Talk:Vedic Sanskrit grammar

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Reference Material and comparison with Vedic meter structure[edit]

Wikner's introductory guide is referenced to Panini's grammar; infact referenced to much recent text books on Sanskrit grammar instead of any "Vedic Sanskrit Grammar". I do not see, what is the purpose of putting this as a reference. If article contains the material from it, which I presume it does, then does not serve the purpose per se.

Sril Jiva Goswami's book is the second referenced book - doesn't contain any thing different from Wikners and it is just referenced to Bhagvad Gita to teach Sanskrit. Arthur McDonell's book titles with "Vedic Grammar", however it is merely a prose on the structure of Vedic Meter, which can be summariesed in two vedic mantras of Rigved followed in Yajurved >> "Gayatri Tristup, Anushtup Panktya saha| Brihati, Ushnik, Kukup , Suchi bhihi , Shamyam tuttva|| Dvipadaya Chakhutpada stripadaha | Vichhandaya Sachhandaha suchibhi samyantuttva ||

For Vedic Accent - uddatt / anuddatt / svarit are the pitches attributed to vedic meter when chanted and has nothing to do with grammar. why Wikner is again referenced here ? ftp://ftp.nac.ac.za/wikner/accent.ps600-june97. Similarly Frederik Kortlandt's article talks about the accent and pitch and not focused on grammar. The pitch and accent has utmost importance which can be understood by the old rules of Maharshi Yjnavalkya. Written and pronounced syllables will be different from each other, Chanting has its own rules - that is why vedic meters are printed with pitch notations where there punctuations and pronunciation differ. This has special meaning in Brahmin Tradition and has nothing to do with grammar.

Similarly , on Morphology , Paul Kiparsky, McDonell, Muller and other's refernce should not be put in here to make the point that Vedas contain different grammar than Panini's Ashtadhyayi - the latter treatise on grammar.

I guess - the difference is being made by the western authors who really do not understand the fact that Vedic Phonology is distinguished in itself for its own purpose. Perhaps, this lack of understanding stems from the fact that only Brahmins are allowed to learn the accent, pitches and chant the mantras (Vedic Meter) and usually they do not share their intellectual property.

I am still struggling to understand the purpose of the article.

Accent is part of grammar, along with inflection and morphological derivation. In vedic, just the difference in accent marks the difference between some cases (that is, nominative and vocative in all stems except for masc/fem sing of vowel stems and masc of some derived consonant stems). Moreover, and more important, is that some words are differed only with the accent, for example ápas, accented on the first syllable, means 'work', but apás, accented on the second, means 'active' (one who works); bráhman means 'prayer' but brahmán means 'one who prays'. Similar differences accounts for different classes of compounds: rÁjaputra 'having kings as sons' but rAjaputrá 'son of a king'.
In a somewhat different field, it is vitally important for Indo-European studies, since it is the best preservation of the old IE accentual system, a fact that solves problems in the other daughter families (see for example Verner's law).
You seem to be familiar with classic sanskrit, so I can recommend you to take a look at MacDonell's Vedic Grammar, and you will notice the differences. By the way, i'm not an expert in Panini so correct me if i am wrong, but i've been told that he is aware of and mentions some older form no longer in use by his time, so the difference is recognized by him as well.


update: now i see the links to the pdf's at the bootom of the page, they are not the entire works, at least not MacDonnel's, which is a brief but essential grammar. Look for it in the library.
Amilah (talk) 10:07, 16 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I checked the MacDonnel's book also - which pages you are referring to? as I said earlier - pitching and accent has its own purpose; it has nothing to do with grammar.Braahman and Brahman are well known words and both are distinct in every aspect - it may be a deal with writing Sanskrit words in English script but not in Devnagri141.160.28.251 (talk) 03:21, 8 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Requested move 1 May 2018[edit]

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

Moved. See enough support and good reason to go ahead with this request as proposed. Have a Great Day and Happy Publishing! (nac by page mover)  Paine Ellsworth  put'r there  15:08, 20 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Grammar of the Vedic language → Vedic Sanskrit grammar – As in similar pages like Japanese grammar, German grammar, French grammar, etc. Jonashtand (talk) 17:03, 1 May 2018 (UTC)--Relisting. Dekimasuよ! 17:49, 8 May 2018 (UTC) --Relisting. Regards, Krishna Chaitanya Velaga (talk • mail) 04:02, 15 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Also note that Substrata in the Vedic language used to be at Substratum in Vedic Sanskrit, but was moved by the same editor who moved this page away from Vedic Sanskrit grammar and (temporarily) moved Vedic Sanskrit to Vedic language. All these moves were the actions of a relatively inexperienced editor over a short period in 2016. See [this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Myedits2]. Dekimasuよ! 00:02, 19 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

Erroneous information[edit]

A cursory glance at this page reveals a lot of unsourced and spurious forms and some that are plainly wrong and non-existent in the language, and also a lot of omissions of extant and common forms, especially with regard to verbs.

1) The form हव्यो for a-stem neuter gender dual nominative is clearly wrong. [1] [2]

2) matr̥ and other feminine stems are shown to have a long termination in the stem, which is wrong. Long r̥ vocalic stems are absent in all stages of the language. This is clearly an erroneous analogy from stems in a. [3] [4]

  1. ^ https://lrc.la.utexas.edu/eieol/vedol/20#grammar_194
  2. ^ https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Sanskrit_Grammar_(Whitney)/Chapter_V#Nouns_and_Adjectives
  3. ^ https://lrc.la.utexas.edu/eieol/vedol/20#grammar_199
  4. ^ https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Sanskrit_Grammar_(Whitney)/Chapter_V#Nouns_and_Adjectives

3) Forms like तः, ता, तस्यः etc. in the pronouns' section are clearly spurious seem extremely speculative.

4) The moods of the aorist system, perfect system and, though rare, of the future system are nowhere alluded to, and the injunctive mood in systems other than aorist too are conspicuously absent. The long form of अस् also seems to be a misunderstanding of the subjunctive mood in athematic conjugation, though it may stand provided references. Again the lack of in line references makes it extremely difficult to verify. [1] [2] [3] [4]

  1. ^ https://lrc.la.utexas.edu/eieol/vedol/60#grammar_231
  2. ^ https://lrc.la.utexas.edu/eieol/vedol/90#grammar_264
  3. ^ https://lrc.la.utexas.edu/eieol/vedol/100#grammar_274
  4. ^ https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Sanskrit_Grammar_(Whitney)/Chapter_VIII#Conjugation

5) Wrong spelling, inconsistencies in accent marking and inconsistencies between the Devanagari and Latin spellings also occur very frequently.

Corresponding sections in Vedic Grammar by Arthur Anthony Macdonell [1] can also be referred to and seems to give similar points. Also the article can be vastly elaborated as it completely ignores prepositions, the grammar of accentuation(as opposed to the orthography and pronunciation which alone is mentioned in the wikipedia page for Vedic Accent), adverbs, additional verbal forms, nominal forms from consonant stems, monosyllabic nominal stems etc. from these same sources. Accent in Vedic Sanskrit is not merely a part of phonology but is clearly semantical and syntactical: verbs for instance accentuate variously based on syntax, strong/weak form and suffixes, and vocative forms accentuate differently based on position in a sentence. This lexical separateness is not maintained in any form in classical Sanskrit because it lacks these altogether, and Panini has made only a basic study on this.

My claims may be wrong and I am not an expert in this subject. I request the editors to look through this and act as they see fit. 49.207.205.62 (talk) 09:26, 2 January 2021 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 49.207.205.62 (talk) 08:44, 2 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  1. ^ https://www.google.co.in/books/edition/Vedic_grammar/VxybDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0

Nugatory but[edit]

This is the oldest method of Proto-Indo-European declension still in productive use ...

Just wondering whether the mot juste for the bolded word might not be 'reflex' (i.e. Zair's 2012 monograph The Reflexes of the Proto-Indo-European Laryngeals in Celtic)? Nishidani (talk) 21:21, 3 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I wouldn't argue against using 'reflex' in this context. In general though I'll say here, I'm still working on this page, and intend to refine some of this as I get more stuff in place. Thanks for your feedback. Dyḗwsuh₃nus (talk) 21:31, 3 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Festina lente. Nishidani (talk) 08:59, 4 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Grammatical gender in PIE & Vedic Sanskrit[edit]

@Nishidani:

Though in PIE, formal gender differentiation was low, with masculine/feminine nouns showing identical inflections, and the neuter class differing from them only with regard to the nominative and accusative.[14] in Sanskrit, nouns are classified as belonging to any one of three genders.

The two-gender feature was prevalent in the oldest forms of PIE, and the 3-gender system developed before PIE broke up into the daughter languages. (Fortson, Burrow..). Could you clarify the importance of the above added note in the context of Sanskrit itself please, which appears to have already inherited the 3-gender system? Dyḗwsuh₃nus (talk) 12:51, 4 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

You can revert it out if you prefer. I was thrown off by the phrasing of

This is the oldest method of Proto-Indo-European declension still in productive use in Vedic.[23]

(a) PIE is a highly conjectural field of reconstruction, and that line reads as though Vedic preserves an 'oldest form'. These 'oldest forms' are merely hypotheses, not ascertained facts. When we speak of a two-gender feature, for example, that evidence is provided by not by most early IE languages, but by Anatolian, which again is markedly different from the model reconstructed for PIE.(Fortson 2010 pp.114, 171)
I'm very busy off line at the moment: the edit itself - worrying about the idea of Vedic or any other old IE language preserving a 'method' which is only an inferred, if probable reconstruction, was rushed as I had to run for a dental appointment. So I'd best leave things in your capable hands. Sorry. Nishidani (talk) 13:32, 4 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
No problem @Nishidani:. I've rearranged your note on PIE/historical gender as an Explanatory Note so it's still there but not directly within the description about the state of affairs in (Vedic) Sanskrit itself. Hopefully that's the right balance to including such a piece of historical information. Hope it wasn't too painful at the dentist's! Dyḗwsuh₃nus (talk) 23:23, 4 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Working on Wikipedia is far more painful than a dental appointment! He spent most of the time remonstrating with me for a bottle of wine I gave him for missing a prior appointment by way of apology. Keep up the good work. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 08:17, 5 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
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