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LANGUAGE, INDIAN THEORIES OF
Panini and Patañjali, is Yāska, author of the Nirukta (Etymological Explanation).
All these authors precede the formation of the classical systems of Indian philosophy; their reflections on language are therefore largely unaffected by them. This changes with BHARTRHARI (c. fifth century), perhaps the first commentator on Patanjali's Mahābhāşya, and the author of the Vakyapadiya (Treatise on Sentences and Words). Bhartphari is well aware of the philosophies of his time, and makes ample use of them to construct his own system, which he presents as the philosophy of grammar. The subsequent Pāņinian tradition accepts this philosophy (or what it preserves of it) as its own, but there are remarkably few grammarians who write treatises on it. Apart from the three principal commentators on the Vakyapadiya - Helārāja (tenth century), Punyarāja and Vrsabhadeva (dates unknown) - by far the most important among them are Kaunda Bhatta and Nägeśa Bhatta, both belonging to the most recent period of grammatical studies (after 1600). Some authors belonging to different schools of thought, however, adopt and defend some of the points of view of the grammarians. The ontological status of composite linguistic units is a subject that evokes special interest.
Knowledge of the links revealed by etymologies is important in reaching one's religious goals.
Yaska's Nirukta takes the validity of such etymol. ogies for granted, but secularizes their use. It presents etymologizing as a way to arrive at the meaning of unknown words. Moreover, only nouns and adjectives can be etymologically explained, and then only in terms of verbal forms: verbs explain nominal words and show the (or an) activity that characterizes the object named. Yāska illustrates his method with the help of known words. One might expect that this procedure would lead to the identification and isolation of the common parts found in different words (such as the common part ag of agni and agre in the above example), and would determine their meanings. But Yāska's demands with regard to the semantic adequacy of etymological explanations are so stringent that this turns out to be impossible. He insists, for example, on two different etymological explanations for words that have two meanings. This rigour forces Yāska to be very undemanding with respect to the phonetic similarity required in etymological explanations. With the help of a number of examples from grammar, he shows that phonemes may disappear, be modified, change position, and so on. The same applies, a fortiori, to etymology Similarities between words in etymological explanations may, as a consequence, be minimal: one single phoneme in common may have to do. The main thing is that one should not be discouraged; one should not stop looking for an etymological explanation simply because one does not find similar words.
It is interesting to observe that Patanjali's Mahabhâsya contains a passage which, like Yaska's Nirukta, shows how phonemes may undergo change of position, elision and modification in grammatical derivations. Unlike Yāska, Patañjali concludes from this quite explicitly that phonemes by themselves cannot have meaning, although it seems likely that Yāska, even though he does not state it in his Nirukta, drew the same conclusion as Patanjali. It appears that Yāska's semantic rigour prevented him from trying to identify the ultimate meaningful constituents of Sanskrit (as we see for ancient Greek in Plato's Cratylus, for example). This task, but on a far less ambitious scale, is left to the grammarians, among whom Pāņini is the most famous. His grammar is not an analysis of Sanskrit but a synthesis: it produces the words and sentences of the language, starting from their ultimate meaning-bearing constituents, essen. tially stems and affixes. To be precise, Panini's grammar first furnishes stems and allixes on the basis of a semantic input, and these stems and affixes are subsequently joined together, and modified where
2 The search for minimal meaningful units The different linguistic sciences of ancient India - and in particular grammar and etymological explanation - have to be understood against the background of the practice, common in the Vedic Brāhmanas (before Panini), of giving etymological explanations of names of gods and of other terms, usually related to the sacrifice and often occurring in sacred formulas (mantras). Unlike those of modern linguistics, the etymologies of ancient India have nothing to do with the origin or the history of the words concerned. They cannot, because language, and the Sanskrit language in particular, was looked upon as stable in time; from the subsequent period we know that many even believed Sanskrit to be eternal, that is, without beginning. These etymologies establish links between things and the mythological reality that hides behind them. The god Agni (fire), for example, is thus called because he was created first (agre). There are countless etymologies of this kind in the Brāhmaṇas. These texts frequently add that the gods have obscured a number of the etymological links. The god Indra, for example, is really called Indha ("the kindler') because he kindled the vital airs. However, people call him Indra because the gods are fond of the cryptic, and dislike the evident.
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