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NYAYA THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE
purpose to enter upon the long controversy between the Nyāya and the Mīmāṁsā on this point."
Sound is of two kinds, namely, dhrani and varņa.? A dhvani is an inarticulate sound, e.g. the sound of a bell or a drum. It is a confused mass of sound-sensations having no order or arrangement of its parts. It has no fixed nature of its own, nor any fixed relation to other like sounds. Dhvani is thus incapable of forming parts of any language. On the other hand, a varna is a sound produced by the action of the vocalorgan of human beings, e.g. the alphabet. A varna is a letter which has a fixed character and a definite place in the alphabet of any language All varnas or letters are constituents of human speech. They may be either spoken or written. Spoken letters are auditory sensations of significant sounds, while written letters are visual sensations of coloured figures. From the standpoint of linguistics, the cries of birds and beasts, and even of newborn babies are dumb and inarticulate They are as variable and disorderly as sounds produced by physical things. These do not lend themselves to any use as parts of any language. Hence they are included within dhvani and not made a separate class
A word is a group of varnas or letters arranged in a certain fixed order. The order of the letters in a word cannot be changed or reversed in any way without altering its meaning. Thus the word 'cow' is a grouping of the letters C-o-w in the given order If we change this order we destroy the word itself. Similarly, the words 'won' and' own,' which contain the same letters, become different because the fixed order of the letters 18 different in the two cases. While a letter is a significant sound, a word is a symbolic sound of a higher order. A letter signifies only
1 Vide NM., pp 205-32 2 Sabdo dhoanisca varnasca, etc , BP, 164 65
