Puṣpikā: Tracing Ancient India Through Texts and Traditions

Contributions to Current Research in Indology Volume I

Nina Mirnig, Peter-Daniel Szanto, Michael Williams, Peter-Daniel Szanto, Michael Williams

• Editore: Oxbow Books
• Anno: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781782970422
• Argomento: Storia
• Categoria: Storia antica

It is perhaps commonplace to say that India is one of the world's richest and most enticing cultures. One thousand years have passed since Albiruni, arguably the first "Indologist", wrote his outsider's account of the subcontinent and two hundred years have passed since the inception of Western Indology. And yet, what this monumental scholarship has achieved is still outweighed by the huge tracts of terra incognita: thousands of works lacking scholarly attention and even more manuscripts which still await careful study whilst decaying in the unforgiving Indian climate. In September 2009 young researchers and graduate students in this field came together to present their cutting-edge work at the first International Indology Graduate Research Symposium, which was held at Oxford University. This volume, the first in a new series which will publish the proceedings of the Symposium, will make important contributions to the study of the classical civilisation of the Indian sub-continent. The series, edited by Nina Mirnig, Péter-Dániel Szántó and Michael Williams, will strive to cover a wide range of subjects reaching from literature, religion, philosophy, ritual and grammar to social history, with the aim that the research published will not only enrich the field of classical Indology but eventually also contribute to the studies of history and anthropology of India and Indianised Central and South-East Asia.

One

Defining the Svara Bearing Unit in the śikṣāvedāṅga literature: Unmasking a veiled debate

Giovanni Ciotti*

§ 1 Defining the framework

A long-standing unspoken debate within the Sanskrit grammatical tradition concerns the definition of the nature of the Svara¹ Bearing Unit [SBU], i.e. which part of a word bears the svara. The very label of “SBU” does not in fact correspond to any specific Sanskrit term, but is a caique - here used for the first time - from the highly controversial concept of Accent Bearing Unit [ABU]. The latter has been at the centre of Western Linguistic speculation at least since the 1930s,² and its elaboration has substantially contributed to the reshaping of the overall interpretation of the architecture of the phonological component of grammar.³ Through the survey of various treatises, it will be shown that the Sanskrit grammarians have also been engaged in an effort to describe the characteristics of a specific set of linguistic entities and their relation to the svaras, a speculation which echoes the quest for the definition of the ABU and which has led to the formulation of different views.

However, before moving any further, it is essential to say a few words about the similarity that is postulated here between the SBU and the ABU. The very nature of the language speculation is in fact intrinsically manifold: it depends on the point of view of its composer, on the tools - both intellectual and technical - which have been used in its formulation, and on the aims which have been pursued.⁴ As a consequence, it should be asked whether the topic that will be treated here represents or does not represent the same problem for the Sanskrit and the Western traditions.

§ 1.1 Sanskrit as a common ground

As with any sort of language speculation, including both the Sanskrit and the Western linguistic traditions, the aim consists in formulating an interpretative and descriptive representation of its object by gathering general observations from a variety of (epi-)phenomena, i.e. by representing its grammar. Since this can be done either through comparisons with different languages, or through the analysis of a single language, although the Sanskrit grammatical tradition has no comparative interests, it is possible to compare its methodologies and achievements with those of the Western Linguistic tradition.⁵

Therefore, Sanskrit itself provides the common ground in which the two traditions can operate: on the one hand describing the characteristics of this language is the very aim of the Indian grammatical tradition and, on the other hand, Sanskrit represents – as any other language might do – a suitable field for testing the validity of the theoretical models provided by Western Linguistics.

Furthermore, although quite problematic in its definition, in particular within the Western tradition, the object under investigation is basically one, namely accentuation. As it will be shown in § 3, it is possible to state that the two traditions have gathered the same general observations while dealing with articulatory phenomena such as the modulation of the vibration of the vocal cords. A remarkable consequence of this common understanding can be seen in the fact that, according to both traditions, it is necessary to split words into minor subunits and to assign to them the property of being bearing units. In fact, just like some strands of the Western Linguistic tradition have divided words into minor units, i.e. units different from morphemes, like segments, syllables, or, more generally, prosodic constituents (see § 4), in the same way, the Sanskrit grammarians have dealt with varṇas and akṣaras in order to understand which part of a pada (“word”) bears the svaras (see § 5).

§1.2 Phonetics and phonology in the Sanskrit tradition

However, what seems to represent a common problem to which a similar answer has been provided should actually be embedded in two remarkably distinct systems concerning the overall architecture of (Sanskrit) grammar. As a matter of fact, the frameworks in which Sanskrit accentuation, or Sanskrit svaras (cf. § 3), have been analyzed are remarkably different from those of the Western tradition, and it would be rather naive to start our comparison without clarifying this point. In fact, Western Linguistics distinguishes two separate modules concerning how the grammatical architecture of a language deals with the sounds of the language itself, namely the phonetic component and the phonological component,⁶ whereas the Sanskrit tradition never operates – at least manifestly – within such a formal distinction.

Although within Western Linguistics the debate about where to draw the precise limit between phonetics and phonology is still open (cf. Purnell [2009]), it is possible to define phonetics as the study of the articulation and perception of the sounds that human beings use in speech, whereas phonology consists in the study of the sound patterns characterizing the overall properties of contrastive sound inventories, of the ...