Jain Journal 2004 04

Author(s): Jain Bhawan Publication
Publisher: Jain Bhawan Publication

Page 56

SATYA RANJAN BANERJEE:ANEKĀNTAVĀDA AND LANGUAGE
257
mentioned by Goyama. Our unit of speech is the sentence and the sentence is the expression of our thoughts and ideas in the form of judgment which either affirms or negates our statement. Whatever things come to the mind of a speaker, he tries to convey his opinion to the hearer. It is said earlier that in communicating one's idea in a sentence, the idea must possess compatibility, expectancy and juxtaposition, and this will lead a sentence to logical judgment. If a sentence mirrors a judgment, it must conform to the logical law.
When we analyse the utterances of human beings, we see that the sentences may be of various forms. They could be---
(i) Assertory (āmamtani), (ii) Interrogative (pucchani) (iii) Petitionery (icchā'nulomā), (iv) Exclamatory (combination of i and iii). Apart from these, the sentences may be affirmative or negative, hypothetical or universal, personal or impersonal. Besides, the sentences may be incomplete in the form of Aposiopesis, Anakoluthon, Ellipsis and Interrogation. These are the patterns by which our expressions or utterances are made.
Besides these sententious patterns of expressing our thoughts and ideas, our sentences, irrespective of any form, may be pedantic, ironical, autobiographical, apostrophic, eulogical, logical, melodious, elliptical, and so on. This is not all. All these stylistic patterns of our expressions depend on how our thoughts and ideas are communicated to a person; on how a person utters his speeches, following any stylistic patterns. His utterances may be balanced and symmetrical, analogical and diffused, verbose and condensed. Sometimes the style may be humourous, rhythmic and emotional, interlocutory and rhetorical; their expressions may be serio-comic, antithetical, and picturesque'. Even then our modes of expressions are not limited to these patterns. They are innumerable, multi-phased; they are anekānta. And all these modes of expressions are correct and are recognised in our ordinary speech. This idea is expressed by Mahāvīra in the language-----ņa esā bhāsā mosā, “This language is not false.”
In explaining certain grammatical niceties, the Jains raised some fundamental questions on the meaning of calamāņe calie. Almost at 8.
For these ideas, see Rev. A. Darby, The Mechanism of the Sentence, Oxford University Press, Bombay, 1919, pp. 8-14;
9.
S. R. Banerjee. Samskrta Sahitya Samālocană Samgraha, Calcutta, 1996. pp. xxi - xxxii.