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LANGUAGE, INDIAN THEORIES OF
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of His Philosophical Correspondents, Toronto, Ont.: University of Toronto Press. (A collection of papers with detailed bibliography.) Kretzmann, N. (1968) 'The Main Thesis of Locke's
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from Descartes to Kant, Amsterdam: North Holland. Porset, C. (1977) 'Grammatista philosophans. Les
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Philosophy in the French Enlightenment, London: Routledge. (General survey, includes a detailed bibliography.) Rousseau, N. (1986) Connaissance et langage chez
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Leibniz', in N. Jolley (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Leibniz, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 224 69. (Survey article. The volume contains a detailed bibliography.) gard, J. (ed.) (1982) Condillac et les problèmes du Langage, Geneva: Slatkine. (Collection of critical
LANGUAGE, INDIAN THEORIES OF Language is a much debated topic in Indian philosophy There is a clear concern with it in the Vedic texts, where efforts are made to describe links between earthly and divine reality in terms of etymological links between words. The earliest surviving Sanskrit grammar, Panini's intricate Aştādhyāyi (Eight Chapters), dates from about 350 BC, although arguably the first explicitly philosophical reflections on language that have survived are found in Patanjali's 'Great Commentary' on Panini's work, the Mahābhāşya (c.150 BC). Both these thinkers predate the classical systems of Indian philosophy. This is not true of the grear fifthcentury grammarian Bhartrhari, however, who in his Väkyapadīya (Treatise on Sentences and Words) draws on these systems in developing his theory of the sphota, a linguistic entity distinct from a word's sounds that Bhartrhari takes to convey its meaning
Among the issues debated by these philosophers (although not exclusively by them, and not exclusively with reference to Sanskrit) were what can be described as (i) the search for minimal meaningful units, and (ii) the ontological status of composite linguistic units. With some approximation, the first of these two issues attracted more attention during the early period of linguistic reflection, whereas the subsequent period emphasized the second one.
1 2 3 4 5
Historical sketch The search for minimal meaningful units The ontological status of composite linguistic units Early sphota theory Later sphoța theory
essays.)
aughter, M. (1982) Universal Languages and Scien
fic Taxonomy in the Seventeenth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vinkler, K.P. (1989) Berkeley: An Introduction, LOxford: Clarendon Press. (Chapters 1 and 2 deal with questions of language and abstraction in Berkeley.)
1 Historical sketch Linguistic science in India started soon after the Vedic period. The earliest grammarian whose work has survived is Pāņini (c.350 BC), author of the Astādhyāyī (Eight Chapters). This work consists of some 4,000 aphoristic statements (sūtras) which describe the Sanskrit language in considerable detail, but leave no space for explicit reflections about the nature of language. Such reflections make their appearance in the voluminous Mahābhāsya (Great Commentary) of PATANJALI (c.150 BC). The Mahābhāsya is a commentary on the Asfadhyāyi (but not on all of its sūtras), and on the aphoristic vārtikas of Kätyāyana, which comment upon Pāņini's sūtras. Another linguist whose work has been preserved and who, like Kātyāyana, appears to belong to the period between
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