Language vs. grammatical tradition in Ancient India: How real was Pāṇinian Sanskrit?
-
Leonid Kulikov
Abstract
There are certain discrepancies between the forms and constructions prescribed by Pāṇinian grammarians and the forms and constructions that are actually attested in the Vedic corpus (a part of which is traditionally believed to underlie Pāṇinian grammar). Concentrating on one particular aspect of the Old Indian verbal system, viz. the morphology and syntax of present formations with the suffix ‑ya-, I will provide a few examples of such discrepancy. I will argue that the most plausible explanation of this mismatch can be found in the peculiar sociolinguistic situation in Ancient India: a number of linguistic phenomena described by grammarians did not appear in Vedic texts but existed within the semi-colloquial scholarly discourse of the learned community of Sanskrit scholars (comparable to Latin scholarly discourse in Medieval Europe). Some of these phenomena may result from the influence of Middle Indic dialects spoken by Ancient Indian scholars, thus representing syntactic and morphological calques from their native dialects onto the Sanskrit grammatical system.
© 2013 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co.
Articles in the same Issue
- Masthead
- Attribution in Romance: Reconstructing the oral and written tradition
- The sound change *s- > n- in Arapaho
- Language vs. grammatical tradition in Ancient India: How real was Pāṇinian Sanskrit?
- The early Middle English reflexes of Germanic *ik ‘I’: Unpacking the changes
- Copularisation processes in French: Constructional intertwining, lexical attraction, and other dangerous things
- The Northern Subject Rule in first-person singular contexts in fourteenth-fifteenth-century Scots
- Early progressive passives
- Participant continuity and narrative structure: Defining discourse marker functions in Old English
- Book Reviews
Articles in the same Issue
- Masthead
- Attribution in Romance: Reconstructing the oral and written tradition
- The sound change *s- > n- in Arapaho
- Language vs. grammatical tradition in Ancient India: How real was Pāṇinian Sanskrit?
- The early Middle English reflexes of Germanic *ik ‘I’: Unpacking the changes
- Copularisation processes in French: Constructional intertwining, lexical attraction, and other dangerous things
- The Northern Subject Rule in first-person singular contexts in fourteenth-fifteenth-century Scots
- Early progressive passives
- Participant continuity and narrative structure: Defining discourse marker functions in Old English
- Book Reviews
