Grammar and God

One of the most famous verses in Sanskrit is the opening verse of Kālidāsa’s Raghuvaṃśa:

vāg-arthāv iva sampṛktau vāg-artha-pratipattaye |

jagataḥ pitarau vande pārvatīparameśvarau ||

Here, Śiva and Pārvatī are seen to be inextricably intertwined like a word and its meaning.

Another verse I came across today expresses a similar relation, but between different pairs of upamānas and upameyas:

rāsa-vilāsa-vilolaṃ smarata murārer mano-haraṃ rūpam |

prakṛtiṣu yat pratyayavat praty-ekaṃ gopikāsu sammilitam ||

May you remember that enchanting form of Mura’s Conqueror,
        dancing around playfully in the Rāsa-līlā,
        united individually with all of the milkmaids,
                like a suffix with flexional bases.

As may be imagined, this is the opening verse of a grammatical text: the Prakriyā-sarvasva of Mēlpattūr Nārāyaṇa Bhaṭṭatiri, who is most famous for his composition of the Nārāyaṇīyam addressed to Kṛṣṇa. As to why Kṛṣṇa should be seen as a suffix (which, in English at least, sounds like it’s subordinate somehow to the word to which it’s added), it’s because the Pāṇinian tradition of grammar sees the suffix’s meaning as dominating the word’s meaning. Moreover, a suffix can be added to far more words than a word can take suffixes, and so it has greater “freedom of union” in that sense. Finally, and conveniently, the word for suffix, pratyaya, takes masculine gender, while the word for flexional base, prakṛti, takes the feminine gender.

Grammar and enclitic pronouns

natvā sarasvatīṃ devīṃ śuddhāṃ guṇyāṃ karomy aham |
pāṇinīya-praveśāya laghu-siddhānta-kaumudīm ||

Having bowed down to Goddess Sarasvatī,
        pure and virtuous,
I compose the Laghusiddāntakaumudī as an introduction to the Pāṇinian system.

With this invocation to Sarasvatī, Goddess of Knowledge, does Varadarāja begin his Laghusiddhāntakaumudī, the “Brief Moonlight of [Grammatical] Principles”. Varadarāja’s work is an annotated, abridged version of Bhaṭṭoji Dīkṣita’s Siddhāntakaumudī, which rearranges the whole of Pāṇini’s Aṣṭâdhyāyī into a format that is pedagogically usable by the student. The English translation of the invocation to Sarasvatī does not capture an interesting ambiguity in the original: the adjectives “pure and virtuous” could [and therefore did!] describe the Laghusiddhāntakaumudī itself.

Much can be said about this work, but for now I wish to note just one pair of verses from its haL-anta-puṃliṅga-prakaraṇa, the chapter on (the declension of) consonant-final masculine nouns:

śrîśas tvâvatu mâpîha dattāt te me ’pi śarma saḥ |
svāmī te me ’pi sa hariḥ pātu vām api nau vibhuḥ ||
sukhaṃ vāṃ nau dadātv īśaḥ patir vām api nau hariḥ |
so ’vyād vo naḥ śivaṃ vo no dadyāt sevyo ’tra vaḥ sa naḥ ||

May the Lord of Śrī protect you and me;
        may He give delight to you and me.
That Hari is the master of you and of me;
        may He, All-Pervading, guard you two and us two.

May the Lord grant happiness to you two and to us two;
        for Hari husbands you two and us two.
May He defend y’all and us;
        may He bestow auspiciousness to y’all and to us;
        He is to be served by y’all and us here.

Why would this verse show up in a grammar text? Because the underlined forms are the enclitic forms of the first- and second-person pronouns! This verse contains examples of the enclitic pronouns for the second, fourth, and sixth cases, in the singular, dual, and plural, in that order. These optional forms are permitted by a small set of Pāṇinian sūtras:

• yuṣmad-asmadoḥ ṣaṣṭhī-caturthī-dvitīyāsthayor vāṃ-nāvau [Pā 8.1.20]
• bahuvacanasya vas-nasau [Pā 8.1.21]
• te-mayāv ekavacanasya [Pā 8.1.22]
• tvā-mau dvitīyāyāḥ [Pā 8.1.23]

Pā 8.1.20 permits the use of vām and nau in place of the regular second- and first-person pronouns, respectively, in the sixth, fourth, and second cases. (As stated, this is a general rule, utsarga, that applies to all these pronominal forms regardless of number.)

Pā 8.1.21 then carves out an exception (apavāda) to this rule, saying that in the plural, the forms vas and nas, respectively, should be used. [These are indeed cognate with Spanish vosotros and nosotros and French vous and nous.]

Pā 8.1.22 carves out another apavāda, saying that te and me should be used in the singular. (Thus, taking these two exceptions together, we automatically restrict vām and nau to the dual.) But this rule, while being an apavāda to Pā 8.1.20, is in itself an utsarga.

Pā 8.1.23 is the apavāda to Pā 8.1.22 in turn, saying that tvā and mā should be used in place of te and me for the second-case forms of the singular pronouns. 

This is an extremely brief look at one of the ways in which the Pāṇinian system works, by creating utsargas and apavādas. One of the side-effects of this is that no Pāṇinian rule can be understood in isolation from all other rules, for everything interacts with everything else. 

To know the whole, know the parts; to know the parts, know the whole.

Auxiliary verbs, a roadmap

Nothing of substance is discussed here. I just want to collect hyperlinks to all of my posts on auxiliary verbs in one place.

We began with auxiliary verbs in English.

We then turned to French, beginning with an overview of the French verbal system, and then turned to compound verbs, and finally concluded with a session on the vagaries of the French passive.

Finally, we moved to German, beginning with an overview of the German verbal system, and then finally getting down to auxiliaries, modal and non-modal, in German.

Fin.

Auxiliary verbs, in German, part two

Too long have I tarried; I shall finish this series ere dawn.

So what are the various forms that a German verb can take? We’re talking here not of specific conjugations but of different combinations of tense, aspect, and mood (usually abbreviated tam). Like  English, these are usually listed in infinitive form, but the sequence of infinitives in German is the reverse of the English sequence. In addition to the Präsens and Präteritum, we will see forms generated from (a) the non-modal complex infinitive, (b) the future infinitive, and from it, (c) the future perfect infinitive.

Participial Past Tense

The non-modal complex infinitive takes one of two forms: 
past participle sein, or past participle haben.

Like French, but unlike modern English (if you exclude Tolkien-esque “Out of the Great Sea unto Middle-earth I am come” sentences), German uses both sein and haben as auxiliary verbs to give rise to the non-modal complex infinitive. Verbs strictly take one or the other (more or less—but this being German, less rather than more).

When haben is conjugated in the Präsens, the verbal form so generated is the Perfekt; when it is conjugated in the Präteritum, the verbal form so generated is the Plusquamperfekt. 

The Arabic nominal system, the regular pattern

Let’s begin by looking at the case-endings for the regular (sālim, سالم) pattern. 

	Singular			Dual
	Definite	Indefinite	Construct	Definite	Indefinite	Construct
marfū‘	-u	-un	-u	-āni	-āni	-ā
manṣūb	-a	-an	-a	-ayni	-ayni	-ay
majrūr	-i	-in	-i	-ayni	-ayni	-ay

This applies to all regular nouns and adjectives in the singular and the dual, whether they are masculine or feminine. Nouns like walad- and bint- and sayyāra(t)-; participles used participially, like kātib-; participles used nominally, like mubārā(t)-: all follow the same pattern.


What’s more, some kinds of masculine broken plurals also follow the sālim regular singular pattern of declension. Thus, the masculine word kuttāb (“(male) writers”), which is the broken plural of the word kātib- (a participle, but being used as a noun), follows the singular sālim declension. Just because a plural is formed in a broken manner does not automatically mean that its declension is also irregular.


There is also a sālim plural pattern, but this varies depending on gender. There is also a subtype of regular feminine nouns, which end in an ā, and which show slightly different endings. 

	Plural—Animate Masculine
	Definite	Indefinite	Construct
marfū‘	-ūna	-ūna	-ū
manṣūb	-īna	-īna	-ī
majrūr	-īna	-īna	-ī

This is the pattern that would be followed by the participle kātib- used participially (to describe a group of males that are currently engaged in a process of writing).

	Plural—Feminine			Plural—Long ā Feminine
	Definite	Indefinite	Construct	Definite	Indefinite	Construct
marfū‘	-ātu	-ātun	-ātu	-ayātu	-ayātun	-ayātu
manṣūb	-āti	-ātin	-āti	-ayāti	-ayātin	-ayātu
majrūr	-āti	-ātin	-āti	-ayāti	-ayātin	-ayāti

For example, the word sayyārat- in the singular declines as sayyār-āt- in the plural. The feminine ā word mubārā(t)- declines as mubār-ayāt-, etc.


More to follow on the “irregular” nominals.

The Arabic nominal system, intro

Arabic has a somewhat tricky system of case-inflections for its nouns. I’ve decided to note down some patterns I’ve seen in order to act as a دلالة الحائرين, a Guide for the Perplexed (in whose company I fall).

In general, Arabic nouns vary along four dimensions:

• number: singular (mufrad, مفرد), dual (muthannā, مثنى), plural (jam‘, جمع)
• gender: masculine (mudhakkar, مذكر) and feminine (mu’annath, مؤنث)
• state: definite, indefinite, and construct (iḍāfa,  إضافة)
• case: “nominative” (marfū‘, مرفوع), “accusative” (manṣūb, منصوب), and “genitive” (majrūr, مجرور)

The Latinate case terms are pretty horrendous when it comes to describing the possible meanings of the Arabic cases, and so I will use only the Arabic terms for them. For the rest, I shall use the English. All of the other terms should be fairly clear, except for the “construct state”, which is generally absent in Indo-European languages. (I’m not going to go into the semantics of the construct state here.)

A fifth dimension, animacy, is implicit and shows up in the formation of plurals. Briefly: when an animate object modified by an adjective takes the plural, then both noun and adjective must be in the plural. But when an inanimate object modified by an adjective takes the plural, then the adjective must be in the feminine singular—regardless of the gender of the object. Consider the four nouns: walad (p. awlād) “boy”, bint (p. bināt) “girl”, qalam (masc., p. aqlām) “pen”, sayyāra (fem., p. sayyārāt), “car”.  Modified by the (regular) participial adjective mukhtalif-  “writing”, we see (in the marfū‘ case):

• awlād mukhtalifūn(a)
• bināt mukhtalifāt(un)
• aqlām mukhtalifa(tun)
• sayyārāt mukhtalifa(tun)

A few random notes:

• Why “regular” adjectives? It’s because Arabic has two different kinds of plurals: the regular or “sound” (sālim, سالم) plural, which is formed regularly for (almost) all feminine nouns and adjectives and for many masculine nouns and adjectives (including all participial adjectives), and the “broken” (maksūr, مكسور) plural, which is formed for some masculine nouns and some masculine adjectives. The most common adjectives and nouns are often the ones that form the craziest broken plurals. Precisely how different broken plurals are formed doesn’t concern us here; all we care about are the ways in which they inflect.

• The regular feminine noun ends in a t, the so-called tā’ marbūṭa(t), but this is not pronounced in pausa. I’ve therefore written it in brackets (which has the added benefit of vaguely resembling the way it’s written in Arabic, as a ة). When case-endings are added, though, the tā’ marbūṭa(a) is pronounced, along with the endings.

• Incidentally, the Arabic word for inflections, i‘rāb (إعراب), is the verbal noun of the verb a‘raba (أعرب) formed from the root ‘-r-b (ع ر ب), which is also the source of the words “Arab” and “Arabic”. In fact, that particular form of the verb literally means “to make something Arab(ic)” or “to Arab-ize”. [I have no basis for this hypothesis, but if the claims made by Bohas, Guillaume, and Kouloughli in The Arabic Linguistic Tradition about the motivation behind Sībawayhi’s nomenclature are correct—i.e., that Sībawayhi picked as grammatical terms action nouns (maṣdar, مصدر) that describe the speaker’s intention—then it would seem that pronouncing the case-endings would stem from the speaker’s desire to make his speech as Arab as possible.]

Actual patterns to follow.

Verbal knowledge (śābda-bodha) in early modern India

(This is unlikely to be of interest to anybody but me, but then again most things on this blog fall into that category!)

In all things associated with language—grammar, semantics, exegesis, hermeneutics, literary theory, you name it—the Sanskritic intellectual tradition developed perhaps the most sophisticated toolkit available to pre-modern humans. One of the most substantial advances on this front was made by the Navya Naiyāyikas (the “New Logicians”), who came up with a formal terminology designed to make communication unambiguous (or at least as unambiguous as can be possible in a natural language). Their terminology was adopted by intellectuals with wide-ranging commitments and projects, such as Mīmāṃsā (hermeneutics), Vyākaraṇa (grammar), and Vedānta (philosophical theology, for lack of a better description).

Jan Houben’s article “‘Semantics’ in the Sanskrit tradition ‘on the eve of colonialism’” shows how Vaiyākaraṇas (grammarians), Naiyāyikas (logicians), and Mīmāṃsakas (exegetes) all used terminology borrowed from the Navya Naiyāyikas to precisely and unambiguously describe the kind of “verbal knowledge” (śābda-bodha) produced in a speaker of Sanskrit upon hearing the sentence:

rāmo ’nnaṃ pacati 

“Rāma cooks rice”

The question for all three groups of intellectuals is the same: what is the main meaning-bearing element of a sentence, and how does it relate to all the other elements? All three agree on what the sentence conveys to a speaker of Sanskrit; where they differ is on the “keystone” of the sentence.

"In Defense of Naïve Reading"

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/in-defense-of-naive-reading/

Literature and the arts have a dimension unique in the academy, not shared by the objects studied, or “researched” by our scientific brethren. They invite or invoke, at a kind of “first level,” an aesthetic experience that is by its nature resistant to restatement in more formalized, theoretical or generalizing language. This response can certainly be enriched by knowledge of context and history, but the objects express a first-person or subjective view of human concerns that is falsified if wholly transposed to a more “sideways on” or third person view. Indeed that is in a way the whole point of having the “arts.”

Likewise—and this is a much more controversial thesis—such works also can directly deliver a kind of practical knowledge and self-understanding not available from a third person or more general formulation of such knowledge. There is no reason to think that such knowledge … is any less knowledge because it cannot be so formalized or even taught as such. Call this a plea for a place for “naïve” reading, teaching and writing—an appreciation and discussion not mediated by a theoretical research question recognizable as such by the modern academy.

The “restatement of the aesthetic experience in formalized, theoretical or generalizing language” is precisely what Sanskrit literary theorists like Abhinavagupta and his rasa folk do. The nature of the aesthetic experience generated in the sensitive connoisseur (sahṛdaya) by a drama or literary piece is theorized at great length in these works and in scores of modern secondary literature on the topic.

What interests me, though, is the author’s second claim, that literature “can directly deliver a kind of practical knowledge and self-understanding”. Sheldon Pollock argues in his epic article “Sanskrit Literary Culture from the Inside Out” that the Sanskrit literary understanding tends not to attribute such epistemological powers to kāvya in general. Now, Sanskrit theorists do claim that kāvya can potentially teach us how to act. As Viśvanātha Kavirāja states in his Sāhitya-darpaṇa: rāmâdivat pravartitavyam na tu rāvaṇâdivat—“one must conduct oneself like Rāma and his like, and not like Rāvaṇa and his like”—and kāvya is of course a major source of such information.

The birth of poetry in Sanskrit

While translating the first verse of the Rāghavayādavīyam of Veṅkaṭādhvarin, I came across a word that I simply could not decipher on my own: mārāmorāḥ (मारामोराः in Devanāgarī). I had to look up the English commentary of Dr. Saroja Ramanujam to figure it out. She resegmented it as mā-ārāma-urāḥ, and glossed it as a bahuvrīhi (an “exocentric” compound functioning as an adjective) that means “one whose chest is a pleasure garden for Mā”. (There is no way I would have figured that out on my own!) 

But what, or who, is Mā? Dr. Ramanujam simply noted that it was a name for Lakṣmī, but I wanted to find out more and dug deeper. Now, digging too deep is fraught with difficulties. (Just ask the dear departed dwarves of Dwarrowdelf, who delved too deep, disturbing a denizen of the dark depths that then dealt the deathblow to their delightful dominion.) But in this case, what I found was pure mithril.

Prof. Ajay Rao has written a fascinating paper called “Theologising the Inaugural Verse: Śleṣa Reading in Rāmāyaṇa Commentary” for the Journal of Hindu Studies. The underlying argument of the paper (which Prof. Rao elaborates in his dissertation) is that the Rāmāyaṇa was not always perceived as a fully religious text, and that at least early in its history it was seen as a work of literature (kāvya) and not a received tradition (smṛti). Indeed, the Rāmāyaṇa is seen not just as any literary work, but as the first literary work (ādi-kāvya), and its composer, the poet-sage Vālmīki, is regarded as the First Poet (ādi-kavi). Prof. Rao further argues that the “theologization” of the Rāmāyaṇa was accomplished by a series of Śrīvaiṣṇava commentators who interpreted key episodes in the narrative as illustrative of the theological ideas underpinning their philosophical theology. Foremost among these commentators was the sixteenth-century Govindarāja, upon whose Rāmāyaṇa-bhūṣaṇa commentary Prof. Rao relies.

Definitions of negation

The Sanskrit grammatical tradition loves to name and define its terms, often in verses. For example, the privative prefix, which manifests itself as a- or an- (and is cognate with the Greek a- in words like atom), is called naÑ in the Pāṇinian tradition. A concise verse (from the voluminous Śabdakalpadruma) summarizes the various meanings that this prefix can express:

tat-sādṛśyaṃ virodhaś ca tad-anyatvaṃ tad-alpatā |

aprāśastyam abhāvaś ca nañarthāḥ ṣaṭ prakīrtitāḥ ||

The tradition enumerates six different meanings that can be expressed by naÑ:

Auxiliary Verbs, in German

After our long detour through the French auxiliary verbal system, it’s time to tackle something a little closer to home. German is often sold to native English speakers as a “harder” language to learn than French, and this is certainly true insofar as learning German requires us to learn lots of unfamiliar vocabulary. English has absorbed so much Latinate vocabulary that even without knowing no French or German, it’s far easier to understand les langages sont compliqués than Sprachen sind schwierig. But given German’s deep familial relationship with English, I would argue that in some ways German is actually easier to learn than French, because English speakers already possess a(n admittedly incomplete) knowledge of German structure.

This structural similarity is not very visible in the case of nouns, for modern English has almost completely abandoned the complex nominal declension system that Old English had and modern German and Icelandic still possess. Its remnants can be seen in the pronouns, where English him and her are clearly related to the German dative pronouns ihm and ihr, and your is similar to euer. To identify clear structural similarities between English and German, one must turn to their verbal systems.

An Overview of the German verbal system
German verbs fall into two broad categories: “strong” and “weak”. This terminology was developed by the Grimm brothers (yes, of fairytale fame!) based on the logic that weak verbs, being regular and predictable, were too weak to break free of the system of rules, whereas strong verbs were strong enough to behave unpredictably and break the rules. English verbs can also be classified into these categories; furthermore, if a verb is strong in one of the two languages, it will likely be strong in the other as well. Thus, knowing that “to sing” and “to swim” are “irregular” in English (see “I sang” and “I have sung”, and “I swam” and “I’ve swum”), we can guess that the German cognates singen and schwimmen are also strong (in the same order, ich sang and ich habe gesungen, and ich schwamme and ich bin geschwommen). This isn’t a hard-and-fast rule, though, since English verbs have tended to weaken over time, becoming more regular. Witness that the English cognate of the German strong verb backen is the regular verb “to bake”.

But German verbs, whether strong or weak, are not so strong as to entirely eschew the use of auxiliaries. (The Germanic tribes served as a source of auxiliaries to the Roman legions, but I don’t know if that had anything to do with this!) Indeed, one of the most obvious differences between the English and German verbal systems on the one hand and the French verbal system on the other is precisely the fact that both English and German use auxiliaries much more extensively. 

In fact, given a German infinitive, only two purely synthetic verbal forms exist in the indicative mood: the present (das Präsens) and the preterite (das Präteritum or das Imperfekt). All other verbal forms are generated using auxiliaries. And like English (and unlike French), the auxiliary verbs are of two types, modal and non-modal.

• The non-modal auxiliaries, which also do double-duty as full-fledged verbs:
• haben (“to have”), used for the perfect construction
• sein (“to be”), also used for the perfect construction (like the French use of être)
• werden (“to become”), used in two roles:
• werden, for the passive voice of all TAMs
• werden, for the future aspect
• The modal auxiliaries, which (as in English) convey a whole host of modal nuance, and which are cognate with the English modal auxiliaries but often carry different meanings:
• können, cognate with “can” and meaning “to be able to”
• mögen, cognate with “may” and meaning “to like”
• dürfen, meaning “to be permitted [to do something]”
• sollen, cognate with “shall” and meaning “to be obliged / required [to do something]”
• wollen, cognate with “will” but meaning “to want”
• müssen, cognate with “must” and meaning “to have to”

Two pairs need a bit of clarification: wollen expresses a stronger desire than mögen; and müssen expresses a stronger need or compulsion than sollen (compare “I must eat” to “I should eat”). Wollen is also worth noting carefully, because its English cognate “will” has come to be used as the future aspect auxiliary in the third person. Its use in German shows how this makes sense: “he will go” must have meant at some point “he intensely desires to go”. The German usage also shows why “I will go” is seen in ‘propah’ English as less polite than “I shall go”, and why it may seem rude to some to say “he shall go” in place of “he will go”. In the first situation, the use of “will” comes across as rather insistent; in the second situation, the use of “shall” eliminates the third person’s personal agency.

More to come, as always.

Auxiliary Verbs, auf französisch, part trois

Now that we’ve got a fairly good sense of the two main auxiliary verbs in French, avoir and être, let’s examine some of the more complicated stuff that inevitably comes along. Earlier posts on French auxiliaries are here and here.

The passive voice

As in English, the auxiliary used to form the passive voice is the form “to be”, which is être, colored dark red here as in an earlier post to distinguish it from both the regular verb être and the auxiliary être. In a way, it’s actually false to distinguish between the passive auxiliary être and the full verb être because both really behave the same way, including the question of requiring gender and number agreement of the adjective. The only reason, perhaps, to make this artificial distinction is to be clear that the passive auxiliary être takes as its adjective a past participle of the main verb.

That’s right: the structure of the passive voice is identical to the structure of the compound tenses using the non-modal auxiliary être. Talk about a recipe for confusion!

Except not really. Because the verbs we’ve seen so far that take être as their auxiliary are all intransitive verbs—they lack a direct object, and so there is simply no way they can form a passive at all. What this means is that it’s only really verbs taking avoir as their auxiliary that will form the passive with être.

And of course, once the passive is formed, it can form its own compound tenses. Since the conjugated verb in the passive voice is être, this means the auxiliary constructions will be formed with avoir + été + past participle (inflected).

So let’s take the sentence “I read a book” and look at every single possible verbal construction. This list will look slightly different from the list above because there I classified the verbs into seven groups based on the TAM in which the conjugated verb was conjugated. Here, though, I will be classifying them into the fourteen possibilities that we get by including the various compound tenses.

Auxiliary Verbs, auf französisch, part deux

Last time, we took a very brief look at the general structure of the French verbal system. Let’s now take a gander at the auxiliaries! (For that was the whole point of this, n’est-ce pas?) 

Instead of getting bogged down in hypothetical forms, let’s start by looking at the compound tenses of the verb parler. Paralleling English, the structure of this construction is avoir + past participle (with the word avoir colored dark green to show that it is the auxiliary verb and not the usual verb avoir that means “to have”). We can conjugate the verb avoir in every tense and mood that we can conjugate parler in; these compound tenses have different names. To keep things simple, let’s just look at the first person singular I speak in all its various forms in French.

Auxiliary Verbs, auf französisch

Anyone who has read Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers and St. Clare’s series knows of the legendary terror French verbs struck into the hearts of British schoolchildren of a certain age. No Maiwand or Isandhlwana could have stopped the might of the British Empire, but the slightest whiff of l’imparfait subjonctif would reduce the stoutest-hearted Viceroy into a whimpering schoolboy. At least this was the impression I had of the power of French verbs over the British psyche while growing up.

The French verbal system is no doubt more complicated than the English system, but this hardly means it’s utterly chaotic. With just a little bit of memorization and a little bit of thought (and some occasional hand-waving and some rather more frequent hand-wringing) it is possible to tame the system of conjugation. One of the reasons for the infamous difficulty of the French system is that it preserves many more synthetic (single-word) forms of its verbs than English does.

Auxiliary Verbs, en anglais

I can already see people running away from this post, terrified by its title. (This, of course, presumes that there are people coming to this site in the first place!) Grammar, perhaps because it is so awfully taught, if at all taught these days in school, tends to frighten people like no other subject save perhaps mathematics. This is a tragedy, for grammar is in fact quite beautiful and often very systematic, quite like mathematics. I'm going to focus on what may seem like a rather strange topic for now, but I will try to be clear (and will also use colors!) in order to convey a little bit of the ultimately systematic nature of this topic.

What is an auxiliary verb?

The word “auxiliary” usually means something supplemental, something additional, possibly accompanied by a sense of superfluousness. But let that not mislead us, for auxiliary verbs are by no means superfluous; indeed, their proper use is essential not merely to ensure that a verb is well-formed, but also to convey a whole host of additional meanings that are not present in the verb itself. (In this sense, the auxiliary verbs are much like the auxiliary corps of the Roman army: the Numidian light cavalry, Balearic slingers, Thracian archers and the like, whose specialized combat skills were absolutely essential to the success of the Roman legions.)

For the preservation of the Oxford / Harvard / serial comma

As part of my drive towards the use of logic-driven punctuation, I must heartily recommend this post on why it is "vitally necessary to prevent the extinction of the serial comma". As with everything else, it cannot be blindly used: there are cases where a blindly applied serial comma can create, not resolve, ambiguity. I repudiate such reprehensible misuse of punctuation. However, in most cases it serves to disambiguate lists and to clarify information, and in general I prefer to err on the side of too many, rather than too few, commas.


The purpose of punctuation in a language like English must be to convey something of intonation and reading pauses, which are critical to conveying meaning and which cannot be indicated in the language itself, since English lacks the kind of particles that German or Sanskrit possess. Punctuation is like salt: everybody has their preferred levels, but there is always such a thing as too much, and such a thing as too little, of it.

American and British punctuation

All international students, especially those who grew up in the Commonwealth or went to a Commonwealth-curriculum school, will know the pain of having to switch to the American system of spelling and punctuation. Many refuse to spell words the American way, out of practice or out of a desire to not conform; others change their ways, but inconsistently, with their deeply-ingrained old ways of spelling and writing never really going away, like that accent that always leaves behind its traces.

Of all the differences in writing punctuation, the only one that I truly dislike is the American habit of having the quotation mark in a phrase come at the end of a clause or sentence. Having grown up with the British system, where the logic of the context determines whether or not the punctuation belongs inside or outside the quotation, I've always found the American system misleading. Here's an article that points to the difference between American and British usage, and offers a historical* reason for why this is the case.

I'm certainly guilty of inconsistency, but I deem that to be less of a problem than being guilty of an illogical consistency. I will try henceforth to place my commas and periods where they logically belong, at least in writing where I'm not penalized for grammatical errors!

Orderings of alphabets

(Warning: there is no point to this post! Then again, I suppose that holds for virtually all of the posts here.)

I was reading something by Prof. Paul Kiparsky the other day about Pāṇini, the brilliant Sanskrit grammarian whose Aṣṭādhyāyī is essentially a complete generative grammar for the language, which mentioned that the entire Pāṇinian edifice rests on the grammarians' penetrative analysis of the Sanskrit phoneme inventory. Now, anyone who knows any Indic script (with the qualified exception of Tamil) knows that the alphabetic arrangement of letters is highly systematic, classifying the main consonants into a 5 x 5 array based on five points and five modes of articulation. However, Pāṇini does not use this arrangement, instead using the arrangement of the akṣarasamāmnāya, also known as the Śivasūtras. These are fourteen sūtras (lit., "threads", meaning something like "aphorism"), arranged in the following peculiar fashion:

1. a i u Ṇ
2. ṛ ḷ K
3. e o Ṅ
4. ai au C
5. h y v r Ṭ
6. l Ṇ
7. ñ m ṅ ṇ n M
8. jh bh Ñ
9. gh ḍh dh Ṣ
10. j b g ḍ d Ś
11. kh ph ch ṭh th c ṭ t V
12. k p Y
13. ś ṣ s R
14. h L

The minuscule letters represent the actual sounds of Sanskrit, while the majuscule letters are what are known as anubandhas (lit. "tie, attachment, connection", meaning "indicator(y letter)" in the Pāṇinian context). This paper, also by Prof. Kiparsky, does a much better job of arranging the Śivasūtras into an array that also brings out the phonemic logic in the arrangement. Prof. Kiparsky's paper also tries to flesh out an argument that explains why the Śivasūtras have the shape they do (his main point is that this arrangement is particularly conducive to the economy of expression so prized by Sanskrit grammarians that it was said ardha-mātrā-lāghavena putrôtsavaṃ manyante vaiyākaraṇāḥ (roughly, "The grammarians celebrate the economizing of half a mora like the birth of a son") ).

<UPDATE>

This article has more information on the working of Pāṇinian grammar, and in particular draws attention to the "background material", so to speak, that Pāṇini assumes a working knowledge of: the phonology of Sanskrit (the aforementioned akṣarasamāmnāya), the verbal roots classified by their conjugation in the present system (the dhātu-pāṭha), and non-verbal nominal and pronominal bases (the gaṇa-pāṭha, a somewhat confusing name since the verbal conjugation classes are also called gaṇas). Inflectional morphology (the suP case markers and the tiṄ verbal conjugations) and derivational morphology (the primary derivational, or kṛt, and and the secondary derivational, or taddhita, affixes) then apply to the bases found in the gaṇa-pāṭha.

</UPDATE>

Anyway, while I was looking up more details about the Śivasūtras online, I came across the interesting fact that the current Japanese ordering of the kana syllabary, called gojūon ("fifty characters"), was inspired by the very sensible conventional Sanskrit order. Prior to this, a poetic pangram was used to organize the syllabary into an order. According to Wikipedia, the poem, called iroha, was:

(in modern Japanese writing, a mixture of kanji and hiragana)

色は匂へど

散りぬるを

我が世誰ぞ

常ならむ

有為の奥山

今日越えて

浅き夢見じ

酔ひもせず

(in pure hiragana)

いろはにほへと

ちりぬるを

わかよたれそ

つねならむ

うゐのおくやま

けふこえて

あさきゆめみし

ゑひもせす

(archaic pronunciation in Roman transliteration)

iro ha ni ho he to

chi ru nu ru wo

wa ka yo ta re so

tsu ne na ra mu

u wi no o ku ya ma

ke fu ko e te

a sa ki yu me mi shi

we hi mo se su

I must add that I can read neither kanji nor kana! The poem was translated thus by Prof. Ryūichi Abe at Harvard—

Although its scent still lingers on,

        the form of a flower has scattered away.

For whom will the glory

         of this world remain unchanged?

Arriving today at the yonder side

        of the deep mountains of evanescent existence

We shall never allow ourselves to drift away

        intoxicated, in the world of shallow dreams.

This ordering of hiragana is apparently still used in Japan to represent numbers in some formal contexts, something like the old abjad order of the Arabic alphabet. (Not that I can read Arabic either!) While the modern sequence in Arabic is almost entirely based, at least as far as I can tell, on the orthographic resemblances of the letters, the old abjad order was an extension of the order of the Phoenician alphabet (which also influenced the Greek and Roman orders). This older ordering is only typically used for enumeration, and I think Orhan Pamuk uses it in My Name is Red to number the many triplets of anecdotes narrated by the characters. I have vague memories of learning this order in Dubai, but this is just what I found online, cross-checked against Wikipedia:

أ ب ج د ه و ز ح ط ي ك ل م ن س ع ف ص ق ر ش ت ث خ ذ ض ظ غ

read:

أبْجَدْ هوَّزْ حُطِّي كَلَمَنْ سعْفَصْ قَرَشَتْ ثَخَذْ ضَظَغْ

I don't know why the alphabet is parsed in this manner, but I do recall that Hebrew still follows the abjad order. (Not that I can read Hebrew either!)

<UPDATE>

I quickly ran through the English alphabet in my head, contrasting it with the abjad order. It's fascinating to see clusters of letters that still correspond in order to clusters in the Arabic order: A-B-(C)-D, K-L-M-N, Q-R-S-T.

</UPDATE>