अष्टाध्यायी
keyur joshi
Hi!
Sharing teaser on my work on अष्टाध्यायी. It may take 10 years before I publish. But this is what I am working on.
What is अष्टाध्यायी
Verbal communication started with वर्ण. Each वर्ण had meaning. But there was no language or grammar yet, so वर्ण was noun and verb both in itself. वर्ण represented all विभक्ति of noun and all विकरण+तिङ् रूप of verbs because verb and noun were not yet distinguished and their derivatives were not manifest separately. वर्ण had its meaning hard wired in brain circuits and it could be understood without any need of teaching or learning. In this sense it was, and is, अ-पौरुषेय.
With usage वर्ण evolved into वर्ण-समास. These वर्ण-समास did not have inherent meaning of their own but derived their meaning from constituent वर्ण. So, meaning changed based on context. मा derived its meaning from म (inside) and आ(here+here, until, desire) and can mean the space inside something or mother depending on context. These वर्ण-समास are now called धातु.
Usage of धातु to communicate lead to संज्ञा revolution. धातु had bundled meaning consisting of constituent वर्ण. So, धातु became a pointer to more complex understandings. This naming a bundle of complex things into one “name” is key evolutionary step in the development of language and intellect. It is interesting to note that संज्ञा itself means gather(स)-inside(म)-open (ज)-surface/skin(ञ)-here (आ) if we go by meaning of its constituent वर्ण. संज्ञा originally referred to bundled inside net/skin here and was used to indicate bundled वर्ण. We now have lost the original meaning of the word संज्ञा. But that is a story for some other day.
During this period, somewhere between 20 lakh year ago and 13 lakh year ago, two revolutions happened in cognition/language. The first we already discussed – संज्ञा revolution – that enabled labelling of things. This allowed words to become pointers to complex meanings.
The other evolution is डु-कृञ् revolution. This is when language became action (verb) centric.
Some of धातु evolved to have special meaning and they were used frequently as धातु-समास to indicate different meaning/s. (the way “to” is used in together, towards, tonight, today, towards, etc) These special धातु evolved to be प्रत्यय.
During this time, out of need to convey details of “action/verb”, प्रत्यय for “from”, “to” and “at” evolved. These became संप्रदन आपादन अधिकरण विभक्ति. Immediately after that प्रत्यय for Subject, object and instrument also evolved. Long time after this, षष्ठी was added in this प्रत्यय list and whole thing is now called सुप् प्रत्यय.
Soon after सुप्, तिङ also evolved from one specific major activity of civilization of that time – नौ. पुरुष (anchor) and वचन (draft) evolved as very relevant concepts for नौ. They too, like संज्ञा, originally meant something totally different. This happened, at the minimum, before 10 lakh years ago. We can give timeline because, some sort of sea faring had evolved 10 lakh years ago (Flores) and verbal communication are prerequisite to cross open waters.
After तिङ and सुप्, there emerged काल out of necessity to measure time (of tide) thru flow of sand from some hand held basket/pot. काल literally meaning hand held until sand.
At different points in time, different set of people migrated taking root stock of language with them. Migratory groups evolved their separate languages but ancestral memes are detectable in these languages.
The mother language, and its people, continued to evolve and resulted into full fledge spoken language centric, largest civilization worshipping वेद – knowledge (derived from वद speech).
Because language was super high technology, efforts were made to preserve the same.
That preserved document is अष्टाध्यायी.
Venkata Subramanian
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Venkata Subramanian
Suchetan M
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keyur joshi
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keyur joshi
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Suchetan M
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