Comments on: Panini’s Law

By: Simon Holloway

Simon Holloway — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 08:10:39 +0000

Conrad, I jest. Only I really do know absolutely nothing about Indo-European grammar, English included, and am hoping that a Syntax class that I will be sitting in on this year might rectify that somewhat. Oh, and I’m to be learning Greek, Latin and Coptic now! Excellent. But, no, nothing confrontational in what you said.

Thanks for the info on Panini – both you and John. I will be sure to check it out ASAP.

By: Conrad

Conrad — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 00:59:21 +0000

Just checked the wiki article, which says that Panini’s grammar does in fact have speculative / generative elements, so I guess I was wrong on that. I’m a little bit suspicious of all the computing/Turing references in the article though.

By: Conrad

Conrad — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 00:45:47 +0000

s/b “flicked through his”…

By: Conrad

Conrad — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 00:44:20 +0000

Simon, I was just being pedantic, apologies if I sounded over-confrontational.

As for Panini, he is notable for being the author of the first (extant) grammar anywhere in the world. He allegedly worked out a description of Sanskrit grammar better than any of the classical or even modern grammars of Latin and Greek. I once flicked his “Eight Books” through in a library, in translation–even so they meant nothing to me as I don’t know any Skt. What’s interesting though is that in Panini we already find concepts that took until c. 1800 to be developed by Western comparative philologists: concepts like the ablaut (guna), vowel-length (vrddha), and the root/stem distinction. Also, Panini was different to the classical tradition in that he treated words by form (morphology) first, before function (semantics).

Breal claims that Panini had a strong (but unacknowledged) direct influence on the new science of philology in the 19c., but I don’t know if this is true, or if Bopp etc. came to the same ideas separately.

It would be accurate to say that ‘descriptive linguistics’ has seen no radical upheavals since Panini, but Chomsky comes from the speculative tradition that flourished in the Middle Ages, and this is something wholly absent (as far as I am aware) in Panini. I could be wrong on that though.

By: JohnFH

JohnFH — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 23:58:53 +0000

Simon – it seems from your remarks that Mr. Panini is new territory for you. You might begin with his entry in Wikipedia. Eventually you will want to read Itkonen’s Universal History of Linguistics, ch. 6. I think she says something to the effect that linguistics saw no real progress between Panini and Chomsky. That’s an overstatement, at least for those of us who believe that diachrony and the whole problem of linguistic change are central to the linguistic enterprise, but catches something of P’s greatness.

From what I’ve read, P is the greatest linguist of all time, so it’s fun to know at least a little bit about him.

By: Simon Holloway

Simon Holloway — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 11:14:27 +0000

Agostino – as you suspected, I merely referred to the fact that three of the other words (police, appeal and demand) also had verbal meanings which I took to have been primary. That’s fascinating what you tell me about the etymology of “police” and “cascade”: that they were both nouns that were later converted into verbs. I have a habit of assuming that the transformation always occurs the other way around…

By: Simon Holloway

Simon Holloway — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 11:10:37 +0000

Conrad – I stand corrected. I must learn to stop making sweeping statements about Indo-European grammar (who do I think I am, anyway?). In Hebrew, all participles are etymologically verbs and, while I believe that this is the basic reality of participles in every language, Hebrew seems to have maintained the original verbal meanings as well, even after the words were nominalised. I’m sure that somebody now is going to step in and suggest an exception to this, but nothing springs to mind immediately.

By: Simon Holloway

Simon Holloway — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 11:05:31 +0000

John – thankyou. I have actually been an avid reader of your blog for some time now.

I also encountered the name of this “law” in O’Connor’s text, but know nothing about the individual after whom it was named. Was Panini a specialist in Indo-Iranian?

I hadn’t considered any connection between Panini’s Law and the parallel structure of Semitic poetry, but that sounds like it’s worth pursuing.

By: JohnFH

JohnFH — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 09:27:30 +0000

The subject matter of your post interests me, and your commenters make excellent points. I first ran across the term Panini’s law in M. O’Connor’s massive tome entitled Hebrew Verse Structure. No references, if memory serves, to how Panini himself, arguably the greatest linguist of all time, framed the matter. Bibliography on how this so-called law works itself out in Sanskrit would be a nice place to start.

But I’m really interested in ancient Hebrew poetry, and more precisely, in how longer and/or heightened ‘b’ elements tend to follow ‘a’ elements in parallel structures. It is not an iron-clad rule, but a look at Isa 1:2-20, for example, turns up numerous examples. I discuss them briefly in my piece on the poetry of this passage at http://www.ancienthebrewpoetry.typepad.com

Congratulations on a really fine site.

By: Agostino

Agostino — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 20:43:08 +0000

Surely recruit, assault & cascade in their present shape betray their origin as past participles, but I can’t see why the other words I mentioned should be related to a participial form. Anyway I’d be very curious to know what makes these words sound like participles to the ears of English mother-tongue speakers. Maybe the fact that they can be used as verbs too? Well, I should check, but I think all or almost all of these words were (in English) originally attested as nouns (cascade and police surely are).

“do you feel that most of the ‘exceptions’ are specifically of Romance origin?”

Actually police is from Greek polis (city) via Latin. In germanic languages the accent rarely shifts from the root of the word and usually the root of the word is in the first place, unless it is preceded by some preposition attached to the root (ex: forbear, beget, forlorn,…)