Read Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World Online
Authors: Nicholas Ostler
Tags: #History, #Language, #Linguistics, #Nonfiction, #V5
Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (54 page)
Truly her lower lip glows like a tender leaf, her arms resemble flexible stalks.
And youth, bewitching like a blossom, shines in all her lineaments.
Kālidāsa, Śākuntalā Recognized
, i.21
*
This is not a metaphor, or anachronistic interpetation of Sanskrit grammar, but a straightforward description of the working of the sutras in Panini’s system. Consider the application of a single sutra:
iko yaaci
The three words that constitute the sutra are not words of Sanskrit itself, but of an artificial metalanguage that refers tersely to other sutras of the grammar. Nevertheless, they are treated as if they are consonant-stem nouns, with the regular ending for genitive (
-as
), nominative (a bare ending) and locative (
-i
). (There is a slight complication, in that both a voiced segment, a final
-as
, is realised phonetically as
-o.
This is a regular principle of liaison in Sanskrit, itself a highly complicated part of the grammar.) The sutra could therefore be analysed functionally as
In the context of a sutra, these cases have special interpretation, referring respectively to the input, the output and the right-hand context of a phonological rule. The sutra is therefore to be understood as:
But what is the reference of the strange words themselves? They are to be understood as applications of another set of sutras (known as the Śiva-sutras), which plays the role of a system for defining natural classes of sounds in Sanskrit. This begins:
There is no distinction between upper or lower case in Sanskrit, nor any semicolons. But the use of this Roman typographical convenience is simply to show explicitly what a student of Paninian grammar learns by example, namely that the letters here written in upper case are functioning as control characters. Any term consisting of one of the lower-case letters a followed by one of the control characters b denotes the sequence of phones starling with a and ending just before b. So, for example, ‘aC’ denotes the set of vowels, ‘haT’ the set of semi-vowels excluding 1. It can be seen then that the sutra being analysed is nothing less than a concise statement of the rule:
Terse, indeed, but it should be remembered that this level of concision is possible only because a number of controlling principles can be taken for granted—e.g. the interpretation implicit in the brackets: the first four phones map respectively on to the second four phones, but this occurs before any of the nine phones in the environment. Part of the task of the tradition of commentary which followed on from Panini was to make explicit the precise nature of the
paribhāā
(auxiliary principles) on which the correct interpretation of the sutras rests.
*
Compare the 215,000 or so entries in the latest
Chambers English Dictionary
, and over 500,000 in the latest
Oxford English Dictionary.
*
This is the precise Sanskrit equivalent of the Greek
barbaros
, defined as someone who did not speak Sanskrit.
*
Bizarrely this only happened after Muslim incursions, which had brought in the completely alien Persian as the new elite language.
*
Indeed, there is a famous story of the embarrassment caused when a king called Satavahana turned out to know less Sanskrit than a lady: in a water fight, one of his queens begged him to stop pelting her with water (
modakai, from
mā udakai
modakai
Kathā-sarit-sāgaram
, l.vi.108-22).
*
One gets some idea of how much, and how little, Pali differs from Sanskrit by comparing the Sanskrit equivalent for this phrase:
sarvasatāmūlabhā
*
He called it
Fan
, probably a Chinese reduction of the word
Brahmana.
*
The most widely used alphabet in this area of India is still known as
deva-nāgarī
, ‘the gods’ urban [script]’.
*
These two terms came to mean ‘slave’ and ‘demon, robber, bandit’ respectively. Compare the development of the English word
slave
from
Slav
, and the apparently opposite route taken by Serb from Latin
servus.
The feminine of
dāsa, dāsī
, came to mean ‘whore’ (
devadāsī
, ‘a god’s slave-girl’, was a temple prostitute), and one of the most routine Sanskrit insults is
dāsya
*
The purpose was to rescue Rama’s kidnapped wife Sita—rather similar to Homer’s motivation for the Trojan War, where a Greek fleet set out to rescue Menelaus’s wife Helen.
*
In a total reversal, Hinduism was later to renounce even the possibility of foreign voyages. It was held to bring unassuageable impurity upon higher castes, e.g. in the late-thirteenth-century law digest by
Hemādri
(iii.2: 667).
*
Devanagari, Gujarati, Panjabi, Bengali, Oriya in the north; Telugu, Kannada, Tamil, Malayalam and Sinhalese in the south. There is another related alphabet, used farther north for Tibetan.
.† Burmese, Lao, Thai, Khmer (Cambodian) on the mainland; in the islands, Javanese, Balinese, Tagalog (in the Philippines), Batak (in Sumatra) and Bugis (in Sulawesi)
*
The same word is now pronounced Phnom, as in Phnom Penh.
†
Java, Sumatra and Malaya are derived from
Yava-dvīpa
, ‘barley island’;
samudra
, ‘sea’, and
Malaya
, actually from a Dravidian word,
malai
, ‘a hill’, in south India near Malabar. Cambodia (
Kamboja
) evokes
Kambuja
, a kingdom in the Khyber pass area; but had a competing etymology as
Kambu-ja
, i.e. born of
Kambu Svāyambhūva
, a hermit who united with the celestial nymph Mera to found the race of Khmers (Coedès 1968: 66). Champa shares its name with the kingdom of the lower Ganges, but is probably the local ethnonym Cham in Sanskrit form. The River Irrawaddy in Burma is named for the
Irāvatī
, ‘having drinking water’, the old name of the Ravi river in Panjab.
*
To an extent, this still continues: so Megawati Sukarnoputri, at the time of writing president of Indonesia, has a name that translates as ‘Cloudy, Beneficent’s Daughter’.
*
A variant called
Siddha-mātka
, ‘settled alphabet’, or simply Siddha, is the version of the script most generally used in the East Asian (i.e. Mahayana) Buddhist traditions.
†
The motivation for this is purely historic. It ultimately goes back to an equally arbitrary ‘aleph beth gimel daleth…’ specified by the Phoenicians.
*
The items in parentheses do not exist separately, in the spelling or the language, for phonetic reasons.