Alternative paninian grammar: Narayana Bhatta

Objectives

This project addresses the question: How functions, in detail, the most important grammar of the language of more than 2500 years of sanskrit and vedic literature?.

Panini’s grammar, the Astadhyayi work consisting of eight books, has been praised as "at once the shortest and the most complete grammar in the world" (MacDonell 1927 : xi). It has inspired generation after generation of modern linguists from Franz Bopp (1791-1867) and William Dwight Whitney (1827-1894) onwards. According to Leonard Bloomfield (1933 : 11) Panini’s grammar constitutes "one of the greatest monuments of human intelligence." In spite of all the fame and praise, it is not at all clear in all detail how Panini’s grammar worked in practice or how it was used at the time of its conception and in the centuries afterwards.

One of Panini’s aims in composing his grammar was to store the extensive detailed information on the language in a most efficient way (brevity), by using, among other things, abbreviations and ellipses. Later works in the Paninian tradition, the so-called Prakriya-works, have reorganized the grammar in order to achieve greater clarity, but at the cost of brevity because a rule taken from its original context normally requires considerable explanation.

Among the Prakriya-works only two are (more or less) complete with regard to Panini’s sutras : the one of Narayana Bhatta and the one of the contemporeneous Bhattoji Diksita (both belonging to the 16th-17th century). In order to get a better understanding of the functioning of Panini’s grammar the present project studies and compares both versions, with special attention for Narayana’s version which represents a much neglected pragmatic approach in Paninian grammar (in contradistinction to the exegetic approach represented by Bhattoji Diksita’s version). This research should lay the basis for future extensions of the research in which different versions of (strictly as well as less-strictly) Paninian grammar are systematically compared with the help of a computer model so that its general structure and its possible variations become tangible and their distinctive effectiveness testable.

Material and Methods

In the initial phase the project has to focus on the philological study of Narayana Bhatta’s grammar. The basic material consists of the available editions (all quite imperfect) and selected manuscripts ; the text of the editions is improved on the basis of the study of manuscripts for and on the basis of "higher textual criticism" which is indispensable and consists of the study of the system of the grammar with the help of parallel texts or texts from which expressions and citations have been taken (for instance, in the case of Narayana’s Prakriyasarvasva, Bhoja’s grammar and the Madhaviyadhatuvrtti).

When the project is sufficiently advanced the possibilities of the creation of a computer model of (the formalizable parts of) the grammar (in some of its versions) will be investigated.

Team

Project leader

• Jan E.M. Houben, Directeur d’Etudes, Ecole Pratique des Hautes etudes (EPHE), Sciences Historiques et Philosophiques (SHP), Paris

Research collaborators

• Maria Piera Candotti, (PhD Université de Lausanne), EPHE (SHP), Paris
• Jesper Larnaes, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Funding

• Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris
• UMR 7528, Mondes Iranien et Indien, Ivry-sur-Seine ;
• Institut Français de Pondichéry.

Main outputs

Chapters in books

• HOUBEN J., 1999. Meaning statements in Pâñinian grammar: on the purpose and context of the Aæøâdhyâyî, In Studien zur Indologie und Iranistik 22: 23-54.
• HOUBEN J., 1996. Socio-linguistic attitudes reflected in the work of Bhartùhari and later Grammarians, In Ideology and Status of Sanskrit (ed. J.E.M. Houben): 157-193. Leiden: E.J. Brill.

Articles

• CANDOTTI MP., 2006. La realtà della lingua e le astrazioni dei grammatici: parole, frasi e segmenti nello sviluppo della riflessione linguistica indiana In Humanitas 3: 399-460 (with Tiziana Pontillo)

• CANDOTTI MP., 2003. Substitution as a descriptive model in Panini’s grammar: towards an opposition between phonological and morphological levels, In Atti del secondo incontro genovese di Studî Vedici e På±iniani (Genova, 23 luglio 2003; 15 ottobre 2003)(ed.Rosa Ronzitti e Guido Borghi), Recco: Le Mani Microart’s Edizioni, pp. 1-19

• HOUBEN J., 2003. Three myths in modern Pâñinian studies [Review article of Cardona 1999], Asiatische Studien / Études Asiatiques 57.1: 121-179.