4. Guņa-Vŗddhi Replacements: Rules within Rules in Pāņini

The world of Panini is a maze of rules, metarules, exceptions and extensions all couched in a secret language that itself follows the rules it is expounding, which yields nothing to the unaided aspirant. This leads to fiendishly involved derivations with plenty of traps and pitfalls for the unwary wanderer. Take the seemingly simple substitution,

1.1.3          iko guņavŗddhī

which we assumed means something like

1.1.3 ‘Of short vowels, (happens) guņa and vŗddhī, or, simply put, replace short vowels (we include the semi-consonants ŗ and ļ along with a, i, and u in this category), with the corresponding guņa (augmented) and vŗddhi (super-augmented) forms. Of course, there must be certain circumstances in which this is done, or else the short vowel forms would eliminate themselves by repeated application of this rule.  It appears that this substitution applies to other rules, scattered through the chapters, which call for replacement by guņa and/or vŗddhi, but without specifying what is to be replaced. Obviously whole words will not be replaced; so when there is no specific target stated up front, we are to assume that it is the short vowels (the iK vowels a, i, u, ŗ and ļ in the Shiva-sutras) )which are to be replaced.

We assume that the specific situation calling for such replacement will be elaborated in subsequent rules. So the genitive case here signifies replacement, not possession. The second term sthāneyogā may mean something like ‘in its place suitable’; I confess I have not figured it out, but I understand it signifies that provided no other interpretation of the genitive case is possible in the given context, it signifies replacement by the terms that follow.

Sutra 1.1.3 is followed by a few more sutras that qualify or explain it further; this introduces the device of extending a rule statement over a number of sutras, a ‘read-with’ device to develop a complex situation. Thus,

1.1.4          na dhātulope ārdhadhātuke

which has to be read in continuation to 1.1.3, iko guņavŗddhī. There is some disagreement on whether we should read na dhātulope or na dhātulopa; I will gloss over this issue for the present and go with the former. 

An ārdhadhātuka is something like an affix to a verb root (dhātu) which is not a tense-person form of verbal ending. A  dhātulopa is a condition resulting in truncation of a dhātu, verb root (here a part of a root). The sutra means (very broadly and coarsely!) something like this: replacement of short iK vowels by augmented guņa or vŗddhi, as ordered in sutra 1.1.3, will not (na) be done if there is an affix that causes truncation (deletion) of the root.  

To make life further difficult, there is more:

1.1.5          kṅiti ca

(ṅ is the velar ng-sound in the series k kh g gh ṅ). This is to read with ‘na’ from 1.1.4, so it says something like: (replacement of short vowels by augmented vowels) will NOT take place also if there is a k g ṅ marker in the affix (which apparently is a marking device, not necessarily indicating the actual presence of the sound k or g or ṅ; further, they’re not referred to as kgṅ but as kṅ apparently because the rules require collapse of such adjacent velars – an artifact of the meta-language having to follow the very rules it is expounding!).

And finally, this span of rules is completed by

1.1.6          dīdhīvevīţām , separated out as

dīdhī vevī iţ ām (possessive case ending, sixth vibhakti)

again to be ‘read with’ the negative na of 1.1.4, which thereby further adds to the exceptions to replacement of short (iK) vowels ordered by 1.1.3. This means there will be NO replacement of iK vowels even if prescribed by some rule, in forms of the verb dīdhī, ‘throw light on’, vevī, ‘go forth’, and something called iŢ which is a verb affix (presumably i  followed by a nonsense sound Ţ to denote that it is a grammatical category, not a lexical (meaningful) word; ‘it’ is a general technical term for such nonsense markers, as at the ends of each sequence of sounds in the Shiv-sutras). These negations or exceptions will obviously come into play in the operation of various rules where the target is the short iK vowels of specific word types or categories, which we will hopefully come across and grapple with if we persist on this journey! The main thing here is that we have seen how a rule may span a number of sutras with its explanations and exceptions.