7. Special sound joins for long vowels in Pāņini

This post of the new series takes up from where I left Panini two years ago, that is with sutra 1.1.11, which gives the definition of something called pragŗhyam. This is also a nice illustration of the way Panini stretches a text over a number of sutras to give a general rule, then some exceptions to it, and then perhaps some special instances which counter the exceptions! It’s like that jingle we all learn in school to remember the number of days in a month: thirty days in September, April June and November (the opening statement); all the rest have thirty-one (the general rule, or exception, whichever way you wish to look at it); except February, twenty-eight (the exception); and one day more once in four (the special condition to moderate the exception). This jingle also demonstrates a tactic that is made much of, that is the omission of the phrase in the preceding sutra to achieve brevity, and which glosses provide for the convenience of the learner. Of course, what it amounts to is that a run of text containing all the parts described above -- the statement, its exceptions, and special cases – is actually broken up among a number of very short sutras for convenience of remembering and understanding. There are technical terms used in Sanskrit grammar for these elements, which will be introduced in a later post.

So coming back to our sutra,

1.1.11      īdūdeddvivacanam pragŗhyam

This sounds even more drivelish than the worst of the previous formulae we have seen. The trouble, as I realized suddenly, is that with our ear trained to the normal sound patterns of Indo-European, we tend to scan this as a series of CV combinations: (Anglo) ee-doo-day- and so on, somewhat like a rap song we all have heard and love. But we need to look at this as a series of codes starting on a long vowel and ending on a terminator: īd-ūd-ed, or, if we split the sandhi,

īt ūt et (Anglo eet-oot-ayt)

These  represent the long vowels, each supplied with the nonsense terminator t (or capitalized T to show that it is a terminator symbol in our convention):

īT ūT eT

The latter part of the first ‘word’, dvivacanam, is easy, as it actually means something: dvi, dual, vacanam, number. The m is supplied with a diacritic not reproduced here (a small dot or comma under the character) to indicate it is a nasal (probably) rather than a full closed sound. The first part means, on the whole,

īT ūT eT dvivacanam 

a dual (verb or noun form) ending in the long vowels ī ū or e

The second word,

pragŗhyam

is a technical term, and is translated in the books I have seen as – pragŗhyam! I wish somebody had hazarded a guess at what this term means in everyday language, and why Panini thought to apply this particular term, which sounds as though it could mean something rather than being a made-up word. From the sound of it (related to grah, hold or seize or grab), I would like to attribute something like ‘reserved’ or ‘restrained’ to this term.

So this first sutra in the section only defines a pragŗhyam as a dual form ending in the long vowels specified. What Panini uses this term for, will be explored in the next sutra (and why I fancy that the term pragŗhyam means something ‘restrained’!).

(It’s been a couple of years since I last posted: I got through my retirement in the meantime, and am now back chipping away at this large block of granite to see if there’s something awesome inside it! Thanks to the kind people who actually seem to have had some interest in this attempt of mine, unschooled though it may be, and who have refrained from blasting it to perdition. I just hope that one day we will be able to look back and wonder whether we really were that callow!)