Houben 1997 - The emergence of semantics in ... the Sanskrit tradition-compressé.pdf (original) (raw)
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Semantics " in the Sanskrit tradition " on the eve of colonialism
2002
1. One of the striking features of intellectual discussions of Sanskrit authors in the centuries preceding South Asia's colonial period is the importance of semantic issues, and the sophistication with which these are approached. Major philosophical and religious topics are commonly discussed with reference to the semantic properties of relevant terms. The sophistication had developed in various directions, especially in the directions of grammar, logic, and exegesis, each with a long history in the Sanskrit tradition. The proper evaluation of discussions taking place "on the eve of colonialism" generally requires familiarity with the intellectual achievements in these directions. Major landmarks in the Sanskrit tradition pertaining to semantics have been reviewed in Houben 1997a. At this place a brief evaluative survey is given with special attention to the period presently under discussion.
Houben 2002 -- Indian_Semantics_in_History.pdf
2002
This study identifies eight landmarks in the emergence of semantics in the Sanskrit tradition that deserve to be the subject of as many research projects designed to arrive at a sharper picture of these crucial episodes in the history of Indian thought with regards to their antecedents, circumstances and influence on later developments. That the Sanskrit philosophical and linguistic tradition contains material which is relevant for modern discussions on linguistic and philosophical semantics, or even that the Sanskrit tradition has important 'original' contributions to make to these discussions, has been emphasized by several authors familiar with both areas. However, although some important beginnings have been made, it will be safe to say that the 'study of semantics in the Sanskrit tradition' has still a long way to go before it will reach maturity. In the first place, we still need proper editions and translations of many basic texts of the different periods in this tradition; in the second place, even though a considerable number of texts are already available at least in a provisionally acceptable form, there is no framework of an outline of historical developments in which each text could find its place. The observations I make in this paper are an outcome of my study of some grammarians and philosophers in the Sanskrit tradition, and more specifically of my work in a research project on The emergence of semantics in four linguistic traditions. A volume with this title, in which four authors (W. van Bekkum, I. Sluiter, and K. Versteegh, Jan E.M. Houben) deal with the emergence of semantics in the Hebrew, Greek-Latin, Arab, and Sanskrit tradition, has appeared in the series Studies in the History of the Linguistic Sciences (van Bekkum, Houben, Sluiter, Versteegh, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1997). Semantics is taken in the very general sense of -- to quote Keith Allan's definition in the Encyclopedia of Linguistics, Oxford 1992 -- “the study and representation of the meaning of language expressions, and the relationships of meaning among them” (Allan 1992: 394).
Linguistics in Premodern India
Published in "Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics". Ed. Mark Aronoff, New York, Oxford University Press, 2018
Indian linguistic thought begins around the 8 th-6 th centuries BC with the composition of Padapāṭhas (word-for-word recitation of Vedic texts where phonological rules are not applied). It took various forms over these twenty-six centuries and involved different languages (Ancient, Middle and Modern Indo-Aryan as well as Dravidian languages). The greater part of documented thought is related to Sanskrit (Ancient Indo-Aryan). Very early, the oral transmission of sacred texts-the Vedas, composed in Vedic Sanskrit-made it necessary to develop techniques based on a subtle analysis of language. The Vedas also-but presumably later-gave birth to bodies of knowledge dealing with language, which are traditionally called Vedāṅgas: phonetics (śikṣā), metrics (chandas), grammar (vyākaraṇa) and semantic explanation (nirvacana, nirukta). Later on, Vedic exegesis (mīmāṃsā), new dialectics (navya-nyāya), lexicography (nighaṇṭu and later, kośa) as well as poetics (alaṃkāra) also contributed to linguistic thought. Though languages other than Sanskrit were described in premodern India, the grammatical description of Sanskrit-given in Sanskrit-dominated and influenced them more or less strongly. Sanskrit grammar (vyākaraṇa) has a long history marked by several major steps (Padapāṭha versions of Vedic texts, Aṣṭādhyāyī of Pāṇini, Mahābhāṣya of Patañjali, Bhartṛhari's works, Siddhāntakaumudī of Bhaṭṭoji Dīkṣita, Nāgeśa's works) and the main topics it addresses (minimal meaning-bearer units, classes of words, relation between word and meaning/referent, the primary meaning/referent of nouns) are still central issues for contemporary Linguistics.
Houben 2000 - Language and Thought in the Sanskrit tradition
“Language and thought in the Sanskrit tradition.” In: History of the Language Sciences / Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaften / Histoire des sciences du langage: An International Handbook on the Evolution of the Study of Language from the Beginnings to the Present ... , 2000
Among fundamental, problematic aspects of the relation between thought and language, there are questions such as: How is language (spoken or written) perceived and understood? How is a message or idea ‘encoded’ in language? What truth-claims can be upheld for knowledge based on language? What is the relation between language and the process of thinking in general, or of logical thought in particular? A basic issue relevant to all these questions is: are thought, thinking, understanding always connected with language, not just at the level of discursive thinking which seems clearly language-related, but also at the level of vaguer thoughts and ideas? Or are there ‘cognitive episodes’ which are entirely ‘free from language’? It is this basic issue that was of crucial importance in philosophical and linguistic discussions in the Sanskrit tradition. It is on this basic issue, already evoked in Upanisadic statements, that the present article is focused. At the background of the problems of the relation between language and thought there is a larger problematic set of notions, namely language, thought and reality. Problems concerning language and thought and their relation are therefore, also in this article, inextricably bound up with ontological questions (‘what is real?’), apart from linguistic and epistemological ones.
"The Role of Specific Grammar For Interpretation in Sanskrit"
Sanskrit enjoys a place of pride among Indian languages in terms of technology solutions that are available for it within India and abroad. The Indian government through its various agencies has been heavily funding other Indian languages for technology development but the funding for Sanskrit has been slow for a variety of reasons. Despite that, the work in the field has not suffered. The following sections do a survey of the language technology R&D in Sanskrit and other Indian languages. The word `Sanskrit' means "prepared, pure, refined or prefect". It was not for nothing that it was called the `devavani' (language of the Gods). It has an outstanding place in our culture and indeed was recognized as a language of rare sublimity by the whole world. Sanskrit was the language of our philosophers, our scientists, our mathematicians, our poets and playwrights, our grammarians, our jurists, etc. In grammar, Panini and Patanjali (authors of Ashtadhyayi and the Mahabhashya) have no equals in the world; in astronomy and mathematics the works of Aryabhatta, Brahmagupta and Bhaskar opened up new frontiers for mankind, as did the works of Charak and Sushrut in medicine. In philosophy Gautam (founder of the Nyaya system), Ashvaghosha (author of Buddha Charita), Kapila (founder of the Sankhya system), Shankaracharya, Brihaspati, etc., present the widest range of philosophical systems the world has ever seen, from deeply religious to strongly atheistic.
From the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries, Indian intellectuals produced numerous Sanskrit-Persian bilingual lexicons and Sanskrit grammatical accounts of Persian. However, these language analyses have been largely unexplored in modern scholarship. Select works have occasionally been noticed, but the majority of such texts languish unpublished. Furthermore, these works remain untheorized as a sustained, in-depth response on the part of India's traditional elite to tremendous political and cultural changes. These bilingual grammars and lexicons are one of the few direct, written ways that Sanskrit intellectuals attempted to make sense of Indo-Persian culture in premodern and early modern India. Here I provide the most comprehensive account to date of the texts that constitute this analytical tradition according to three major categories: general lexicons, full grammars, and specialized glossaries. I further draw out the insights offered by these materials into how early modern thinkers used language analysis to try to understand the growth of Persian on the subcontinent.
1 Indian Lexicon: An introduction Discovering the language of India circa 3000 B.C. This is a comparative study of lexemes of all the languages of India (which may also be referred to, in a geographical/historical phrase, as the Indian linguistic area). This lexicon seeks to establish a semantic concordance, across the languages or numraire facile of the Indian linguistic area: from Brahui to Santali to Bengali, from Kashmiri to Mundarica to Sinhalese, from Marathi to Hindi to Nepali, from Sindhi or Punjabi or Urdu to Tamil. A semantic structure binds the languages of India, which may have diverged morphologically or phonologically as evidenced in the oral tradition of Vedic texts, or epigraphy, literary works or lexicons of the historical periods. This lexicon, therefore, goes beyond, the commonly held belief of an Indo-European language and is anchored on proto-Indian sememes. The work covers over 8,000 semantic clusters which span and bind the Indian languages. The basic finding is that thousands of terms of the Vedas, the Munda languages (e.g., Santali, Mundarica, Sora), the so-called Dravidian languages and the so-called Indo-Aryan languages have common roots. This belies the received wisdom of cleavage between, for example, the Dravidian or Munda and the Aryan languages. The lexicon seeks to establish an areal 'Indian' language type, by establishing semantic concordance among the so-called Indo-Aryan, Dravidian and Munda languages. The area spanned is a geographical region bounded by the Indian ocean on the south and the mountain ranges which insulate it from other regions of the Asian continent on the north, east and west. This lexicon is a tribute to the brilliant work done by etymologists and scholars of Indian linguistics, and to a number of scholars who have contributed to unravelling the enigma of the Indus (Sarasvati-Sindhu) Script and to the study of ancient Indian science and technology.