Pāṇini Totally Explained

Everything about Dhatupatha totally explained

(IAST:, Devanāgarī: ; a patronymic meaning "descendant of Pani") was an ancient Indian grammarian from Gandhara (fl. 4th century BC).
   He is known for his Sanskrit grammar, particularly for his formulation of the 3,959 rules, but it's likely that the name was known via Old Persian yauna, so that the occurrence of taken in isolation allows for a terminus post quem as early as 520 BC, for example the time of the conquest of Darius the Great.
   It isn't certain whether Panini used writing for the composition of his work, though it's generally agreed that he did use a form of writing, based on references to words such as "script" and "scribe" in his Ashtadhyayi. It is believed that a work of such complexity would have been very difficult to compile without written notes, though some have argued that he might have composed it with the help of a group of students whose memories served him as 'notepads'. Writing first reappears in India (since the Indus script) in the form of the [[Brāhmī|]] script from ca. the 6th century BC, though these early instances of the Brāhmī script are from Tamil Nadu in southern India, quite distant from Gandhara in northwestern India.
   While Panini's work is purely grammatical and lexicographic, cultural and geographical inferences can be drawn from the vocabulary he uses in examples, and from his references to fellow grammarians. Deities referred to in his work include Vasudeva (4.3.98). The concept of dharma is attested in his example sentence (4.4.41) dharmam carati "he observes the law".

The Ashtadhyayi

The Ashtadhyayi is the central part of Panini's grammar, and by far the most complex. It takes material from the lexical lists (Dhatupatha, Ganapatha) as input and describes algorithms to be applied to them for the generation of well-formed words. It is highly systematised and technical. Inherent in its generative approach are the concepts of the phoneme, the morpheme and the root, only recognized by Western linguists some two millennia later. His rules have a reputation for perfection — that is, they're claimed to describe Sanskrit morphology fully, without any redundancy. A consequence of his grammar's focus on brevity is its highly unintuitive structure, reminiscent of contemporary "machine language" (as opposed to "human readable" programming languages). His sophisticated logical rules and technique have been widely influential in ancient and modern linguistics.
The Ashtadhyayi consists of 3,959 sutras (sutrani) or rules, distributed among eight chapters, which are each subdivided into four sections or padas (padani).
From example words in the text, and from a few rules depending on the context of the discourse, additional information as to the geographical, cultural and historical context of Panini can be discerned.

The rules

The first two sutras are as follows: ť 1.1.1 vṛddhir ādaiC

1.1.2 adeṆ guṇaḥ In these sutras, the capital letters are special meta-linguistic symbols; they're called IT markers or, in later writers such as Katyayana and Patanjali, anubandhas (see below). The C and Ṇ refer to Shiva Sutras 4 ("ai, au, C") and 3 ("e, o, Ṇ"), respectively, where the same markers occur, forming what is known as the pratyaharas aiC, eṆ. They denote the list of phonemes . At this point, one can see they're definitions of terminology: and are the terms for the full and the lengthened ablaut grades, respectively.

List of IT markers

its or anubandhas are defined in P. 1.3.2 through P. 1.3.8. These definitions refer only to items taught in the grammar or its ancillary texts such at the dhātupāţha; this fact is made clear in P. 1.3.2 by the word upadeśe, which is then continued in the following six rules by . As these anubandhas are metalinguistic markers and not pronounced in the final derived form,pada (word), they're elided by P. 1.3.9 - 'There is elision of that (for example any of the preceding items which have been defined as an it).' Accordingly, the anubandhas as defined by Panini are as follows:
1) Nasalized vowels, e.g bhañjO. Cf. P. 1.3.2.
   2) A final consonant (haL). Cf. P. 1.3.3.
   2a) except a dental, m and s in verbal or nominal endings. Cf. P. 1.3.4.
   3) Initial ñi ṭu ḍu. Cf. P 1.3.5
   4) Initial ṣ of a suffix (pratyaya). Cf. P. 1.3.6.
   5) Initial palatals and cerebrals of a suffix. Cf. P. 1.3.7
   6) Initial l, ś, and k but not in a taddhita 'secondary' suffix. Cf. P. 1.3.8. A few example of elements that contain its are as follows:

suP nominal desinence
Ś-IT
- Śi strong case endings
- Ślu elision
- ŚaP active marker
P-IT
- luP elision
- āP ā-stems
  - CāP
  - ṬāP
  - ḌāP
- LyaP (7.1.37)
L-IT
K-IT
- Ktvā
- luK elision
saN Desiderative
C-IT
M-IT
Ṅ-IT
- Ṅí Causative
- Ṅii ī-stems
  - ṄīP
  - ṄīN
  - Ṅī'Ṣ
- tiṄ verbal desinence
- lUṄ Aorist
- lIṄ Precative
S-IT
GHU class of verbal stems (1.1.20)
GHI (1.4.7)

Auxiliary texts

Panini's Ashtadhyayi has three associated texts. The Shiva Sutras are a brief but highly organized list of phonemes. The Dhatupatha and Ganapatha are lexical lists, the former of verbal roots sorted by present class, the latter a list of nominal stems grouped by common properties.

Shiva Sutras

The Shiva Sutras describe a phonemic notational system in the fourteen initial lines preceding the Ashtadhyayi. The notational system introduces different clusters of phonemes that serve special roles in the morphology of Sanskrit, and are referred to throughout the text. Each cluster, called a pratyāhara ends with a dummy sound called an anubandha (the so calledIT index), which acts as a symbolic referent for the list. Within the main text, these clusters, referred through the anubandhas, are related to various grammatical functions.
Use the Pratyahara Decoder at http://www.sktutilities.com/pratyaharaAction.do to understand them paradigmatically. It is also available for Free Download as a Java Utility from the same Web Site.

Dhatupatha

The Dhatupatha (dhatupatha) is a lexicon of Sanskrit verbal roots subservient to the Ashtadhyayi. It is organized by the ten present classes of Sanskrit, for example the roots are grouped by the form of their stem in the present tense.
   The ten present classes of Sanskrit are: ť 1. (root-full grade thematic presents)

   2. (root presents) ť 3. (reduplicated presents)

   4. (ya thematic presents) ť 5. (nu presents)

   6. (root-zero grade thematic presents) ť 7. (n-infix presents)

   8. (no presents) ť 9. (ni presents)

   10. (aya presents, causatives)
   Most of these classes are directly inherited from Proto-Indo-European. The small number of class 8 verbs are a secondary group derived from class 5 roots, and class 10 is a special case, in that any verb can form class 10 presents, then assuming causative meaning. The roots specifically listed as belonging to class 10 are those for which any other form has fallen out of use (causative deponents, so to speak).

Ganapatha

The Ganapatha is a list of groups of primitive nominal stems used by the Ashtadhyayi.

Commentary

After Panini, the [[Mahābhāṣya|]] ("great commentary") of Patañjali on the Ashtadhyayi is one of the three most famous works in Sanskrit grammar. It was with Patañjali that Indian linguistic science reached its definite form. The system thus established is extremely detailed as to shiksha (phonology, including accent) and vyakarana (morphology). Syntax is scarcely touched, but nirukta (etymology) is discussed, and these etymologies naturally lead to semantic explanations. People interpret his work to be a defense of Panini, whose Sūtras are elaborated meaningfully. He also attacks Katyayana rather severely. But the main contributions of Patañjali lies in the treatment of the principles of grammar enunciated by him.

Editions

Otto Böhtlingk, Panini's Grammatik 1887, reprint 1998 ISBN 3875481984

Katre, Sumitra M., Astadhyayi of Panini, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987. Reprint Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1989. ISBN 0292703945

Panini and modern linguistics

Panini, and the later Indian linguist Bhartrihari, had a significant influence on many of the foundational ideas proposed by Ferdinand de Saussure, professor of Sanskrit, who is widely considered the father of modern structural linguistics. While this is maintained by Prem Singh in his forword to the reprint edition of the German translation of Paninis Grammar in 1998, George Cardona (University of Pennsylvania) warns against an overestimation: "As far as I'm able to discern upon rereading Saussure's Memoire, however, it shows no direct influence of Paninian grammar. Indeed, on occasion, Saussure follows a path that's contrary to Paninian procedure." (cf. Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 120, No. 3, (Jul. - Sep., 2000), p. 465) Noam Chomsky has always acknowledged his debt to Panini for his modern notion of an explicit generative grammar. In Optimality Theory, the hypothesis about the relation between specific and general constraints is known as "Panini's Theorem on Constraint Ranking". Paninian grammars have also been devised for non-Sanskrit languages. His work was the forerunner to modern formal language theory (mathematical linguistics) and formal grammar, and a precursor to computing.
Panini's use of metarules, transformations, and recursion together make his grammar as rigorous as a modern Turing machine. The Backus-Naur form (Panini-Backus form) or BNF grammars used to describe modern programming languages have significant similarities to Panini grammar rules. Panini's grammar can be considered to be the world's first formal system, well before the 19th century innovations of Gottlob Frege and the subsequent development of mathematical logic. To design his grammar, Panini used the method of "auxiliary symbols," in which new affixes are designated to mark syntactic categories and the control of grammatical derivations. This technique was rediscovered by the logician Emil Post and is now a standard method in the design of computer programming languages.

Further Information

Get more info on 'Dhatupatha'.

External Link Exchanges

Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:

<a href="http://p_____ini.totallyexplained.com">Pāṇini Totally Explained</a>

Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned.