Dr.Rupnathji ( Dr.Rupak Nath ) Introduction

A SANSKRIT GRAMMAR FOE STUDENTS BY ARTHUR A. MACDONELL M.A., PH.D., LL.D.(Edin.), D.O.L. (Calcutta) late Boden Professor of Sanskrit in the University Christ! of Oxford ; Hon. Fellow of Corpus College j Fellow of the British Academy THIRD EDITION OXFOBD UNIVERSITY PRESS DR.RUPNATHJI ( DR.RUPAK NATH ) INTRODUCTION BRIEF HISTORY OF SANSKRIT GBAMMAR THE first impulse to the study of grammar in India was given by the religious motive of preserving intact the sacred Vedic texts, the efficacy of which was believed to require attention to every letter. Thus, aided by the great transparency of the Sanskrit language, the ancient Indian grammarians had by the fifth century B.C. arrived at scientific results unequalled by any other of their distinctive achieve- nation antiquity. It is, for instance, ment to have recognized that words for the most part consist on the one hand of roots, and on the other of affixes, which, when compounded with the former, modify the radical sense in various ways. The oldest grammar that has been preserved is Panini's. It already represents a fully developed system, its author standing at the end of a loiig line of predecessors, of whom no fewer than sixty-four are mentioned, and the purely grammatical works of all of whom, owing to the excellence and comprehensiveness of his work, have entirely perished. Panini is considerably later than Yaska (probably about 500 B,C.), whom he mentions, and between whom and himself a good number of important grammarians intervene. On the other hand, Paniiu is much older than his interpreter Patafijali, who probably dates from the latter half of the second century B. c., the two being separated by another eminent grammarian, Katya- yana. Pftnini himself uses the word yavanml, which Kiityayana ' as ' of the Tavanas explains writing (i.e. laones or Greeks). Now it ig not at all likely that the Indians should have become acquainted with Greek writing before the invasion of Alexander in 327 B.C. But the natives of the extreme north-west, of whom Panini in all probability was one, would naturally have become acquainted with it soon after that date. They must, howeve^, have grown familiar with it before a grammarian would make a rule as to how to form from Tavana, 'Greek/ DR.RUPNATHJI ( DR.RUPAK NATH ) INTRODUCTION xi a derivative form meaning 'Greek writing \ It seems therefore hardly possible to place Pan in i earlier than about 300 B.C. Panini's grammar consists of nearly 4,000 rules divided into eight chapters. Being composed with the utmost imaginable brevity, each Sutra or aphorism usually consists of only two or three words, and the whole work, if printed continuously iu medium-sized Devanfigarl type, would not occupy more than about thirty-five pages of the present volume. And yet this grammar describes the entire Sanskrit language in all the details of its structure, with a completeness which has never been equalled elsewhere. It is at oiice the shortest and fullest grammar in the world. In his endeavour to give an exhaustive survey of the bhasa or classical Sanskrit with a view to correct usage, Panini went on to include within the scope of his grammar the language of the sacred texts, which was no longer quite intelligible. He accordingly gives hundreds of rules about the Veda, but without completeness. His account of the Yedic language, taken as a whole, thus shows many gap?, important matters being often omitted, while trifles are noticed. In this part of his work Panini shows a decided incapacity to master his subject-matter, atlri- " bating to the Veda the most unbounded grammatical license, especially iu interchanging or dropping inflections. ' The grammar of Panini is a Sabdanuiasana, or Treatise on all Words ', the fundamental principle of which is, that nouios are derived from verbs. Starting with the simplest elements into which words can be analysed, root, affix and termination, Panini shows how nominal and verbal stems are formed from roots and complete words from stems. He at the same time indicates the functions which words acquire by the addition of formative elements and by being compounded with other words. It is a peculiarity of Paniui's word-formation, that he recognizes deri* i vation by suffixes only. Thus when a verbal root like bhid, to pierce/ is used in the nominal sense of 'piercer', he has recourse to the highly artificial expedient of assuming an imaginary suffix, for which a blank is substituted I Yaska records that the universality of Sakal&yana's principle of nouns being derived from verbs was contested by Gargy&, who objected to the forced etymologies resulting from a general DR.RUPNATHJI ( DR.RUPAK NATH ) xii INTBODTJCTION application of this principle. Gargya maintained that if aiva, 1 horse/ for instance, were derived from ai, 'to travel/ not only would everything that travels be called aiva, and everything he named after all its activities, but states of being (Ihwva) would he antecedent to things (which are presupposed by those states). Panini makes a concession to Gargya's objection by excluding all words the derivation of which is difficult owing to their form l or meaning, as aiva, horse/ go,' cow/ andpun^a/man/ Primary nouns of this kind had been collected before Panini's time in a special list, in which they were often forcibly derived from verbal roots by means of a number of special suffixes. The first of these suffixes u called the whole list of these being 9 technically un, formations received the name of with un&di (' beginning tin'). Panini refers to all such words as ready-made stems, the formation of which does not concern him. The Unadi list which Panini had before him survives, in a somewhat modified form, as theTJnSdi Sutra with the commentary (dating probably from the thirteenth century JLD.) of Ujjvala- datta. In its extant shape this Sutra contains some late words, such as dlndra (Lat, denarius), a noun which cannot have come into use in India much before 100 A.D. The proper object of Panini's grammar being derivation, he does not deal with phonetics as such, hut only incidentally as affecting word-formation, or the combination of words in a sentence. He therefore does not give general rules of phonetic change, but since his analyses, unlike those of the Un&di Sutra, move within the bounds of probability and are generally correct, in cases being many confirmed by comparative philology, he actually did discover several phonetic laws. The most important of these was the of interchange vowels with their strong grades gwa and vrddhi (cp. iy), which Grimin called ablaut, and which comparative grammar traces to the original Indo-European language. The other great phonetic discoveries of the Indians had already been made by Panini's predecessors, the authors of the original Prfiti&khyas, the phonetic treatises of the Vedic schools. P&nini also treats of the accents of words in derivation and in the but with in sentence, syntax our sense he does not deal, perhaps owing to the simplicity of the sentence in Sanskrit. DR.RUPNATHJI ( DR.RUPAK NATH ) INTEODUCTION xiii of Panini's The general plan work is as follows : Book i, contains the technical terms of the grammar and its rules of inter- pretation; ii. deals with nouns in composition antf case relations; iii. teaches how suffixes are to be attached to verbal roots ; iv. and v. the same with to nominal stems vi. explain process regard ; and vii. describe the accent and phonetic changes in the formation of words, while viii. treats of words in a sentence. This general plan is, however, constantly interrupted by single rules or by a series of rules, which were added by the author as a result of progressive grammatical studies, or transferred from their natural context to their present position in order to economize words. In formulating his rules, Panini makes it his aim to express them in as abstract and general a way as possible. In this he occasionally goes so far as to state a general rule for a single case; while, on the other hand, he sometimes fails to collect a number of related phenomena under a single head. In carrying out the principle of extreme conciseness dominating to his grammar, Panini resorts various devices, such as ellipse of the verb, the use of the cases in a special technical sense, and the employment of heading rules (adhikara) which must be supplied with a number of subordinate rules that follow. By such means a whole rule can often be expressed by a single word. Thus the 'after a root ablative dJtatoh, literally ', not only means 'to a root the following suffixes are attached', but is also an adhikara extend- ing its influence (anuvrtti) over some 540 subsequent aphorisms. of The principle brevity is, moreover, notably applied in the invention of technical terms. Those of Panini's terms which are real words, whether they describe the phenomenon, as sam-dsa, 'compound/ or express a category by an example, as dvi-gu ('two- cow'), 'numeral compound/ are probably all borrowed from predecessors. But most of his technical terms are arbitrary groups of letters resembling algebraic symbols. Only a few of these are abbreviations of actual words, as it, 'indicatory letter/ from iti, 'thus.' Most of them are the result of great deliberation, being chiefly composed of letters rarely occurring in the language. Thus the letter I was taken as a symbol of the personal endings of the verb combined with a cerebral t it refers to a tense or ; primary mood, but combined with a guttural n it denotes a secondary tense or mood.

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