Yāska

(Devanagari )) was a Sanskrit grammarian who preceded Pāṇini (fl. 4th c. BC), assumed to have been active in the 5th or 6th century BC.

He is the author of the Nirukta, a technical treatise on etymology, lexical category and the semantics of words. He is thought to have succeeded , an old grammarian and expositor of the Vedas, who is mentioned in his text.

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: # nāma - nouns or sustantives # ākhyāta - verbs # upasarga - pre-verbs or prefixes # nipāta - particles, invariant words (perhaps prepositions)

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'., 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.

Yāska 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, Yāska 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 Yāska's Nirukta, atomists), vs the Vaiyākarans (grammarians following Pāṇini, 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 Yāska, 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

Yāska 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

Kahrs, Eivind. On the Study of Yāska's Nirukta. Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Pune, India, 2005.

Matilal, Bimal Krishna. The word and the world: India's contribution to the study of language. Oxford, 1990.

Langacker, Ronald W. Grammar and Conceptualization. Mouton de Gruyer, 1999. ISBN 3-11-0166604-6

Rajavade, V.K. Yāska's Nirukta. Government Oriental Series Class A, no.7. Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Pune, India, 1993.

Sharma, T.R.S. Chief editor. Ancient Indian Literature, An Anthology. Volume 1, Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi, 2000. ISBN 81-260-0794-X

Footnotes

External links

Niruktam sememes

http://www.hinduwebsite.com/hinduism/concepts/vedangas.asp

Category:Ancient Sanskrit grammarians