Indian Antiquary Vol 14

Author(s): John Faithfull Fleet, Richard Carnac Temple
Publisher: Swati Publications

Page 43

FEBRUARY, 1885.]
STUDY OF HINDU GRAMMAR AND SANSKRIT.
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no intimation of any difference in character among them, or warning that a part of them may and that another part may not be drawn upon for forms to be actually used ;-all stand upon the same plane. But more than halfactually more than half-of them never have been met with, and never will be met with, in the Sanskrit literature of any age. When this fact began to come to light, it was long fondly hoped, or believed, that the missing elements would yet turn up in some corner of the literature not hitherto ransacked, but all expectation of that has now been abandoned. One or another does appear from time to time ; but what are they among 80 many P The last notable case was that of the root stigh, discovered in the Maitráyam-Sarhitá, a text of the Brahmana period, but the new roots found in such texts are apt to turn out wanting in the lists of the grammarians. Beyond all question, a certain number of cases are to be allowed for, of real roots, proved such by the occurrence of their evident cognates in other related languages, and chancing not to appear in the known literature, but they can go only a very small way indeed toward accounting for the eleven hundred unauthenticated roots. Others may have been assamed as underlying certain derivatives or bodies of derivatives- within due limits, & perfectly legitimate proceeding, but the cases tbas explainable do not prove to be numerous. There remain then the great mass, whose presence in the lists no ingenuity has yet proved sufficient to account for. And in no small part, they bear their falsity and artificiality on the surface, in their phonetic form, and in the meanings ascribed to them. We can confidently say that the Sangkrit language, known to us through a long period of development, neither had nor could have any such roots. How the grammarians came to concoct their list, rejected in practice by themselves and their own papils, is hitherto an unexplained mystery. No special student of the native grammar, to my knowledge, has attempted to cast any light upon it, and it was left for Dr. Edgren, no partisan of the
grammarians, to group and set forth the facts: for the first time, in the Journal of the American Oriental Society (Vol. XI. 1882 [but the article printed in 1879), pp. 1-55), adding a list of the real roots, with brief particulars as to their occurrence. It is quite clear, with reference to this fundamental and most important item, of what character the grammarians' Sanskrit is. The real Sanskrit of the latest period is, as concerns its roots, a true successor to that of the earliest period, and through the known intermediates. It has lost some of the roots of its predecessors, as each of these some belonging to its own predecessors or predecessor; it has, also like these, won a certain number not earlier found : both in such measure as was to be expected. As for the rest of the asserted roots of the grammar, to account for them is not a matter that concerns at all the Sanskrit language and its history; it only concerns the history of the Hindu science of grammar. That, too, has come to be pretty generally acknowledged. Every one who knows anything of the history of Indo-European etymology knows how much mischief the grammarians' list of roots wrought in the hands of the earlier more incautious and credulous students of Sanskrit: how many false and worthless derivations were founded upon them. That sort of work, indeed, is not yet entirely a thing of the past: still, it has come to be well understood by most scholars that no alleged Sanskrit root can be accepted 88 real unless it is supported by such a use in the literary records of the language as authen. ticates it-for there are such things in the later language as artificial occurrences, forms made for once or twice from roots taken out of the grammarians' list, by a natural license, which one is only surprised not to see oftener availed of: (there aro hardly more than a dozen or two of such cases quotable). That they appear so seldom is the best evidence of the fact already pointed out above, that the grammar bad, after all, only a superficial and negative influence upon the real tradition of the language.
It thus appears that a Hindu grammarian's statement as to the fundamental elements of
H
3 I have myself now in press & much faller scoount of the quotable roots of the language, with all their quotable tenne-stems and primary derivatives everything sooompanied by a definition of the period of its known ooourrence in the history of the language.
Not, indeed, universally; one may find among the selected verbs that are conjugated in full at the end of F. M. Müller'a Sanskrit Grammir, no very small number of those that are utterly unknown to Sanskrit usage ancient or modern.