Ancient India

Systematic inquiries into the nature of language in the West do not begin before Plato’s Cratylos, and are confined to some speculations about words or names (onomata) even there. The paradigm of scientific theorizing in the early Greek tradition is mathematics, and geometry in particular. Scientific theorizing about grammar in the shape of a distinct discipline separate from the study of the universal forms of thought or metaphysics, is largely missing in the foundations of Western science. Aristotle in De interpretatione I–IV didn’t fail to leave his stamp in regards to an identification of the parts of speech making up a proposition (see Moro, 1997: appendix), but his treatment is still embedded within larger concerns in semantics and metaphysics, with the latter as the most foundational discipline. His medieval interpreters, in any case, took him to be a logician not a grammarian.13

Basically, a scientific treatment of grammar has to wait until the arrival of Modistic grammar in the fourteenth century, which would set out by discarding much of the Latin (and Greek) grammar of the time (in particular Priscian’s, of the sixth century ad) and attempting to get both the connection between, and the distinctness of, logic and grammar right, an insight documented in Abelard’s Dialectica (twelfth century) (Covington,2009: 11; and see Section 1.4 below). Yet, Modistic grammar blossomed for barely half a century, when Occam’s nominalism wiped it off the philosophical scene. In the subsequent early modern scientific revolution, grammar does not figure on the agenda of science. Galilean physics is based on the mathematization of nature

13 _{Later commentary suggests that Aristotle in fact rejected the distinction between semantic and}

syntactic analysis (Moravcsik,1968). Aristotle aimed to find the basic elements of sentences of subject- predicate form as these would be the entities that also fall into only one category of metaphysical existence. This for Aristotle was where the link between language and metaphysics existed. We thank James Miller for this reference.

again, and in the scheme of Descartes’s version of mechanistic explanation, language cannot in principle figure: for it cannot be conceived without thought, which it expresses, and to which mechanical principles of explanation do not apply.

In this way language is excluded from the Western scientific paradigm. Curiously, the opposite is true of the Indian scientific tradition, where from the inception of human theoretical speculation the very paradigm of scientific theorizing is grammar, the most important so-called ‘limb’ in the curriculum for the study of the Vedas, where itfigures along with phonetics, etymology, metrics, astronomy, and the science (or art) of ritual. Of these limbs grammar was the ‘prime mover’ (Matilal, 1990: 7). The study of language is formally identified as Vyākarana, and linguistics as a discipline is joined by the philosophy of language from early on, unlike in the nineteenth or twentieth century, where these two disciplines have proceeded on largely separate paths and with disparate goals, virtually indicating different ‘para- digms’ in thinking about language, as Chomsky (2000a) and Antony and Hornstein (2003) systematically document. The philosophy of language is pursued by sages who write on grammar (the grammar of Sanskrit) and call themselves ‘grammarians’, recognized as having distinct concerns from the ‘logicians’ (Matilal, 1990: 42). We will re-encounter this same important dichotomy in the case of the Modistic gram- marians in the next section.

At a time when Plato was still reflecting on whether names are conventional or natural devices, Pāṇini completed a monumental oeuvre, the As·t.ādhyāyī, which consists in a system of about 4,000 interacting rules of four different types that together aim to give a maximally economical and complete, as well as theoretically consistent, description of the grammar of Sanskrit, a language initially based on the sacred and ancient texts (collections of hymns) guarded by the Brahmin religion. As Bloomfield (1933: 11) would famously put it, ‘No other language, to this day, has been so perfectly described’, in a way that is ‘complete and accurate’, and based ‘not upon theory but upon observation’. In the context of colonial Europe, this grammar would lay the foundations of historical-comparative linguistics and the systematic study of language change in the Indo-European language family: this was after William Jones, in1786, announced the hypothesis, based on the method of the comparisons of word (sound) forms, that Greek, Latin, Germanic, and Sanskrit must have had a common origin in some ancient language of‘Proto-Indo-European’.

Pāṇini’s methods would teach nineteenth-century historical linguists how to do morphological analysis in the descriptive characterization of their own languages, effectively contributing to the emergence and foundations of modern structuralist linguistics in the early twentieth century, as it eventually emerged out of the Western encounter with Sanskrit. The indebtedness of both Saussure and Bloomfield to Pāṇini is acknowledged and clear (Singh et al., 1995): it was Pāṇini, after all, who had first delivered a system for structurally analysing each and every word-form of a language, leaving nothing to the informal understanding of the language user, thus

giving a proof of concept for a full and scientific account of a language in the structuralist sense.

Rather than dealing with a particular corpus of Vedic texts, Pāṇini’s grammar, at a basic level, reflects the insight that Sanskrit exhibits a structural complexity that is subject to formal rules and regularities, which, together with relevant exceptions to their application and a list of primitives (roots) to which they apply, capture an infinity of cases, thereby doing justice to the unboundedness of language. Sentences, the Indians recognized, are‘innumerable’, requiring some kind of formal structure (Cardona,2009: 148, 154). This structure is analysed at a number of different ‘levels’— semantics/meaning, morphosyntax, morphology, and phonology, with asymmetric dependencies between these (so that, e.g., semantics can influence morphology, but not the other way around) (Kiparsky,2002). It is noteworthy in this regard that, although Pāṇinian grammar is no doubt ‘formal’, grammatical description starts from meanings to be signified, serving as conditions for the introduction of affixes after bases, making semantics‘intimately linked with grammar’ (Cardona, 2009).

In this tradition, the epistemological and philosophical significance of the study of grammar runs deep. Pāṇini’s grammar was widely recognized, particularly by Pa- tanjali (2nd century ad) and Bhartrihari (5th century), not to belong to any particular

Vedic school but to be common to them all (Cardona, 2009). One might thus

characterize it as a general analysis of the structure of Vedic knowledge (the Vedas, literally, are‘the body of knowledge’) and an organizing principle behind the rituals that were associated with it. In the perception of the time, the Vedas, by laying an ancient foundation for language, lay a foundation for the fundamental distinctions and classifications of the world, and for the rituals that sustain and ground the social and natural order (Halbfass,1991). Moreover, according to the ‘Advaitic’ position defended by Bhartrihari as well as the Manu-smrti and other dharma texts, the Ultimate Reality itself, or Brahman, is of the nature of word (sabdabrahman, where sabda means‘word’) (Aklujkar, 2009). As Tripath (2009) puts it, ‘the Ultimate Reality is the Word-principle’, not unlike perhaps in the Christian Genesis. Accordingly, it makes sense that whatever is created can be linguistically analysed, comprehended, and communicated—it has a linguistic nature—and all science must adhere to the principles of grammar. It also makes sense that the study of grammar becomes part of spiritual practice, i.e. yoga, the attempt to realize a supreme state of being.

Naturally, Brahman is One, and without beginning and end, as God is in the Christian tradition. But we can only perceive creation in its multiplicity and in space and time. The same is true for the word-principle: whereas meaning is something unitary, we can only study it by looking at verbal activity, which is temporal and sequential. Yet the study of grammar aims beyond this surface. Viewed as a spiritual practice,

it has been termed sabdapurvayoga or the yoga of transcending the verbal multiplicity or plurality through the words themselves. All such verbal multiplicity occurs in time; hence, it is

an activity, temporal and sequential. Spiritual practice of grammar shows the path to submerge such a sequentiality into the plenitude of the Self, the Consciousness. (Tripath,2009: 183)

The Indian tradition, then, gave language and hence grammar a role to play in the scientific study of the world and our place therein that was both principled and systematic. Ultimately, this appears to be the reason why linguistic discussions in the West came to fruition only so much later, while in India both grammar and the philosophy of language were cornerstones of science in a consistent fashion for more than a thousand years after the onset of human scientific speculation as such.

These considerations also help us to understand why the study of grammar in the Indian tradition has a normative significance that it is taken to lack today. Of course, Pāṇini’s grammar is now widely regarded as ‘descriptive’ rather than ‘prescriptive’ in character (Matilal, 1990: 10), which is to say: it is not prescriptive in the sense in which Latin set a standard for grammaticality of European languages in the eyes of some eighteenth-century linguists, whose moulding of all languages on the Latin model would be ridiculed by nineteenth-century comparativists (recall Jespersen’s comments above). In Pāṇini’s case, however, understanding how complex words arise by strictly rule-based application of such operations as replacement, affixation, augmentation, and compounding seems to, at the same time, serve to better under- stand how they function, i.e. what they mean or signify when occurring in the ancient language in which the scriptures are written. Indeed, the process of inflecting a given root is being compared to a process of‘cleansing’ the root in question, making it fit for the purposes of ritual—a ‘raw’ concept (root) cannot be so used or occur as such in a sentence (Matilal,1990: 9). In this sense, word and sentence formation rules do contribute to thefixation of a norm for the formulation of knowledge and for the practice of ritual. As we shall see in Bhartrihari’s case, this conclusion is strengthened in a different and crucial way.

To assert the same of modern generative grammar would be untrue, particularly under the understanding of syntactic autonomy, where formal rules are arbitrary manipulations of‘symbols’ that are thought not to inherently relate to their use or semantics, which has its independent ontology and formal structure. As Chomsky famously puts it, the computational system of language that is governed by the rules in question could be just what it is now, yet be used for purposes of locomotion (Chomsky,2000a: 27). It becomes linguistic in character only through its contingent embedding in already existing ‘performance’ systems, such as the C-I systems mentioned above, which have a non-linguistic semantics. In this sense, the connec- tion between grammar and thought is something of an evolutionary accident.

Relatedly, Chomsky implies (2000a: 106) that the ordinary term ‘language’ may not actually describe anything in nature, or a‘natural kind’: a nominalist stance, on which the term‘language’ is merely an informal label that is eliminated, as scientific inquiry proceeds, by technical abstractions (e.g.‘I-language’), which need not cohere

with how we intuitively describe the world. Perhaps, indeed, no essence is hidden under such common-sense terms as‘chemical’, ‘physical’, or ‘electrical’. Perhaps, the name‘language’, too, may just be a name, referring loosely to a scattered range of phenomena that form no unity of which there could be a single science, as the Indian tradition conceived it. But then again, maybe not: maybe the term‘language’ does depict a natural kind or distinctive principle. In the Indian tradition, it depicts the principle of reality itself. A non-nominalist stance of this sort invites probing deeper into the question of what grammar actually is—a question that might well have some substantive and principled answer in naturalistic inquiry.

The connection between language and speciation that we tackle in Chapter7 will support this perspective in its own ways. Today we assume that there is only one human‘spirit’—the ‘psychic unity of mankind’—and only one living human species, originating in a Sub-Saharan population that found itself biologically endowed to put its sensory-motor apparatus to a fundamentally novel use: talking, manifesting a mode of thought apparently equally novel, as pre-sapiens hominin culture suggests nothing like it. As a consequence of this, an essentially modern culture erupts, rather abruptly (Tattersall,2008), defining a novel way of being in the world after millions of years of relative evolutionary stagnation. The biological endowment furthermore must have stabilized genetically in this species by40,000 years ago, when it reached Australia (Crow,2002a). The species has remained a single one. Its language capacity is such that any child can learn any language; it unifies this species, drawing a boundary around it. Speciation, language, and thought are thus virtually a single evolutionary event, which asks for a unified principle behind it (Crow, 2008): a principle with the power of reformatting human thought and defining a new species. Species however are real as biological entities. So if language defines a species, it is also real, as a biological kind.

It is worth asking, then, what grammar, as such, is or does—not allowing us any nominalist escape routes, and hence taking it as a fundamental and unified element of nature and cognition, which perhaps cannot be decomposed. In this regard, Bhartrihari gave an answer that is particularly interesting in the present context. Bhartrihari considers grammar as the essential guide to the reality of language: unlike pronunciation, it is the inner essence of language. But for Bhartrihari, language also lies at the heart of the universe. If so, the study of grammar is the foundation of all knowledge. But why exactly should this be? He tells us:

Words are the sole guide to the truths about the behaviour of objects; and there is no understanding of the truth about words without grammar. (Vakyapadiya I.13)

The first sentence is correct in the perhaps obvious sense that to state or even contemplate a truth about anything, we need words to refer to objects and say something about them. Of course it is true that we may capture the behaviour of objects in the form of another notation that makes no use of words, say a differential equation. Yet, this is using a language too, that of mathematics, which moreover has a

formal grammar to it. That mathematical language depends on natural language, moreover, and the mathematician’s thinking about these equations and his regarding them as true will presumably take a propositional format (it is certainly logical). The second sentence in the quote is also correct in the equally obvious sense that words are inherently grammatical entities (they can combine by grammatical rules) and grammar alone tells us about their behaviour. Knowledge of reality is thus made possible by grammar. But why does it follow that language is therefore at the basis of the universe?

This, again, is correct—though now not in an obvious way—in the sense that it is part of what it means to say that some proposition P is true (or that it is an item of knowledge), that the world is as P says. If (i) words are needed to state a truth, (ii) grammar is the essential guide to the behaviour of words, and (iii) we can formulate (at least some) truths in terms of such words, grammar is therefore the study of reality.14One can, of course, redefine what truth means. One could say, perhaps, that we never really quite claim that something is true, but only that it is likely, or well confirmed. Or we could say that whatever truth we can claim, it will be true of the world as appearance, not as reality. But it is undeniable that‘true’ is not what ‘likely to be confirmed’ means. ‘True’ means true, and it is arguably an analytic claim that P can only be true if, not only language, but also the world is a certain way: indeed, it has to be in the exact way that P says. One could also redefine the term ‘reality’, and say that it is not really reality we mean, but appearance. Yet, again, when we say that something is real, we are not saying that it appears to be real.‘Real’ does not mean ‘appears/seems to be real’, and to master the grammar of such raising verbs is to master the metaphysical distinctions in question.

If truth depends on grammar, therefore, grammar is a guide to the real, which is what Bhartrihari says: by learning about how words function in language, we learn about objects in the world. The argument for the normativity of grammar made

above, and for the epistemological significance of grammar, is therefore

strengthened. Interestingly, Bhartrihari adds to his argument that ‘all thing-classes depend upon word-classes’ (Vakyapadiya I.15), a claim that will play an important role in the second chapter. We interpret this as saying that in the way we think about, refer to, and know the world, objects fall under certain formal classes: they are ‘objects’, ‘events’, ‘propositions’, and so on, exhibiting what we call a formal ontology. No such ontology can be defined in purely perceptual terms. The question then is whether this formal ontology is independent of the form of language. On Bhartri- hari’s view, it is only through words, and in the way these figure in sentences, that things are understood or become known. We know the world through seeing, tasting, touching, and hearing it, too; but this is knowledge in a non-propositional sense. In

14 _{We return to this argument at greater length in Chapter9. The three premises of this argument are}

this sense, Bhartrihari’s conclusion makes sense that what we know as the world is the creation of language. This does not mean that when we talk about a tiger, it is not a tiger we are talking about, but instead a word. Rather, it means that, as an object of knowledge, the tiger is inherently referred to under a grammatical form.

Like Pāṇini’s grammar, Bhartrihari’s is meaning-based. Much of his work revolves around reflections about what grammatical meaning is, for which Bhartrihari reserves the term sphota. Word and meaning, on this view, relate like cause and effect. Strictly, sentence (i.e. grammatical) meanings have no parts, and that sen- tences are uttered in a temporal sequence of words, he argues, shouldn’t confuse us into thinking that they do. Sentence meanings, in short, are indivisible unities, and the words are no more than‘instructions’ for calling up a certain sphota. We shall come back to Bhartrihari’s rejection of the principle of compositionality, which is defended in the Indian tradition by the opposing empiricist Nyaya and Mimamsa schools (Pradhan, 2009: 287), in Chapter 3. The same non-compositional view is endorsed by Bhartrihari for the meaning of words: while a word has phonemes as parts, its meaning has no parts, leading to an‘atomist’ position in contemporary terms (Fodor,1998; Hinzen, 2012).

Bhartrihari’s view of grammar must be centrally meaning-based, for language has