18. Introducing a new species of word – avyaya (indeclinables)

We saw, in sutra 1.1.27 sarvādīni,  that Panini defines something akin to pronominals by a list of words starting with sarva, ‘all’ in his Gaņapāţha (list of groups). The next batch of sutras is introduced in a similar way, based on the list of words starting with svar ‘heaven’ in the Gaņapāţha, to define (and describe the behaviour of) a category or species termed avyaya (‘unchanging’, i.e. indeclinables).

1.1.37  svarādinipātamavyayam

Dividing this into the constituent words with case and number:

Svarādi nipātam (1/1) avyayam (1/1)

And the expansion is as follows (with hyphens to help clarify out the compounds):

Vŗtti: svar-ādīni (the list starting with the word) svar (at the head) śabda-rūpāņi (word forms) nipātāh ca (and nipāta words) avyaya-samjñāni  (indeclinable words) bhavanti (are, constitute).

The sutra merely defines avyaya words, without telling us anything further about them, just as the previous batch started with a definition of sarvanāma without saying much about their behaviour. That is because this first part of the Ashtādhyāyi is all about definitions, and the domain of these initial sutras is supposed to be distributed all over the remaining, operational, sections. This is very much like an old-fashioned Fortran program which sets up the names of entities first, and then goes on to elaborate their behaviour through various operations.

Another thing to note is that there are two, distinct, types of words defined as nipāta, linked only by the conjunction ca ‘and’: the first type is merely the list of words svar etc., and the second type is words called nipāta. The conjunction has to be supplied, otherwise we may be mistaken to understand svarādi words as nipāta. They are two distinct categories, and both are subsumed under the category avyaya.

The svar etc. group is a long list indeed, starting with svar ‘heaven’, antar ‘midst’, prātar ‘in the morning’, and so on. The nipāta words are defined further on, in sutras 1.4.56 to 61, and can be taken to mean particles (words that have fallen nearby, under the tree?).

The next few sutras add on other groups under the definition of avyaya, such as forms ending in suffixes (affixes) ktvā etc. (participles), forms ending in kŗt affixes, and avyayībhāva samāsa (compounds).