IGT: an introductionIf I raise a naïve question as to what should characterize the

‘Indian Grammatical Tradition’ in one sentence!,The answer might not be simple, but one can say something like

‘the Indian philosophers engaged themselves in ponderingover the issues of ‘epistemology and ontology’ of ‘cognizableentities’ over centuries.

These issues are complex but Indian scholars are systematic andlogical and thus the debate that emerged as differenttraditions of knowledge in the history is something that makesthe IGT different from others.

The Indian thinkers were very radical and open in drawinginspiration and information from all quarters/sectors ofknowledge to build structured argumentations and models forcharacterizing the ‘knowable entities’ (term used by Kapoor:2005;Pp 1) which helped us know what actually constitute theworld.

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This is a big claim but I guess this is justified in what they havecontributed for the overall understanding of the nature andfunction of knowledge.

Epistemology (theory of knowledge) is the branch ofphilosophy/linguistics that is concerned with the nature andscope of knowledge. It addresses the questions:

What is knowledge?How is knowledge acquired?How do we know what we know?The main debate in the field of language and philosophy has

been the nature of knowledge.It is also about how it is related to its related notions such as

truth, belief, and justification.It also deals with the means of production of knowledge as well

as the skepticism about different claims of knowledge.2

It is common to find that epistemology is seen closely related tocritical thinking.It is often defined as the study of a theory of the nature andgrounds of knowledge especially with reference to its limits andvalidity.But this definition does not capture the essential and coreunderstanding of epistemology because it is correct only in part.This is so, because epistemology defines knowledge as being of

the truth.Unlike critical thinking, epistemology nearly ignoresmechanisms, procedures and methods which are emphasized incritical thinking such as the testing of specific propositions,logical fallacies, bias, and deception found in everyday real-lifeconditions.This however, should not mean that epistemology does not havereasoning or rationale for its theorization. 3

In epistemology, we generally discuss the kind of knowledge that isusually termed or known as propositional knowledge, alsoknown as "knowledge that= is knowable."

This knowledge is distinct from the "knowledge how" and the"acquaintance-knowledge".

For example: in mathematics, it is known that 2 + 2 = 4, but it isalso possible to know how to add two numbers and getting toknow a person (e.g., oneself), place (e.g., one's hometown) andthing (e.g., cars).

The last one is known as the ‘acquaintance-knowledge’ inphilosophy.

Some philosophers(not all !) think that we must make a distinctionbetween "knowing that", "knowing how", and "acquaintance-knowledge”.

Nevertheless, since epistemology is primarily interested in‘propositional knowledge’, i.e. ‘knowledge that’, we will not letourselves get diverted in other directions. 4

The ‘ontology’ on the other hand, is the philosophical study of thenature of being, existence and reality.

This also concerns with the basic categories of BEING and theirrelations to other related things.

Ontology, traditionally listed as the major branch of philosophyknown as metaphysics, deals with questions concerning whatentities exist or can be said to exist.

This further explains how such entities can be grouped, relatedwithin a hierarchy, and subdivided according to similarities anddifferences.

I am sure you could easily extend the notion to any level oflinguistic analysis, and the ways in which linguistics organizesvarious layers (i.e. sounds, words, sentences) of human languageand correlates them to make the overall structure of the edifice.

The Indian grammarians were philosophers first and linguisticscame into being as a spin-off.

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IGT: an introductionNo introduction to Indian grammatical tradition can be

complete without talking about Sanskrit and its developmentor various work(s) that have been done for this language.

The Sanskrit grammatical tradition of vyākaraṇa /व्याकर,IPA: [ʋjɑːkərəɳə] is one of the six Vedangas which areauxiliary-disciplines or means or tools that are traditionallyassociated with the study and understanding of the Vedas.

These six tools are:• 1.Shiksha (śikṣā): phonetics and phonology (sandhi)• 2.Kalpa (kalpa): ritual• 3.Vyakarana (vyākaraṇa): grammar• 4.Nirukta (nirukta): etymology• 5.Chandas (chandas): meter• 6.Jyotisha (jyotiṣa): astronomy for calendar issues, such as

auspicious days for performing rituals. 6

The reference to vyākaraṇa is again incomplete if we do not talkabout famous work, Aṣṭādhyāyī, of Pāṇini.

The Ashtadhyayi is one of the earliest known grammars ofSanskrit.

It is known as Ashtadhyayi (अष्या्य्ा aṣṭādhyāyī) and it means"eight chapters" and has been written by Pāṇini ( 4th BCE).

He is known for his Sanskrit grammar, particularly for hisformulation of the 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology, syntaxand semantics in the grammar.

Bloomfield (1933) has described Panini's Ashtadhyayi as 'one ofthe greatest monuments of human intelligence.' It is acomplete, explicit and comprehensive grammar of both spokenand compositional Sanskrit.

Pāṇini's school:Pāṇini's Aṣṭadhyāyī , which consists of extensive analysis of the

processes of phonology, morphology and syntax, provided thebasis for hundreds of commentaries by Sanskrit grammarians.7

Pāṇini's approach was amazingly formal and his generative rulesfor deriving complex structures and sentences representmodern state of machine translation and computationallinguistics.

Indeed many of the developments in Indian Mathematics,especially in terms of place-value (VS Roman symbolic-system)and its notational system may have originated from Pāṇiniananalysis.

Pāṇini's grammar consists of four parts:Śivasūtra: phonology (notations for phonemes specified in 14

lines)Aṣṭadhyāyī: morphology (rules for complex structure)Dhātupāṭha: list of roots (classes of verbal roots)Gaṇapāṭha: (lists classes of primitive nominal stems)

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Śivasūtra (phonology ): Śivasūtra in one sentence can be explainedas the fourteen verses that organize the phonemes of theSanskrit language that was mentioned by Pāṇini in his workAṣṭādhyāyī.

For example:

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There is a fixed method to decode the sutras of each class. Each ofthese verses consists of a group of basic Sanskrit phonemesfollowed by a single 'dummy letter' (also known as anubandha)which is conventionally rendered by capital letters in Romantransliteration.

This allows Pāṇini to refer to groups of phonemes withpratyāhāras, which consist of a phoneme-letter and ananubandha (and often the vowel ‘a’ to aid pronunciation) andsignify all of the intervening phonemes.

Pratyāhāras are thus single syllables, but they can be declined (seeAṣṭādhyāyī 6.1.77 below). Therefore,

• [ aL] refers to all phonemes (because it consists of the firstphoneme a and the last anubandha L)

• [ aC] refers to vowels (i.e., all of the phonemes before theanubandha C: a i u ṛ ḷ e o ai au)

• [hL] to consonants, and so on. 10

Note that some pratyāhāras are ambiguous. The anubandha ṇ occurs twice in the list, which means that you can assign two different meanings to pratyāhāra aṇ (including or excluding ṛ,etc.); in fact, both of these meanings are used in the Aṣṭādhyāyī.

On the other hand, the pratyāhāra haL is always used in themeaning "all consonants".

The Shiva Sutras put phonemes together which has a similarmanner of articulation (e.g. śa ṣa sa // ñ m ṅ ṇ n).

Economy happens to be the main motivation and the guidingprinciple for their organization in a particular fashion.

It has been a matter of debate between scholars whether Pāṇinideliberately encoded phonological patterns in them or simplygrouped phonemes together which he needed to refer to in theAṣṭādhyāyī and which only secondarily reflect phonologicalpatterns (as argued by Paul Kiparsky and Wiebke Petersen).

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The aṣṭādhyāyī, a grammar written by Pāṇini, is the earliestcomplete grammar of Classical Sanskrit.

The notion of completeness that has been infused in Aṣṭādhyāyīremains unmatched in any ancient grammar of any language.

It inter-weaves different grammatical components having takenthe input from the lexical lists such as Dhatupatha andGanapatha.

It then describes algorithms to be applied to them for thegeneration of well-formed words and sentences.

The inter-weaving is highly systematized and technical.With a great power of its generative approach, the concepts of the

phoneme, the morpheme and the root are so well thought outthat they leave no room for any exception.

His rules have a reputation for what must be call, the perfection-that is, they are claimed to describe Sanskrit grammar withoutany redundancy. 12

Dhatupatha: The dhatupatha is a like a lexical repository ofSanskrit verbal roots that accepts the rules of Ashtadhyayi toproduce the target outputs.

It is organized by the ten classes present tense in Sanskrit, i.e. theroots are grouped by the form of their stem in the present tense.

The ten present classes of Sanskrit are:1. bhū-ādayaḥ (root-full grade thematic presents)2. ad-ādayaḥ (root presents)3. ju-ho-ti-ādayaḥ (reduplicated presents)4. div-ādayaḥ (ya thematic presents)5. su-ādayaḥ (nu presents)6. tud-ādayaḥ (root-zero grade thematic presents)7. rudh-ādayaḥ (n-infix presents)8. tan-ādayaḥ (no presents)9. krī-ādayaḥ (ni presents)10. chur-ādayaḥ (aya presents, causatives)

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Ganapatha : The Ganapatha (gaṇapāṭha) is another auxiliary modulethat is needed by the Ashtadhyayi.

It is a storage place for the list of groups of nominal stems of Sanskritlanguage.

Panini has always emphasized the importance of the verb over thenouns , however, he did prescribe the Ganapatha for various kinds ofnominal declension specially with regard to the different caseendings.

Commentators on Pāṇini :KātyāyanaPatanjaliThe NyayayikasThe MimamsakasBhartṛhariKāśikāvṛttīBhaṭṭikāvyaBuddhists (Nagarjuna and Dignaga) 14

Kātyāyana, a linguist and mathematician in 3rd BCE, has saidthat the word-meaning relation is proven or siddha, i.e.given and non-decomposable.

This idea goes just opposite to what Saussure, who studied andtaught Sanskrit, called arbitrary.

Kātyāyana also opines that the meanings refer to universalsthat are inherent in the word itself.

This is what makes the IGT different from other tradition. Thedifference is not in adopting a new approach, but prove thesame with logic.

Patanjali was a linguist and composer of yoga sutras, 2nd BCE.He is the author of Mahabhashya. He proposed the notion ofshabdapramânah.

This means that the value of words that makes them evidentialis inherent in them, and not derived externally.

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What makes the word evidential is its enunciative value and thushelps in the attainment of its meaning in the real world.

The enunciation of linguistic token must have its requiredingredients that are required to establish the value of the wordfor the real world object.

The argument that he gives to prove this natural relation betweenword and the meaning is that people do not make an effort tomanufacture words.

When we need a pot, we might have to approach a potter and askhim to make a pot for us (in old times when there was nomarket).

However, the same is not true of words. We do not usuallyapproach grammarians for requesting him to manufacturewords when we need them to speak out a concept.

This might look bit funny, but these were the issues that weredebated in those days. 16

Surprisingly, this is similar to the argument of Plato in the earlypart of Cratylus, where morphemes are described as natural.

Cratylus was an ancient Athenian philosopher from late 5thcentury BC, mostly known through his portrayal in Plato'sdialogue Cratylus.

Otherwise, we know very little about Cratylus or his mentorHeraclitus.

According to Cratylus at 402a, Heraclitus proclaimed that onecannot step twice into the same stream.

In his opinion, the world was in such constant flux that streamscould change at any instance or at every instance and the samewas true for words too.

Thus, Cratylus found communication to be impossible. As a resultof this realization, Cratylus renounced his power of speech andlimited his communication to moving his finger.

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He was an advocate of the idea that language is natural ratherthan conventional.

These issues of the word-meaning relation have been elaboratedin great detail in the IGT.

The Mahābhāṣya ("great commentary") of Patañjali on theAṣṭādhyāyī is a major early exposition on Pāṇini, along with thesomewhat earlier Varttika by Katyayana.

A varttika is a critical commentary or a gloss on a givengrammatical or philosophical work.

In this, he raises the issue of whether meaning is ascribed to aspecific instance or to a category:

kim punr kṛtih pdrth, hosvid drvym [8].What is 'meaning' (rth) [of a word]? Is it a particular instance

(drvy) or a general shape (kṛt)?The discussion take place in Patanjali in connection to a sutra

(Pāṇini 1.2.58) that states that a plural form may be used likesingular when designating a set of species (jti).

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As mentioned earlier, Patanjali dealt with how words andmeanings are associated with each other.

He claims that it is ‘shabdapramâNaH’ i.e. self evident andinherent.

The Nyaya School of thought: The philosophers of Nyaya Schoolwere know for their realist-position, a notion is closely relatedto that of Plato.

The nyayikas, who were basically logicians, considers the word-meaning relation as created through human convention.

According to them, the sentence meaning is principallydetermined by the main verb and its relation with the noun.

The Nyaya school propounded four major sources of knowledge:perception, inference, comparison and testimony.

They said that the knowledge obtained through each of thesesources can still be either valid or invalid.

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As a result, they further went on identifying and explaining as towhat it may take to make the knowledge valid and invalid.

In this way, Nyaya is probably the first and closest equivalent tocontemporary ‘analytical philosophy’.

The Nyaya metaphysics recognizes sixteen categories for theattainment of the knowledge.

These sixteen categories are:pramāṇ (valid means of knowledge)

pramey (objects of valid knowledge)

saṁśaya (doubt)prayojan (aim)dṛṣṭānt (example)siddhānt (conclusion)avayav (members of syllogism)

tark (hypothetical reasoning)

nirṇay (settlement)vād (discussion)jalp (wrangling)vitaṇḍā (cavilling)hetvābhāsa (fallacy)chal (quibbling)jāti (sophisticated refutation)

nigrahasthāna (point of defeat)

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As we already saw in the earlier slide that the main source ofknowledge was grounded in four valid means, the Nyayaepistemology considers knowledge or cognition as achievement(upalabdhi) or consciousness (anubhava).

The Naiyayikas accepted four valid means (pramaṇa) for obtainingvalid knowledge (prama) - perception (pratyakṣa), inference(anumāna), comparison (upamāna) and verbal testimony(śabda).

The Invalid knowledge on the other hands, includes memory(smṛti), doubt (saṁśaya), error (viparyaya) and hypotheticalreasoning (tarka).

I wish I could go on explaining each of these in details to showwhat is means for Nyaya school of thought and how Gautama,the author of Nyaya-sutras, explains the most rigorous and yetself explanatory way to attain the valid knowledge through hisproposed sixteen categories, but this would mean teaching theIGT for the semester and not Historical linguistics.

So, I will cut short the slide on Nyaya and move on …. 21

Mīmāṃsā is a Sanskrit word which means ‘investigation’ and it isa school of Hindu philosophy whose primary enquiry is intothe nature of dharma based on close relationship to theVedas.

Mimamsa is mainly concerned with textual interpretation, andconsequently gave rise to the study of philology and thephilosophy of language.

Mimansakas opine that the notion of shabda "speech" is anindivisible unity of sound and meaning (signifier and signified).

In the field of epistemology, the Prābhākara school recognizesfive pramanas (means of valid knowledge) and the KumārilaBhaṭṭa school recognizes six.

In addition to the four pramanas (pratyakṣa, anumāna, upamānaand śabda) accepted by the Nyaya school, the Prābhākaraschool recognizes arthāpatti (presumption) and the Bhāṭṭaschool recognizes both arthāpatti and anuapalabdhi (non-apprehension) as the valid means of knowledge. 22

A more interesting feature of the Mimamsa school of philosophy isits unique epistemological theory of the intrinsic validity of allcognition.

They believed that all knowledge is ipso-facto true(Satahprāmāṇyavāda).

Thus, what is to be proven is not the truth of cognition, but itsfalsity.

The Mimamsakas advocate the self-validity of knowledge both inrespect to its origin and ascertainment.

Not only did the Mimamsakas make the very great use of thistheory to establish the unchallengeable validity of the Vedas,but later Vedantists also drew inspiration from Mimamsakas’contribution.

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Bhartṛhari is the most important thinker in the field ofvyākaraṇa (linguistic analysis/grammar), and largely responsiblefor its establishment as an independent philosophical system.

Bhartṛhari , a grammarian of the school of Pāṇini, wrote his majorwork Vākyapadīya.

He developed a complex, unique, and highly influential theory ofspeech (śabda) or language in it.

Language for him is an activity that can be linked to the vibration(spanda) of consciousness.

It has two levels; underlying or inner speech (sphoṭa), the bearerof meaning, which is an integral part of everyone'sconsciousness, and its derivative, or manifestation, articulatesound (enunciation or dhvani), through which meaning ‘burstsforth’.

The entire universe has evolved out of a single principle, theśabda-brahman (the ‘eternal verbum’ or ‘word-essence’),i.e. the ultimate reality.

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Bhartṛhari’s Sphoṭa theory is an important contribution in thefield of philosophy of language by the IGT of Vyakarana.

The theory is related to the problem of speech production,and how the mind systematizes the linguistic units intocoherent order to achieve the desired meaning.

He theorized the act of speech as being made up of threeelements:

1. Conceptualization by the speaker (Paśyantī "idea")2. Performance of speaking (Madhyamā "medium)3. Comprehension by the interpreter (Vaikharī "complete

utterance")Bhartṛhari belongs to the school which identifies language

and cognition as one and the same.According to Cardona (1980), "Vākyapadīya is considered to

be the major Indian work of its time on grammar,semantics and philosophy.” 25

Although, the sphoṭa theory is generally associated withBhartṛhari, the term has a longer history of use in the IGT, andBhartṛhari may have rebuilt the ideas of his predecessors.

The Sphoṭa is etymologically derived from the root sphuṭ whichmeans 'to burst'.

It has been used by Patañjali to refer to the ‘bursting forth’ ofmeaning in the mind as language is uttered.

In the Vākyapadīya, the term sphoṭa takes on a finer nuance, butthere is some disagreement among scholars as to whatBhartṛhari intended to say.

Sphoṭa retains its invariant attribute, but its indivisibility has beenemphasized in great detail and it operates at several linguisticlevels.

Bhartṛhari develops this doctrine in a metaphysical setting, wherehe views sphoṭa as the language capability of man, revealing hisconsciousness. 26

Indeed, the ultimate reality is also expressible in language, and thisultimate reality is what Bhartṛhari calls the śabda-brahman.

Bhartṛhari's sphoṭa might have been termed as a mystical notion,owing to the metaphysical underpinning of Bhartṛhari'sVākyapādiya, but it appears to be more of a psychologicalnotion.

Also, the notion of ‘insight’ or "revelation" which finds a centralplace in the discussion to the concept has also bestowed itselfto this viewpoint.

However, the modern view is that it is perhaps a morepsychological distinction.

Bhartṛhari expands on the notion of sphoṭa in Patañjali, anddiscusses three levels:

1. varṇa-sphoṭa, at the syllable level2. pada-sphoṭa, at the word level3. vakya-sphoṭa, at the sentence level 27

The verse I.93 in Vākyapādiya, Bhartṛhari states that the 'sphota' isthe universal for several layers of linguistic utterances:sentence-type or word-type, syllable-type.

He makes a distinction between sphoṭa, which is whole andindivisible, and 'nāda', the sound, which is sequenced andtherefore divisible.

The sphoṭa is the causal root, i.e. the intention, behind anutterance, in which the sense is similar to the notion of lemmain most psycholinguistic theories of speech production.

However, sphoṭa arises also in the listener, which is different fromthe lemma position.

Uttering the 'nāda' (sequence of sounds) induces the same mentalstate or sphoṭa in the listener - it comes as a whole, in a flash ofrecognition or enunciation (pratibhā, 'shining forth').

This is particularly true for vakya-sphoṭa or sentence-vibration,where the entire sentence is thought of (by the speaker), andgrasped (by the listener) as a whole.

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The relevance the sphoṭa theory in modern times is that it hasinfluenced many scholars like Saussure, Bloomfield andJakobson.

Saussure is said to have worked for his doctoral work on thegenitives in Sanskrit.

Later, he taught Sanskrit and Indo-European languages at the Parisand at the University of Geneva for nearly three decades.

It has been pointed out by several scholars that Saussure musthave been influenced by some ideas of Bhartṛhari, particularlythe sphoṭa debate.

In particular, his description of the sign, as composed of thesignifier and the signified, where these entities are notseparable.

Saussure’s method of mapping the sound images that constitutethe signifiers for the sign seems to have some coloring of sphoṭain it. 29

Many other prominent European scholars around 1900, includinglinguists such as Leonard Bloomfield and Roman Jakobson mayhave been influenced by the sphoṭa theory of Bhartṛhari aswell.

The Kāśikāvṛttī is known as the kāśikāvṛttī because it wascomposed in Kāśi, i.e. Varanasi and is a commentary on Pāṇini,attributed to Jayaditya and Vamana, composed in the 7thcentury.

The Kāśikāvṛttī is considered the "fourth great grammar" ofSanskrit, after Pāṇini’s Aṣṭadhyāyī (4th BCE), Patanjali'sMahabhasya (2nd BCE) and Bhartrhari's Vakyapadiya (6th AD).

Bhaṭṭikāvya or ‘Bhatti's Poem’ is a Sanskrit language poem datingto the 7th century AD.

It focuses on two deeply-rooted Sanskrit traditions such as theRamayana and Panini's grammar.

It is said to be a great blend of science and art whereby itpoetically glorifies the adventures of Rama and explains the30

The core text for this study was the very difficult i.e. Aṣṭādhyāyī ofPāṇini which was the most remarkable and indeedfoundational text in the history of linguistics.

It also represented the most compact form and sophisticatedmeta-language.

This grammar of Pāṇini had been the object of intense study forthe ten centuries prior to the composition of “Bhaṭṭi’s Poem”.

Bhaṭṭi’s purpose was to provide a study-aid to Pāṇini’s text byusing the examples that already existed in the grammaticalcommentaries.

To the dry bones of this grammar, Bhaṭṭi has infused an elegantand simple description in his poem.

The intention of the author was to teach these advanced sciencesthrough a relatively easy and pleasant medium.

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Buddhist scholars have produced a remarkable quantity ofintellectual theories, philosophies and world view concepts.

Buddhism received significant theoretical grounding fromNagarjuna. He was the most influential scholar within theMahayana tradition.

Nagarjuna's primary contribution to Buddhist philosophy was thesystematic exposition of the concept of śūnyatā, or "emptiness“.

The concept of emptiness brings together other key Buddhistdoctrines, particularly anatta and pratītyasamutpāda(dependent origination) in order to refute the metaphysics ofSarvastivada (the existence of all dharmas) and Sautrantika(extreme momentariness).

For Nagarjuna, it is not merely sentient beings that are empty ofātman, but all phenomena (dharmas) are without any svabhava("self-nature"), and thus without any underlying essence;

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they are "empty" of being independent; thus the heterodoxtheories of svabhava circulating at the time were refuted on thebasis of the doctrines of early Buddhism.

Nagarjuna's school of thought is known as the Mādhyamaka. Someof the writings attributed to Nagarjuna made explicit referencesto Mahayana texts, but his philosophy was argued within theparameters set out by the agamas(scriptures in Buddhism).

Debates concerning philosophical problems on language occupy acentral place in Buddhist scriptures.

According to Buddhist tradition, language is not a dharma (anentity of reality) in itself but a combination of three differentdharmas ; phonemes, words, and sentences.

These three linguistic dharmas have a peculiar nature in that theyare different from material entities, from mind—considered byBuddhism as pure consciousness—and from mental factors,which are affective and intentional states. 33

Every concrete activity of thought is a manipulation of phonemesinto words and thus in sentences, the only structures ofordinary language endowed with meaning.

For this reason, linguistic dharmas belong to a group ofincorporeal entities, neither material nor mental.

Buddhist thought conceives of language as the main tool forbuilding up and articulating phenomenal reality.

Linguistic descriptions of the world have no absolute truth value.language is an instrument of fallacious knowledge.

It creates reality as perceived and constructed in ordinary states ofconsciousness through categorization and conceptualization ofperceptual data and their semantic articulation.

It is also because the yogācāra epistemology, a radicalconstructivism, language has the function of articulating a worldof illusion through the power of semiotic “seeds”.

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Non-enlightened people consider their own ordinary image of theworld to be true and corresponding to reality since theyattribute to the objects characteristics peculiar to linguisticexpressions (autonomy, immutability, homogeneity).

Such confusion of ontology with epistemology of reality with itslinguistic descriptions and mental images is called avidyā(ignorance) in Buddhism.

Epistemological ignorance is the first cause of existential suffering.Therefore, there is an absolute gap separating language fromtrue reality.

The tradition of the great Indian philosopher Nāgārjuna inparticular developed this systematic philosophical position ofśūnyatā, or "emptiness.

That’s all 35