English
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, however, have grown familiar with it before a grammarian would make a rule as to how to form from Yavana, ‘Greek, INTRODUCTION xi a derivative form meaning ‘Greek writing *. It seems therefore hardly possible to place Panini earlier than about 300 b.c. I 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 in medium-sized Devanagarl 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 once the shortest and fullest grammar in the world. 1 In his endeavour to give an exhaustive survey of the bhdsd 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 Vedic language, taken as a whole, thus shows many gaps, 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, attri¬ buting to the Veda the most unbounded grammatical license e specially in interchanging or dropping inflections. Th® grammar of Panini is a iabdanuidsana , or ‘ Treatise on Words , the fundamental principle of which is, that all nouns are derived from verbs. Starting with the simplest elements into which words can be analysed, root, affix and termination, Paniui shows how nominal and verbal stems are formed from roots knd 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 Panmi's word-formation, that he recognizes deri¬ vation by suffixes only. Thus when a verbal root like bhid * to £®l C A i “.“ ed ■“‘('enomiaul sense of ‘piercerhe hasrecourse the highly artificial expedient of assuming an imaginary suffix for which a blank is substituted I ' 1 Yaska records that the universality of Sakatayana’s princinle of noons being derived from verbs was contested by P Qargya who objected to the forced etymologies resulting from a generei XI1 INTRODUCTION application of this principle. Gargya maintained that if aira, 1 liorse,’ for instance, were derived from ai, ‘to travel,’ not only would everything that travels be called aha, and everything be named after all its activities, but states of being ( bhdva) would be antecedent to things (which are presupposed by those states). a concession to Gargya’s objection by excluding all words the derivation of which is difficult owing to their form or meaning, as aha, ‘horse,’go,‘cow,’ and purusa , 1 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 being u , technically called un, the whole list of these formations received the name of unddi (‘beginning with un’). 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 the Unadi Sutra with the commentary (dating probably from the thirteenth century a.d.) of Ujjvala- datta. In its extant shape this Sutra contains some late words, such as dinara (Lat. denarius), a noun which cannot have come into use in India much before ioo a.d. The proper object of Panini’s grammar being derivation, he does not deal with phonetics as such, but 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 Unadi Sutra, move within the bounds of probability and are generally correct, being in many cases confirmed by comparative philology, he actually did discover several phonetic laws. The most important of these was the interchange of vowels with their strong grades guna and vrddhi (cp. 17), which Grimm 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 PrfitiSakhyas, the phonetic treatises of the Vedic schools. Panini also treats of the accents of words in derivation and in the sentence, but with syntax in our sense he does not deal, perhaps owing to the simplicity of the sentence in Sanskrit. INTRODUCTION XII i The general plan of Panini’s work is as follows : Book i. con¬ tains the technical terms of the grammar and its rules of inter¬ pretation; ii. deals with nouns in composition and case relations; iii. teaches how suffixes are to be attached to verbal roots ; iv. and v. explain the same process with regard to nominal stems; vi. 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 woi-ds. 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 his grammar, Panini resorts to various devices, such as ellipse of the verb, the use of the caseB 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 whoie rule can often be expressed by a single word. Thus the ablative dhatoh , literally ‘after a root \ not only means ‘to a root the following suffixes are attached\ but is also an adhikara extend- mgits influence (anuvrtti) over some 540 subsequent aphorisms. l he principle of 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-asa, compound, or express a category by an example, as dvi-gu (‘two^ w ), numeral compound/ are probably all borrowed from pre- decessors. But most of his technical terms are arbitrary groups of letters resembling algebraic symbols. Only a few of these are ‘tht e la M n ! 0 f ?. CtUal WOrda ' as U > ‘indicatory letter/ from iti, thus. Most of them are the result of great deliberation, being it I y^tnposed of letters rarely occurring in the language. Thus verl! etter ta ^ G i n aS a Bymbo1 of the personal endings of the mnnd ; w blUe ^- Wlfc J h a . c f rebral t refers to a primary tense or ’ * Ut W 7 ith ft S^ral n it denotes a secondary or mood. Thus lat, li(, lut, let , lot, mean present, perfect, XIV INTRODUCTION future, subjunctive, and imperative respectively; lan, lun, lin, imperfect, aorist, and potential. Panini’s grammar begins with the alphabet arranged on scien¬ tific principles. To several of its letters is attached an it or anubandha (indicatory letter), by means of which can be formed convenient contractions (called pratyahara) designating different groups of letters. The vowels are arranged thus : a i u-n , r /-k, e o-h, ai au-c. By means of the indicatory letter at the end of the group, all the simple vowels can be expressed by ak , the simple vowels together with the diphthongs by ac. As the last letter in Sanskrit is h, written ha-l, the entire alphabet is ex¬ pressed by the symbol al (much as if we were to express it by az). Indicatory letters are also attached to suffixes, roots, and words in order to point to certain rules as applicable to them, thus aiding the memory as well as promoting brevity. Panini’s work has two appendixes, to which it refers. , One of these is the Dhatu-patha, or ‘List of Verbal Roots’, arranged according to conjugational classes, the mode of inflexion being expressed by accents and indicatory letters. A striking fact about this collection is that of its 2,000 roots (many of which are, how¬ ever, merely variants of one form) only about 800 have yet been found in Sanskrit literature, while it omits about fifty Vedic verbs. The second appendix is the Gana-patha, or ‘List of Word- groups \ Panini gives rules applicable to the whole of a group by referring to its first word. This collection, which contains many words occurring in Vedic works only, has been less well preserved than the Dhatu-patha. The Ganas were metrically arranged in the Gana-ratna-mahodadhi , or ‘Ocean of the Gems of Word-groups’, a work composed by Vardhamana in 1140 A. D. Panini’s work very early acquired a canonical value, and has continued, for at least 2,000 years, to be the standard of usage and the foundation of grammatical studies in Sanskrit. On account of the frequent obscurity of a work which sacrifices every consideration to brevity, attempts soon began to be made to explain it, and, with the advance of grammatical knowledge, to correct and supplement its rules.