Grammatical systems
A comparative study of early Indian Grammatical texts
The project is an expansion of the project, “Tracing the sources of the Kāśikāvṛtti: a comparative study between the Kāśikāvṛtti and earlier Indian Grammatical texts.”
Major activities
The project uses digital language resources in order to conduct data mining and analysis of Sanskrit grammatical texts. The main goals are to evaluate the extent to which each commentary adheres to Patañjali’s Mahābhāṣya (2nd BCE), the first commentary on Pāṇini’s grammar, and to uncover information that may have been taken from sources that are now lost.
The project involves digital text analysis on several Sanskrit grammatical works, mainly the Mahābhāṣya, Kāśikāvṛtti, Cāndravyākaraṇavṛtti, and Abhayanandi's Mahāvṛtti. Each argument given in each text is assigned different tags and linked to its related passages in other texts. This method will give accurate insights into how later grammatical texts relate to the Mahābhāṣya and may reveal fresh information about Pāṇini's sūtras that is not present in the available Pāṇinian commentaries. It also allows for a comparison of the data with Sanskrit texts from other Indian disciplines, like Mīmāṃsā, which may have influenced Sanskrit grammatical tradition. The data which is gathered in the project is displayed here. Additional data will be integrated in the future.
Project personnel
- Sharon Ben-Dor
Grant details
- Tracing the sources of the Kāśikāvṛtti
- period: 2016 -- 2018
- funding: Kone foundation, Finland
- location: University of Helsinki and The Sanskrit Library