The Cambridge Dictionary defines grammar as
(the study or use of) the rules about how words change their form and combine with other words to make sentences
So, typically, grammar assumes that there are words in a language, and then describes how these words interact with other words and form sentences.
That is a typical grammar. So how does an atypical grammar look like. It begins --- as all good things do --- with a story, and a question.
Once upon a time, perhaps in a galaxy far far away, इन्द्र asked his guru बृहस्पति, “How many words1 are there? I want to learn all of them.”
The guru asked “Meaningful words, or meaningless words?”
“All of them.”, replied the pupil.
The teacher, thinking about the enormous task ahead of him, tried a reconciliatory approach. “You see, the meaningless words greatly outnumber the meaningful words. After all, try any combination of syllables, and mostly you would come up with a word that is utterly meaningless. So, let me list out all the meaningful words. And the ones that I have not listed out are all meaningless. Deal?”
The pupil इन्द्र --- who incidentally is also sort of in charge of running the universe --- must have been elated by the proposition emphatically said, “Deal!”
The pair sat there for a thousand cosmic years2 with बृहस्पति listing down all the words and इन्द्र diligently listening to all of them; still the list couldn’t be completed3.
Moral of the story: the list of meaningful words is extremely long; and hence listing them in order to learn them is not an option for us mere mortals. But this leads to a huge problem. Language is made up of words; and if we do not know all the words, we may encounter an unknown word with an unknown meaning. What to do then? Communication, which is literally the only job of a language, will be in great jeopardy.
We need a system, don’t we? A system by which we can reconstruct any meaningful word and associate it with its meaning. And that system in Sanskrit is called व्याकरण which is translated to ‘grammar’ in English simply because व्याकरण cannot be accurately translated.
Just to impress upon the gravity of the task at hand, Sanskrit व्याकरण aims to be (and is) a tool set to create all the words in the language. And these are not only all the words that have been used in the past, but also all the new words that may be created in the future. And this word generation capability is what is truly powerful about this ‘grammar’.
It takes a FINITE set of starting building blocks (about 2000 verb roots, 1000 suffixes, and a few hundred ready-made words) and a FINITE set of formulae/rules (less than 5000) to create an INFINITE number of possible words. Additionally, these rules
- Tell you how these words interact with each other, change their forms and create sentences. Thus performing the task of what is ‘normally’ called grammar.
- Define a well defined path of word formation, telling why a word has a particular form and not any other form. Thus performing the task of what is ‘normally’ called etymology.
- Describes in fair detail how particular letters are to be pronounced. Thus performing the task of phonetics.
- Slightly touches upon the regional variations between the language. Thus incorporating elements of dialectology.
- Forms the basis of poetic metres and hence prosody.
And that is why I say “Sanskrit Grammar is grander than what you probably think”.
The way this is comprehensively done is a marvel to behold in itself. The basic idea is simple: Break the existing words into base and suffixes (प्रकृति and प्रत्यय) in a way that commonalities between the words is established. And this process is done so meticulously that it is able to describe the entire literature in Sanskrit spanning across at least 3.5 thousand years4.
Learning this tool set of व्याकरण is much like learning mathematics. The depth of the subject is enormous, but learning even the basics can make you appreciate its beauty and utility.
In the following articles --- which I shall write as and when time permits --- I will try to present bits and pieces of this field in a simplified way as per my understanding and capability. I myself am a student of Sanskrit and can make mistakes. Experts are free to correct my mistakes.
Until then, why don’t you check-out the etymological analysis of अन्वय that I am currently writing?
Footnotes
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By words, he meant sounds. The original word used is शब्द which technically means sound. ↩
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A cosmic year, by all accounts, is much much longer than a ‘normal’ year. ↩
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Perhaps इन्द्र is still sitting there with बृहस्पति and hence all the current world order is… well… the way it is. ↩
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If you believe that the ऋग्वेद was compiled in 1500 BCE. Most Indian scholars believe it to be much older. ↩