Sanskrit Grammar: Including both the Classical Language, and the Older Dialects, of Veda and...

Sanskrit Grammar: Including both the Classical Language, and the Older Dialects, of Veda and Brahmana, 2nd ed | William Dwight Whitney | Classic work in the field

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Sanskrit Grammar: ...

	Sanskrit Grammar: Including both the Classical Language, and the Older Dialects, of Veda and Brahmana, 2nd ed William Dwight Whitney Harvard University Press, 2003 - 576 pages average customer review:based on 7 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

It was in June, 1875, as I chanced to be for a day or two in Leipzig, that I was unexpectedly invited to prepare the Sanskrit grammar for the Indo-European series projected by Messrs. Breitkopf and Hartel. After some consideration, and consultation with friends, I accepted the task, and have since devoted to it what time could be spared from regular duties, after the satisfaction of engagements earlier formed. If the delay seems a long one, it was nevertheless unavoidable; and I would gladly, in the interest of the work itself, have made it still longer. In every such case, it is necessary to make a compromise between measurably satisfying a present pressing need, and doing the subject fuller justice at the cost of more time; and it seemed as if the call for a Sanskrit grammar on a somewhat different plan from those already in use--excellent as some of these in many respects are--was urgent enough to recommend a speedy completion of the work begun.

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Sanskrit Grammar- Whitney

I am presently useing this book in conjunction with Lanman's- Sanskrit Reader. In a University setting with a competent professor, this is undoubtledly a superb combination.

Although I am turning the corner on this language (picking up steam, "cooking" with oil...) might I suggest to other beginning independent students such as myself, try something a little kinder and gentler, then work up to this.

It is customary and common practice for me to jump headlong into these sorts of disciplines. However, since the difficulties of this language are at the begining; perhaps something along the lines of: Edward Perry's- A Sanskrit Primer, might be more in order.

As I do have a measure of: Greek, German, and Morse Code(that counts also); the general grammatical concepts and terms I am for the most part familiar with. Since this is a very detailed, comprehensive Grammar; it does require: patience, persistance, and effort.

As for me, I am accustomed to the underdog posistion- looking for fairness and justice, you ain't gonna find it down here. Furthermore, if I am going to be dominated by anything; it might as well be Sanskrit.

This Grammar is a "Classic", and I shall rise to the occasion. See, I can sound like college kid's and your professors.

And that's my review.

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Classic work in the field

Whitney is the prototype for Sanskrit grammars in English. I suspect the author had in mind Allen and Greenough's Latin grammar or H.W. Smythe's Greek grammar when designing the numeric scheme for each point, theme, and paradigm. It is a very useful system of notation for referencing from other works.

I can't honestly see going through this lesson by lesson with most students who are not dedicated to long term research in the field and want to begin reading Sanskrit without learning every arcane morphological exception. This book serves as an indispensible reference work by including Vedic forms as well as accentation in the paradigms, which I would imagine is more authoritative than Coulson's simple rules. The book is long and comprehensive, and like Smythe and Greenough, has gained the respect of being "the" authoritative source. It is a wonderful book for learning troublesome concepts correctly and more fully than several of the shorter grammars treat them.

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Whitney Sanskrit Grammar

I like the introductory sections and discussion of differences in classical and Vedic Sanskrit. Still it moves quickly into more detail than can be absorbed with casual study. It is a good reference text -- easier to find things than some of the other grammatical texts -- and it answers some basic questions, like the history of the word spacing in modern texts. But still engages in the vocabulary of advanced grammar without defining the terms -- for example, desiderative, aorist, etc.

Essential historically but today slightly out-distanced

An essential book to understand what has to be done to regenerate diachronic linguistics and the diachronic approach of Sanskrit, Irano-Aryan languages, and then Indo-Aryan and Indo-European languages. Whitney is one of those who set the main concepts by projecting onto Sanskrit his "modern" European concepts. This is clear when he speaks of participles, infinitives, gerundives and gerunds. It never comes to his consciousness that maybe these forms - be they antecedent to or derived from conjugated verbs - are no longer either only or at all in the temporal field but are positioned, in a way or another, totally or partially, in a spatial domain, are spatialized. So he is reduced to speaking of these forms that he mostly sees as declined nominal forms as being quasi-infinitives or infinitives not by the spatial value of these forms but by a pure parallel with the corresponding translations in our languages. In the same way he sees that the genitive is mostly not expressing possession but he does not see it expresses the attribution of something or some quality to someone or some other thing, which implies we have to reconsider the basic value of this genitive. The third example would be that he does not see verbs are by principle dynamic and that all roots are "verbal" (and we should discuss this term because we are before the very distinction between verbs and nouns, in a proto semantic state where nominal and verbal are irrelevant) that is to say dynamic and not static. It is the use of the root in either a nominal or a verbal derivation that makes it a verb or a noun. The book what's more does not give any syntax, I mean the syntax of sentences. He does not see for one example that "BHU" is both "BE" and "BECOME", static and dynamic localizing "state" neither verbal nor nominal in our understanding of these categories in the root itself (and the reference to the traditional translations `be' and `become' is pure intellectual laziness based on the fact that our languages do not have a proto semantic form that is neither nominal nor verbal, before verb and noun emerge). But when the nominative subject of this BE-BECOME understanding when conjugated into a verb is declined in the genitive the BE-BECOME relation from this nominative to the nominative predicative noun is transformed into a HAVE-(GET) relation (note it is purely relational and has nothing to do with a special semantic unit) from this genitive to the nominative predicative noun. If he had dwelt on this case, and there are others of the same type that he quotes at times when examining the uses of the various cases, he would have been able to understand the genitive does not express a possession but the beneficiary of an attribution movement. Yet this book has to be checked, be it only because it is rather clear and explains what has been said since on Sanskrit, as long as linguists did not question the basic concepts. Luckily some linguist have started to question them.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine & University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne

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reviews: page 1, 2

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