This MedLibrary.org supplementary page on Sakatayana is provided directly from the open source Wikipedia as a service to our readers. Please see the note below on authorship of this content, as well as the Wikipedia usage guidelines. To search for other content from our encyclopedia supplement, please use the form below:
Related Sponsors
Śākaṭāyana is a Sanskrit grammarian of Iron Age India (fl. roughly 8th c. BCE). His work is referred by scholars such as Yaska (around 7th c. BCE) and Pāṇini (circa 5th c. BCE), as well as other Sanskrit grammarians, but is lost to us today.
He claimed that all nouns are ultimately derived from some verbal root. This process is reflected in the Sanskrit grammar as the system of krit-pratyayas or verbal affixes.
In his The word and the world, the philosopher Bimal Krishna Matilal refers to this debate (which lasted several centuries) as an
interesting philosophical discussion between the nairuktas or etymologists and the pāṇinīyas or grammarians. According to the etymologists, all nouns (substantives) are derived from some verbal root or the other. Yāska in his Nirukta refers to this view (in fact defends it) and ascribes it to an earlier scholar Śākaṭāyana. This would require that all words are to be analysable into atomic elements, 'roots' or 'bases' and 'affixes' or 'inflections' — better known in Sanskrit as dhātu and pratyaya [...] Yāska reported the view of Gārgya who opposed Śākaṭāyana (both preceded Pāṇini who mentions them by name) and held that not all substantival words or nouns (nāma) were to be derived from roots, for certain nominal stems were 'atomic'. (p. 8-9)
His text may have been called the Lakṣaṇa Śāstra, in which he also describes the process of determining grammatical gender in animate and inanimate creation.
See also
References
- Matilal, Bimal Krishna (1990/2001), The word and the world: India's contribution to the study of language, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-565512-5.
Wikipedia content modification information:
- This page was last modified on 8 September 2008, at 00:49.
Wikipedia Authorship and Review
Wikipedia content provided here is not reviewed directly by MedLibrary.org. Wikipedia content is authored by an open community of volunteers and is not produced by or in any way affiliated with MedLibrary.org.
Wikipedia Usage Guidelines
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article on "Sakatayana".
The URL for this specific entry is:
All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. (See Copyrights for details). Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.