Yaska

IAST|Yāska ( _sa. यास्कः),(6th-5th centuries B.C. according to Shukla, Georgetown University) was a Sanskrit grammarian who preceded Pānini. His famous text is Nirukta, which deals with etymology, lexical category and the semantics of words. He is thought to have succeeded Śākaṭāyana, an old grammarian and expositor of the Vedas, who is mentioned in his text. He is sometimes referred to as Yāska ācārya ("ācārya" = teacher).

The Nirukta attempts to explain how certain words get to have their meanings, especially in the context of interpreting the Vedic texts. It includes a system of rules for forming words from roots and affixes, and a glossary of irregular words, and formed the basis for later lexicons and dictionaries. It consists of three parts, viz.:(i) "Naighantuka", a collection of synonyms; (ii) "Naigama", a collection of words peculiar to the Vedas, and (iii) "Daivata", words relating to deities and sacrifices.

The nirukta was one of the six vedangas or compulsory ritual subjects in syllabus of Sanskrit scholarship in ancient India.

Lexical Categories and Parts of Speech

Yāska defines four main categories of wordscite book
author = Bimal Krishna Matilal
title = The word and the world: India's contribution to the study of language
publisher = Oxford. Yaska is dealt with in Chapter 3| year = 1990
] :
# nāma - nouns or sustantives
# ākhyāta - verbs
# upasarga - pre-verbs or prefixes
# nipāta - particles, invariant words (perhaps prepositions)

Yāska singled out two main ontologicalcategories: a process or an action ("bhāva"), and an entity or a beingor a thing ("sattva"). Then he first defined the verb as that in which the bhāva ('process') is predominant whereas a noun is that in which the sattva ('thing') is predominant. The 'process' is one that has, according to oneinterpretation, an early stage and a later stage and when such a'process' is the dominant sense, a finite verb is used as in "vrajati",'walks', or "pachati", 'cooks'.

But this characterization of Noun / Verb is inadequate, for some processes may also have nominal forms (e.g. "He went for a walk"). For this, Yaska proposed that when a process is referred to as a'petrified' or 'configured' mass ("mUrta") extending from start tofinish, a verbal noun should be used, e.g. "vrajyā", a walk, or "pakti", acooking. The latter may be viewed as a case of "summary scanning" cite book
author={Ronald W. Langacker
title={Grammar and Conceptualization
year={1999
address={Berlin/New York| publisher={Mouton de Gruyer
isbn = {3-11-0166604-6] , since the element of sequence in the process is lacking.

These concepts are related to modern notions of grammatical aspect, the "mUrta" constituting the perfective andthe "bhāva" the imperfective aspect.

Yaska also gives a test for nouns both concrete and abstract: nouns are words which can be indicated by the pronoun "that".

Words as Carriers of Meaning: Atomism vs Holism debate

As in modern semantic theory, Yaska views words as the main carriers of meaning. This view - that words have a primary or preferred ontological status in defining meaning, was fiercely debated in the Indiantradition over many centuries. The two sides of the debate may be calledthe "Nairuktas" (based on Yaska's Nirukta, atomists), vs the Vaiyākarans (grammarians following Panini, holists), and the debate continued in various forms for twelve centuriesinvolving different philosophers from the
Nyaya, Mimamsa and Buddhist schools.

In the prātishākhya texts that precede Yaska, and possibly Sakatayanaas well, the gist of the controversy wasstated cryptically in sutra form as "saṃhitā pada-prakṛtiḥ". According to the atomist view, the words would be the primary elements (prakṛti) out of which thesentence is constructed, while the holistic view considers the sentence as the primary entity,originally given in its context of utterance, and the words are arrived at only through analysisand abstraction.

This debate relates to the atomistic vs holistic interpretation of linguistic fragments - a very similar debate is raging today between traditional semantics and cognitive linguistics, over the view whether words in themselves have semantic interpretationsthat can be composed to form larger strings. The cognitive semanticsview is that words constrain meaning, but the actual meaning canonly be construed by considering a large number of individual contextualcues.

Etymologically, Nouns originate from verbs

Yaska also defends the view, presented first in the lost text of
Sakatayana that etymologically, most nouns have their origins in verbs. An example in English may be the noun "origin", derived from the Latin "originalis", which is ultimately based on the verb "oriri", "to rise". This view is relatedto the position that in defining agent categories, behaviours areontologically primary to, say, appearance. This was also a source for considerable debatefor several centuries (see Sakatayana for details).

References

External links

* [http://www.hindunet.org/hindu_history/sarasvati/dictionary/9niruktam.htm Niruktam sememes]