Indian Antiquary Vol 14

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

Page 52

42
THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY.
rules, his illustrations, and his paradigms, from one end of the volume to the other. And a scholar of the highest rank, long resident in India, but now of Vienna, Professor Bühler, has only last year put forth a useful practical introduction to the language, with abundant exercises for writing and speaking, in which the same spirit of subservience to Hindu methods is shown in an extreme degree, and both forms and material are not infrequently met with which are not Sanskrit, but belong only to the non-existent grammarians' dialect. Its standpoint is clearly characterized by its very first clause, which teaches that "Sanskrit verbs have ten tenses and modes"-that is to say, because the native grammar failed to make the distinction between tense and mode, or to group these formations together into systems, coming from a common tense-stem, Western pupils are to be taught to do the same. This seems about as much an anachronism as if the author had begun, likewise after Hindu example, with the statement that "Sanskrit parts of speech are four: name, predicate, preposition, and particle." Further on, in the same paragraph, he allows (since the Hindus also do so) that "the first four [tenses and modes] are derived from a special present stem;" but he leaves it to be implied, both here and later, that the remaining six come directly from the root. From this we should have to infer, for example, that dadáti comes from a stem, but dadátha from the root; that we are to divide nasya-ti but dáayati, a-visa-t but a-sic-at, and so on; and (though this is a mere oversight) that ayat contains a stem, but adát a pure root. No real grammarian can talk of present stems without talking of aorist stems also; nor is the variety of the latter so much inferior to that of the former. It is only the vastly greater frequency of occurrence of present forms that makes the differences of their stems the more important ground of classification. These are but specimens of the method of the book, which, in spite of its merits, is not in its present form a good one to put in the hands of beginners, because it teaches them so much that they will have to unlearn later, if they are to understand the Sanskrit language.
This work, somewhat recast grammatically, is about to be reproduced in English by Professor Perry, of
[FEBRUARY, 1885.
One more point, of minor consequence, may be noted, in which the habit of Western philology shows itself too subservient to the whims of the Sanskrit native grammarians: the order of the varieties of present stems, and the designation of the conjugation classes as founded on it. We accept the Hindu order of the cases in noun-inflection, not seeking to change it, though unfamiliar, because we see that it has a reason, and a good one; but no one has ever been ingenious enough even to conjecture a reason for the Hindu order of the classes. Chance itself, if they had been thrown together into a hat, and set down in their order as drawn out, could not more successfully have sundered what belongs together, and juxtaposed the discordant. That being the case, there is no reason for our paying any heed to the arrangement: in fact, the heed that we do pay is a perversion. The Hindus do not speak of first class, second class, &c., but call each class by the name of its leading verb as, bhu-verbs, ad-verbs, and so on; and it was a decided merit of Müller, in his grammar, to try to substitute for the mock Hindu method this true one, which does not make such a dead pull upon the mechanical memory of the learner. As a matter of course, the most defensible and acceptable method is that of calling each class by its characteristic feature-as, the reduplicating class, the ya-class, and so on. But one still meets, in treatises and papers on general philology, references to verbs "of the fourth class," "of the seventh class," and so on. So far as this is not mere mechanical habit, it is pedantry-as if one meant to say: "I am so familiar with the Sanskrit language and its native grammar that I can tell the order in which the bodies of similarly-conjugated roots follow one another in the dhátupáthas, though no one knows any reason for it, and the Hinda grammarians themselves lay no stress upon it." It is much to be hoped that this affectation will die out, and soon.
These and such as these are sufficient reasons why an exposition like that here given is timely and pertinent. It needs to be impressed on the minds of scholars that the study of the Sanskrit language is one thing, and the study of the Hindu science of grammar another and a
Columbia College, New York.