Page 143 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

life,' expressions that have caused much trouble in the West not only in popular speculation but also in philosophy.
1. Early Efforts
Theories of meaning arise only after centuries of effort at interpretation, and to this generalization India is no exception. The earliest Indian efforts are found in a class of prose works, the Brahmanas, which from the beginning of the first millenium BC were attached to each of the Vedic schools and which interpreted not so much difficult phrases in the Vedic corpus as ill- understood points of ritual described there. A typical Brahmana passage explains why a particular rite is performed and why a particular Vedic phrase or man- tra is recited at that time. When elucidating the man- tras themselves, paraphrases are given and identities between entities are postulated, as in the following example in which the phrases from the Veda that are interpreted are given within single quotes, and in which reference is made to the deities Prajapati, Savitr, and Agni:
He offers with 'Harnessing the mind,'—Prajapati, assuredly, is he that harnesses, he harnessed the mind for that holy work; and because he harnessed the mind for that holy work, therefore he is the harnessing one.
'Savitr stretching out the thoughts,'—for Savitr is the mind, and the thoughts are the vital airs;—'gazing rev- erently at Agni's light,' that is, having seen Agni's light;— 'bore up from the earth'; for upwards from the earth he indeed bears this (offering).
(Satapatha Brahmana6.3.1.12-13; transl. J. Eggeling.)
Like modern hermeneutics, to which it is by nature related, the Brahmanas abound in interpretations that are empty, obvious, or arbitrary.
An effort at more systematic etymological interpret- ations of a portion of the vocabulary of the Rgveda was given in the Nirukta, Yaska's commentary on the Nighantu which consisted of lists of Vedic words, often arranged in groups that cover a semantic field. In the first section of the Nighantu there are, for example, 23 words for 'night.' There are also sections dealing with ambiguous words, that is, words that have two or more distinct meanings; in such cases, the Nirukta provides different etymologies, often fanciful, for each of these meanings. There are also general discussions on the parts of speech and their general meanings, for example: 'verbs express "becoming" and nouns, "being".' The Nirukta seems to belong to approxi- mately the fifth century BC,the same period as the grammar of Panini (most scholars have treated the Nirukta as preceding Panini because of the undoubted priority of the Vedic to the grammatical tradition; according to Paul Thieme, however, Panini is earlier than the Nirukta).
2. TheGrammaticalTradition
The grammatical tradition started as an ancillary sci- ence to the Vedas, but it was different from the other
ancillary sciences in that it neither restricted itself to a particular school nor provided separate grammars for each of the schools (like the Pratisakhyas did for phonology). It pertained to all the schools. Linguistics attained full independence from the Vedas when Panini shifted attention to the ordinary, daily speech of his contemporaries. Among the early grammarians, Patanjali (150BC) is most explicit, when he states that ordinary speech is the empirical material or means of knowledge upon which the study of grammar is based:
A man who wants to use a pot, goes to the house of a potter and says: 'Make a pot, I want to use it.' But a man who wants to use words does not go to the house of a grammarian and say 'make words, I want to use them.' When he wants to express a meaning he uses the appro- priate words.
(Mahabhasya 1.1.1)
Grammar includes the study of regional usage, e.g., 'Southerners are fond of taddhita suffixes,' and deals with special cases such as shouting from afar or the idiom of gamblers.
The grammar of Panini (ca. 500BC)seems, at first sight, to refer to the meanings of words only hap- hazardly. Accordingly, it has long been held that Panini dealt almost exclusively with phonology and morphology and neglected not only syntax but also semantics. This view, however, cannot be maintained. Panini's grammar deals with both the meaning of words and the meaning of sentences. The latter analy- sis is naturally based on his treatment of syntax, which is not only insightful but also extensive. The extent to which his syntactical theories capture the entire domain of Sanskrit syntax remains a subject of dis- cussion.
2.1 Word Meaning
Panini's grammar refers to the meaning of words in two distinct cases:
(a) In the grammar itself if meanings determine form,asin:khatvaksepe(2.1.26),'khatva "bed" is compounded in the Accusative in a Tatpu- rusa compound when an insult is implied.' Example: khatvarudha 'lying on the bed' which means: 'rude, of bad behaviour.'
(b) In a list of about 2,000 verbal roots, the Dhat- upatha, in which the verbs are classified in accordance with the 10 classes of verbs dis- tinguished by Panini in his grammar. Some scholars have doubted that the earliest Dhat- upatha known was composed by Panini, but, whatever is the case, there is little doubt that a Dhatupatha with a similar structure and methodology, adapted to the structure of the grammar, was used by him. Following the eleventh-century grammarian Kayata, others have argued that the meaning entries were added later, but there is no reason to accept thisview(Bronkhorst 1981).
Indian Theories of Meaning
121