Tuesday, January 11, 2011

2. The first three sutras! Conditioning of short vowel and half-consonant sounds

After beating around the bush, let’s actually get into the work now and see how it goes. The first two sutras are as good a place to start as any. The first aphorism or formula, numbered 1.1.1 to denote the first formula (sūtra), of the first quarter (pāda), of the first Book (Adhyāya), goes like this:
1.1.1          vrddhir adaich or, more phonetically
vŗddhir ādaic
The second goes like this:
1.1.2          adeng gunah, or phonetically,
aden̊ guņaḩ
The first thing, of course, is that it lays down the rules of Sanskrit as she ought to be spoken, with the rules of Sanskrit as she is spoken. It reminds me of the good old German course in college, Deutsche Sprachlehre fuer Auslaender, Grundstufe Eins, which starts off the adventure with ‘Ich bin Anton Brega’, a sentence we all can understand without knowing German, ever since a famous American stood up and intoned ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’.  But one thing here (of many things!): you can’t read Panini (with the retroflex n!) without the rules of joining sounds, sandhi.  So with our 10th class memory, we realize that vŗddhir stands for vŗddhiḩ, nominative case singular number (paradigm harih), gunah (with the retroflex n!) is likewise a nominative singular name of something (paradigm ra:mah ra:mau ra:ma:h).  
With our 10th class Sanskrit, we can recognize the first word vŗ̧ddhih, which is ‘growth’; a vŗddhaḩ is an old-timer.  We also know guņaḩ; a guņa is a quality, like a sadguņa is a good quality, durguņa is a negative quality. Maybe some of us also vaguely remember that guņa and vŗddhi are grammataical terms, representing successive ‘augmentations’ of vowel sounds, somewhat akin to the successive vowel-shift in sequences like sing-sang-sung, ring-rang-rung, called ‘Ablaut’ in good old Anton Brega’s language. So guņa is goody-good, augmented, while vriddhi is ultra-good, doubly augmented. Panini is defining the vowel sequences with these two technical terms. But what are the definitions?
We need the sandhi rules again to make sense of the definitions. The second word, ādaic, actually stands for āt aic (voiceless t becomes voiced d, as in sadguņa, sat+guņa above!). The sequence a:t apparently is a symbol for the sound a:, the first such nonsense name Panini has made up. I guess it could have as well been a simple ā or maybe āchhoo or ārrrgh. Panini uses a simple t to symbolize the sound, so we may write it as āT, the upper-case T representing a symbolic symbol as against a sounded sound. So the first part says ‘the sound ā is a doubly augmented sound’.
What to make of the second part, aic? The ai stands for the sound ai; the ending c is a symbolic one, so the sequence ai  to be written as aiC, the upper-case C showing that it is a code, a symbol, rather than a sounded sound. Here is now a key to understanding Panini’s code: he uses these nonsense words to stand for sub-sets of sounds. He actually gives us a list of sounds (letters) right at the beginning, arranged in a certain sequence with these code symbols like C  interspersed, showing the ends of successive sequences or runs; these are called the Shiva-sutras, formulae given by the great god Shiva himself, or if you like formulae which are eternal, pervading.
These are the first few Shiva-sutras (Śs):
1.       a i u Ņ (retroflex N!)…obviously the short vowel sounds, a and i and u, Ņ a symbol to show the end of that run;
2.       ŗ ļ K … the liquid half-consonants, ŗ and ļ, K ending the sequence;
3.       e o N̊…two medium-long vowels e and o (diphthongs in English?; there are no short e and o in Sanskrit, though there are in Tamil and other Dravidian languages), end marker N̊ (ng sound);
4.       ai au C (ouch!)… some  real diphthongs, ai and au, symbol C ending the set (but not part of it)
So we see that aiC is actually a set that consists of two diphthongs, ai and au, rounded off by the marker C for end-of-list; eN̊ stands for the set of sounds e and o, end-of-sequence set off by N̊; now we see why Panini fits into the computer world so well.  So when he says,
1.1.1 vŗddhir ādaic
or
vŗddhiḩ a:T aiC,
he is actually defining the set of doubly-augmented or amplified sounds, vŗddhi, as ‘a: and ai and au’. Wow!
And similarly, with
1.1.2          aden̊ guņaḩ
or dismantling the sandhi word-joins,
aT eN̊ guņaḩ,
he is saying that the set of singly-augmented or goody-good sounds is ‘a and e and o’. Oh!
You want more?
1.1.3          iko guņavŗddhī
The first ‘word’ is the symbolic iK, representing the sub-set of ‘short’ vowels and half-vowels, i u ŗ ļ, and the end-marker K. It’s apparent here that if you want to make a set spanning more than one Shiv-sutra, the first and the second in this case, you leave out the intermediate end-of-sequence markers (called, incidentally, an iT!). Then this symbol, iK, is put into genitive (possessive) case, singular, really ikaḩ, but by the rules of word-joins, sandhi, put into the form iko meaning ‘of the set i u ŗ ļ’.  
The second term, guņavŗddhī, is a compound word, in dual number. We have to supply a verb in English (but not necessarily in Russian!):  ‘Of short vowels, (happens) guņa and vŗddhi’. This is interpreted as meaning that in place of i u ŗ and ļ, when a substitution is to be done, we will replace them with the appropriate guņa or vŗddhi forms depending on the circumstances. What those circumstances are, is not given rightaway; in one of the master strokes of this opus, a given rule may condition various rules and operations in other parts of the text.
I hope I haven’t made any gross blunders in my interpretation. Happy hunting! 

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