A History of Sanskrit Literature c29.s1.1

c29.s1.1

IN the Brāhmaṇas of the Vedic period we find sufficient proof¹ that, as in Greece, grammatical study in India began with consideration of such points as pronunciation and euphonic combination, and the discrimination of parts of speech which gives us terms such as *vibhakti*, case termination, *vacana*, number, *kurvant*, present tense. Possibly hence it derived its name Vyākaraṇa, though that is often deduced from the later practice of analysis of forms. We find already in Yāska the terms *nāman*, noun, *sarvanāmam*, pronoun, *ākhyāta*, verb, *upasarga*, preposition, *nipāta*, particle.² The next stage is not represented in the Brāhmaṇas, but is fully in being in Yāska’s time; it consists of the analysis of forms, as opposed to the reckless etymologies of the Brāhmaṇas and Plato; we do not know how this came to be arrived at, though it is a plausible conjecture which finds the motive in the fact that in compounds in Sanskrit the first word appears in its stem form without terminations. From this it was fairly easy to distinguish stem and termination in nouns, and then to advance to distinguish in verbs root, terminations and tense and other affixes, and to arrive at the doctrine of the derivation of nouns from nouns by Taddhita suffixes, of nouns from verbs by Kṛt suffixes. A further step was to declare as did Çākaṭāyana that all nouns are derived from verbs, to which Gārgya objected that if this was so, it followed that every thing should have as many names as it had activities, and every name should apply to everything which had the activity it connoted. But the supporters of Çākaṭāyana carried out their principle, and to this period goes back in substance, not in its present form, the *Uṇādisūtra*, containing words which are derived from verbs by unusual affixes, and which in some form Pāṇini evidently knew.