No, apparently not a Sandwich. Thoughts?
Ever since I heard about the ancient Sanskrit grammarians, I have mourned the absence of such ancient Greeks or Romans, or rather the überlieferte works of them. (English word escapes me)
If only we had the attic sophistic treatises on grammar, or the complete Varronic de lingua latina. falls into deep, deep coma filled with dreams of Varro
Even better, had we had Caesar’s treatise “de analogia”! Caesar writing about something that’s not wars!
<?xml version="1.0"?>
Here’s Dionysios Thrax’s τέχνη γ?αμματική.
I know of the ancient grammarians and I ought to think they suffice, but really what I hunger for are treatises in the vein of Plato’s Cratylus, I think. Long-winded essays on the nature of language, preferably.
The Stoics are the go-to guys for that sort of thing. As usual, I think we only have fragments and quotations.
Panini wasn’t long-winded, though. He’d be a lot easier if he were a little less terse.
There’s some very complex thinking about language and knowledge in the Pali canon, but I don’t know anything about post-Paninian language theorizing.
Annis, how is it that you are not a college professor? You seem to know an awful lot.
The differences between Indian grammarians and the Greek ones is, though the Indians tried to describe precisely the language and understand its rules and how it goes developments, the Greeks tried to create simplifications and went so far as to force the use of those simplified rules the way they thought people should do. I know, I am oversimplifying the situation, but still I think I am to the point.
Which Indian grammarians were these? Even the word we use to name the language — Sanskrit: completed, perfected — betrays its scholastic nature. Panini’s grammar is quite as proscriptive and artificial as any atticist manual belched up by the Second Sophistic.
I was thinking of Panini, and the history of Indian grammar schools. How the need arose for these rules, the interpretation of old Vedic texts. Greeks of those times tried only to unify the dialects, which lead to the development of the Koine.
It is said that being able to reduce a sutra with even an ardha matra (half the measure of time to pronounce a short a) gives the sutrakara (author of the sutra) as much happiness as the birth of a baby boy. There is a good reason for being terse, in the old days students had to commit the entire ashtadhyayi to memory.
There’s some very complex thinking about language and knowledge in the Pali canon, but I don’t know anything about post-Paninian language theorizing.
Perhaps you have figured this out already, since this post was made several years ago. There is a philosophical school of grammarians, one important figure in this tradition was Bhartrihari: http://www.iep.utm.edu/bhartrihari/