Friday, January 14, 2011

3. Rules about Rules: Metarules in Pāņini

One of the joys of reading Pāņini (with one retroflex ņ and one normal n!) is how we get to see a brilliant mind at work, busy spinning his webs of logical sequences – from all of 2500 years in the past. Apparently, he is trying to develop decision trees that will account for every known form and variation in his language, and a means to generate new forms that fit into a logical framework. But he also wants to do this in as terse and economical a style as possible.  He makes up technical terms as he goes along, and he has rules about his rules – about what these terms signify in a technical sense. Most of them do not even mean anything in the normal language; others are used in a specific sense depending on the context. There are therefore sutras of different types: there are technical terms and their definitions; there are rules; and there are rules about rules – metarules – which allow him to use his technical terms with the least possible extra explanation. In the terminology of the communications expert, he tells you what he’s going to tell you, then he tells you, then he tells you what he told you! If you still don’t get it, it’s not because he didn’t try.
Here are two such metarules which I managed to understand (to a degree!) in the first quarter (pāda) of the first book (adhyāya).
1.1.49      șașțhī sthāneyogā
This is a metarule which helps to interpret a word in the șașțhī or sixth form (vibhakti) of the noun declension, which is the genitive or possessive ‘case’. We saw this in sutra 1.1.3,
1.1.3          iko guņavŗddhī
where the first word is the genitive case (șașțhī) of the term iK, which represents the short vowels I, u, ŗ, ļ, and the rule meant something like
1.1.3 ‘Of short vowels, (happens) guņa and vŗddhī.’
In other words, you replace these short vowels (of which two may be called semi-consonants) with their augmented and super-augmented counterparts (guņa and vŗddhī) in circumstances which are 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.
More guidance is given by
1.1.50      sthāne antaratamaḩ
which must mean something like ‘in the place, the most similar’. That is, the replacement term is chosen that is most similar to the replaced entity, in terms of either place of articulation, or in terms of meaning, sound quality, or duration. The word sthāne may refer to place of articulation, which has precedence over other aspects.
Here’s another metarule to interpret words in the locative case:
1.1.66      tasminniti nirdişţe pūrvasya
The word tasmin, in the locative or seventh (saptamī) case, means ‘in it’; tasmin iti, ‘in it, like’, or a word in locative case. Again, nirdişţe is in locative case, meaning ‘in the direction’, or to stretch it a bit, tasminniti nirdişţe , ‘in (the context of) a direction (starting with) a word in the locative case’; pūrvasya, in the genitive case, ‘of what precedes’. That is, a direction starting with a term in locative case, tasmin, would refer to an operation on the word preceding the word in locative. Such a rule refers to the entity on the left, a left-referencing rule. Given, or in the event of, the situation referred to by the locative, is implied the situation in the preceding entity (nirdişţe itself is one such word in the locative!).
A similar metarule with ablative case, tasmād (‘from it’):
1.1.67    tasmād ity uttarasya
Or, breaking the word-join,
                tasmāt iti uttarasya
and reading in continuation of the preceding rule, taking as read the linking word nirdişţe, this means: given a rule (nirdişţe, locative case) starting with an ablative (tasmāt iti) it belongs to (refers to) the following entity (uttarasya). Such a rule refers to the entity on the right, a right-referencing rule. From the situation referred to by the ablative, follows the situation in the succeeding entity.
 Do we glimpse the shadow of self-perpetuating loops here?

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