Y01.htm
Compiled by U Kyaw Tun (UKT), M.S. (I.P.S.T., U.S.A.), and staff of TIL (Tun Institute of Learning, http://www.tuninst.net ), from various sources. Prepared for students of TIL Computing and Language Center, Yangon, Myanmar. Not for sale.
index.htm | |Top
GramGloss-indx.htm
Contents of this page
Grammar Glossary - Y
• Yaska (Sanskrit grammarian)
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaska 080709
See also: Ancient Sanskrit grammarians
Yāska (Sanskrit: यास्कः),(6th-5th centuries B.C. according to Shukla, Georgetown University) was a Sanskrit grammarian who preceded Pānini. His famous text is Nirukta, which deals with etymology, lexical category and the semantics of words. He is thought to have succeeded Śākaṭāyana, an old grammarian and expositor of the Vedas, who is mentioned in his text. He is sometimes referred to as Yāska ācārya (ācārya = teacher).
The Nirukta attempts to explain how certain words get to have their meanings, especially in the context of interpreting the Vedic texts. It includes a system of rules for forming words from roots and affixes, and a glossary of irregular words, and formed the basis for later lexicons and dictionaries. It consists of three parts, viz.:(i) Naighantuka, a collection of synonyms; (ii) Naigama, a collection of words peculiar to the Vedas, and (iii) Daivata, words relating to deities and sacrifices.
The nirukta was one of the six vedangas or compulsory ritual subjects in syllabus of Sanskrit scholarship in ancient India.
Lexical Categories and Parts of Speech
Yāska defines four main categories of words[1]:
Yāska singled out two main ontological categories: a process or an action (bhāva), and an entity or a being or a thing (sattva). Then he first defined the verb as that in which the bhāva ('process') is predominant whereas a noun is that in which the sattva ('thing') is predominant. The 'process' is one that has, according to one interpretation, an early stage and a later stage and when such a 'process' is the dominant sense, a finite verb is used as in vrajati, 'walks', or pachati, 'cooks' (yaska-fn01).
But this characterization of Noun / Verb is inadequate, for some processes may also have nominal forms (e.g. "He went for a walk"). For this, Yaska proposed that when a process is referred to as a 'petrified' or 'configured' mass (mUrta) extending from start to finish, a verbal noun should be used, e.g. vrajyā, a walk, or pakti, a cooking. The latter may be viewed as a case of summary scanning (), since the element of sequence in the process is lacking.
These concepts are related to modern notions of grammatical aspect, the mUrta constituting the perfective and the bhāva the imperfective aspect.
Yaska also gives a test for nouns both concrete and abstract: nouns are words which can be indicated by the pronoun that.
Words as Carriers of Meaning: Atomism vs
Holism debate
As in modern
Semantic
Theory, Yaska views words as the main carriers of meaning. This view - that
words have a primary or preferred ontological status in defining meaning, was
fiercely debated in the Indian tradition over many centuries. The two sides of
the debate may be called the Nairuktas (based on Yaska's Nirukta,
atomists), vs
the
Vaiyākarans (grammarians following Panini,
holists), and
the debate continued in various forms for twelve centuries involving different
philosophers from the
Nyaya,
Mimamsa and
Buddhist schools.
In the prātishākhya texts that precede Yaska, and possibly Sakatayana as well, the gist of the controversy was stated cryptically in sutra form as "saṃhitā pada-prakṛtiḥ". According to the atomist view, the words would be the primary elements (prakṛti) out of which the sentence is constructed, while the holistic view considers the sentence as the primary entity, originally given in its context of utterance, and the words are arrived at only through analysis and abstraction.
This debate relates to the atomistic vs holistic interpretation of linguistic fragments - a very similar debate is raging today between traditional semantics and cognitive linguistics, over the view whether words in themselves have semantic interpretations that can be composed to form larger strings. The cognitive semantics view is that words constrain meaning, but the actual meaning can only be construed by considering a large number of individual contextual cues.
Etymologically, Nouns originate from verbs
Yaska also defends the view, presented first in the lost text of
Sakatayana that etymologically, most nouns have their origins in verbs. An
example in English may be the noun origin, derived from the Latin
originalis, which is ultimately based on the verb oriri, "to rise".
This view is related to the position that in defining agent categories,
behaviours are ontologically primary to, say, appearance. This was also a source
for considerable debate for several centuries (see
Sakatayana for details). •
References
• yaska-fn01
Bimal Krishna Matilal (1990). The word and the world: India's
contribution to the study of language. Oxford. Yaska is dealt with in
Chapter 3.
yaska-fn01b
• yaska-fn02
{Ronald W. Langacker ({1999).
{Grammar and Conceptualization. {Mouton de Gruyer. ISBN {3-11-0166604-6.
External links
•
Niruktam sememes
End of Wikipedia article
End of TIL file