Yaska
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Yāska (7th century BCE, pronounced yaaska) is a Sanskrit etymologist and grammarian. His famous text is Nirukta, which deals with etymology, lexical category and the semantics of words. He is thought to have succeeded Sakatayana, an old grammarian and expositor of the Vedas, who is mentioned in his text. He is sometimes referred to as Yaska Acharya (acharya = 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 medieval India.
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[edit] Lexical Categories: Ontological Noun/verb Distinctions
Yāska defines four main categories of words[1]:
- 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'.[1] But when a process is referred to as a 'petrified' or 'configured' mass (mUrta) extending from start to finish, a verbal noun is used, e.g. vrajyā (a) walk, or pakti, (a) cooking. In the latter may be viewed as a case of summary scanning[2], 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.
[edit] 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 Vaiyaakarans (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 text, the gist of the controversy was stated cryptically in the sutra form as "saMhitA pada-prakr^tiH". According to the atomist view, the words would be the primary elements (prakr^ti) 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 considerin a large number of individual contextual cues.
[edit] 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).
[edit] References
- ^ a b 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.
- ^ {Ronald W. Langacker ({1999). {Grammar and Conceptualization. {Mouton de Gruyer.
