Indian Linguistics. The seminal influence of Sanskrit
on European linguistics was in no small part due to
the impact of the Indian grammatical tradition. That
tradition was at least as old as the Greco-Roman, and
completely different. While Western grammar can be
represented as a never quite happy marriage of logical
analysis and linguistic description, the Indian grammar,
as codified by the great Pānini (fl. 350 B.C.?) was whole-
heartedly formal and descriptive. Its achievements in
these respects are far in advance of anything the Euro-
peans had done. The Indians had analyzed the phono-
logical system of their language with great accuracy,
and had also devised a writing system that matched
the analysis. But above all the Indians were far superior
to the Europeans in analyzing the morphemic consti-
tution of words. The (verbal) root was made the basic
unit. The root is of course a more abstract kind of unit
than the word, as it normally does not occur as a free
form. By isolating the root it was possible to discover
the important variations that it could undergo—above
all, the phenomenon of vowel gradation that is so
important in Indo-European languages, as in English
spin-span-spun. Further, the isolation of the root car-
ried with it the isolation of the affix morphemes. Pre-
fixes, derivational suffixes, and inflexional affixes were
accurately described and their function defined. By
stating fully under what conditions the root changed
and the affixes were used, and what modifications they
underwent, the Indians constructed what is in effect
a generative grammar of Sanskrit word formation.
Pānini set forth these results in a concise, almost alge-
braic form.
To some extent the Indian grammarians were helped
by the structure of Sanskrit, whose morpheme structure
is undoubtedly less complicated than that of Greek.
Moreover, the language they described was even in
Pānini's time a partly artificial one, especially in the
form used in religious recital and ritual. Its regularity
may to some extent have been the result of the efforts
of the grammarians themselves, analogists all of them,
to use the Greek term. Whatever the reason, their
achievement was remarkable, especially in the fields
of phonetics and morphology. Pānini also included
syntax within his survey, but his successors—including
the Europeans two thousand years later—tended to
neglect it.
