone (holism).
• Kāśikāvṛttī (7th century)
• Bhaṭṭi (c. 7th c. CE) exemplified Pāṇini's rules in his courtly epic the Bhaṭṭikāvya^[2].
• The Buddhist school, including Nagarjuna (logic/philosophy, c. 150 CE) Dignaga (semantics and logic, c. 5th c. CE), Dharmakirti.

[edit] Medieval Accounts

The earliest external historical accounts of Indian grammatical tradition is from Chinese Buddhist pilgrims to India from the 7th century ^[3].

• 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.

[edit] Mughal period

Early Modern (Mughal period, 17th century) Indian linguists who revived Panini's school include Bhattoji Dikshita and Varadaraja.

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.

Gaudiya Vaishnava Sanskrit grammar is outlined by Jiva Goswami in his Hari-nāmāmṛta-vyākaraṇam.^[4]

[edit] Modern Sanskrit grammarians

[edit] Beginning of Western scholarship

• Jean Francois Pons
• Henry Thomas Colebrooke
• August Wilhelm von Schlegel
• Wilhelm von Humboldt
• Dimitrios Galanos

[edit] 19th century

• Ramakrishna Gopal Bhandarkar
• Franz Kielhorn
• William Dwight Whitney
• Bruno Liebich
• Otto Boehtlingk
• Georg Bühler
• Franz Bopp
• Jacob Wackernagel, Altindische Grammatik

[edit] 20th century to present

• Leonard Bloomfield
• Paul Thieme
• Karl Hoffmann
• Louis Renou
• Bimal Krishna Matilal
• Johannes Bronkhorst
• George Cardona
• Paul Kiparsky
• Frits Staal
• Michael Witzel
• Kshetresa Chandra Chattopadhyaya
• Vagish Shastri

[edit] References

1. ^ Matilal, Bimal Krishna (1990/2001), The word and the world: India's contribution to the study of language, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-565512-5 8f.
2. ^ Fallon, Oliver. 2009. Bhatti’s Poem: The Death of Rávana (Bhaṭṭikāvya). New York: Clay Sanskrit Library[1]. ISBN 978-0-8147-2778-2 | ISBN 0-8147-2778-6 |
3. ^ Frits Staal, A Reader on the Sanskrit Grammarians, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1972), reprint by Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi (1985), ISBN 81-208-0029-X.
4. ^ Sri Jiva - Hari-nāmāmṛta-vyākaraṇam

• 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.

[edit] See also

• Schools of Sanskrit grammar
• Aindra school of grammar
• Sanskrit in the West
• Hari-namamrta-vyakarana