Linguistics in ancient India

14#14 (or 3rd C B.C.?) 15#15 Eight volumes on Sanskrit Grammar.

16#16 was followed by Patañjali (150 B.C.) 17#17 and Bhartrhari (7th C. A.D.) 18#18 (The latter regarded the sentence as a single undivided unit conveying its meaning ``in a flash'' eg. Fetch a cuckoo from the woods.)

Panini's work was the culmination of a long line of previous research (many detailed treatises on phonetics and phonology were written between 800-150 B.C.). These were the first systematic investigations of language. The motivation was the precise and accurate preservation of Vedic texts. Sanskrit scholarship served as the model for other Indian languages including Tamil and Tibetan.

• Language was studied against the background of literary studies as well as philosophical enquiry.

• Included phonetics, phonology and morphology.

• Semantic study of words as well as sentences (in contrast, Plato and Aristotle thought of a sentence as being built up of individual words which contributed their own meanings to it). The sentence as a unit of analysis occured in the Western tradition much later and became the norm only after Chomsky.

• Phonological and phonetic study of words as isolates and words as part of sentences (also morphemes as part of words); the technical term sandhi i.e. ``joining together'' is now accepted in Western linguistics.

• Relation between perceived utterance (spoken or written) and meaningful articulated language. The respective units of these were dhvani (actual event, or individual realisation) and sphota (an abstract, unexpressed, permanent, ``ineffable'' entity). The scheme is reflected today in the distinction between phonetics and phonology - the latter relates upwards to grammar and lexis.

• Correct diagnosis of the activity of buccal cavity, lungs and nasal cavity in voicing (first seen in the West only in the 17th C and even then it was ignored). The Sanskrit alphabet is devised on segmental (?) phonemic lines.

• Verb was the core of a sentence and other words stood in relation to it, eg. as agent and object. This conceptual framework to understand systactic relationships is close to that of today's generative grammar.

• A rule system for grammatical word formation: the rules have to be applied in set order, like the rules of generative grammars. Indian grammatical rules for word compounding, like tatpurusha (``his servant'' - attributive compound, eg. ``doorknob'' and ``blackberry'') and bahuvrihi ( ``(possessing) much rice'' - exocentric compound, eg. ``turnkey'' and ``humpback'') have passed into general currency.