Customer Reviews

Sanskrit Grammar: Including both the Classical Language, and the Older Dialects, of Veda and Brahmana, 2nd ed (Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium)

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We have been using Whitney's Grammar in addition to Whitney's Roots and the Lanman Reader for the purposes of learning Sanskrit this year. Our professor teaches from a historical linguistic perspective for which this book is fairly well suited. This book is most remarkable for its extremely well organized format and exhaustive treatment of the forms. The inclusion of Vedic forms is very nice. The Sanskrit Reader by Charles R. Lanman is the perfect complement to this reference grammar. The excellent notes in Lanman's reader refer the student to Whitney's Grammar, the vocabulary is helpful and the stories are delightful. Whitney's Grammar is a must for a thorough grasp of the forms though.

Whitney is the prototype for Sanskrit grammars in English. I suspect the author had in mind Allen and Greenough's Latin grammar or H.W. Smythe's Greek grammar when designing the numeric scheme for each point, theme, and paradigm. It is a very useful system of notation for referencing from other works.

I can't honestly see going through this lesson by lesson with most students who are not dedicated to long term research in the field and want to begin reading Sanskrit without learning every arcane morphological exception. This book serves as an indispensible reference work by including Vedic forms as well as accentation in the paradigms, which I would imagine is more authoritative than Coulson's simple rules. The book is long and comprehensive, and like Smythe and Greenough, has gained the respect of being "the" authoritative source. It is a wonderful book for learning troublesome concepts correctly and more fully than several of the shorter grammars treat them.

I like the introductory sections and discussion of differences in classical and Vedic Sanskrit. Still it moves quickly into more detail than can be absorbed with casual study. It is a good reference text -- easier to find things than some of the other grammatical texts -- and it answers some basic questions, like the history of the word spacing in modern texts. But still engages in the vocabulary of advanced grammar without defining the terms -- for example, desiderative, aorist, etc.

When Europeans first stumbled upon Sanskrit, the Indians had been working from a grammar by Panini for over a millennium. The problem is that Sanskrit was already several hundred years old by the time Panini's grammar took its form, and it's not clear that he and his fellow scholars quite understood the language for which they were writing the rules. As a result, you wind up with phenomena analogous to English speakers' memorization of rules like "i before e except after c..." that aren't always helpful, or even correct. Since Panini set the standard, his work applies, as far as I understand it, to most things written after his time. But for earlier texts, notably the Vedas, the Indian/Indologist traditions of grammar can make things more, not less, confusing.

Whitney set out to make a grammar of Sanskrit the same way you'd do for any other previously unknown language. The model he fit Sanskrit into is definitely European and it may be strained in places. But this is a sincere effort to document what happens in Sanskrit within the actual texts, as opposed to laying down the rules that tradition had passed along. As a reference, it is therefore useful for seeing how the earliest Sanskrit really worked. It is, as another reviewer noted, a shortcoming that there is nothing on syntax. However, for the morphology of Sanskrit from its earliest days, this is an excellent work.

Note that this is a reference grammar, and not a textbook. If you try to learn Sanskrit from this and this alone, you will not get too far. Better to start with Perry's Sanskrit Primer, which combines the vocabulary and exercises from a German primer by Buhler with Whitney's explanations of key points.

This edition of Whitney's classic grammar is deficient. Scanned from a copy at the Cornell University Library, either the copy used was incomplete or the scanning process was faulty, as pages are missing both from the table of contents at the front and the general index at the rear of the book. This is fatal for a reference grammar. How is one supposed to find what one is looking for? This edition should not be on the market: it needs to be corrected by adding the missing pages before it is again presented to the public. Instead, buy the edition sold by Nataraj Books in Springfield Virginia on Amazon Marketplace, in which no pages are missing from either the table of contents or the general index, in which the pages are sewn rather than glued, as they are in the Cornell edition, which is hard cover instead of paperback, as is the Cornell edition, and which, finally, costs $8 less than the defective Cornell edition.

This is a classic Sanskrit grammar. It is geared more for the advanced student or scholar than for the beginner, but it does have insightful details for students of any level.

Fresh, readable, and a treasure. I used this book at the University of Washington and it is as great as ever.

An essential book to understand what has to be done to regenerate diachronic linguistics and the diachronic approach of Sanskrit, Irano-Aryan languages, and then Indo-Aryan and Indo-European languages. Whitney is one of those who set the main concepts by projecting onto Sanskrit his "modern" European concepts. This is clear when he speaks of participles, infinitives, gerundives and gerunds. It never comes to his consciousness that maybe these forms - be they antecedent to or derived from conjugated verbs - are no longer either only or at all in the temporal field but are positioned, in a way or another, totally or partially, in a spatial domain, are spatialized. So he is reduced to speaking of these forms that he mostly sees as declined nominal forms as being quasi-infinitives or infinitives not by the spatial value of these forms but by a pure parallel with the corresponding translations in our languages. In the same way he sees that the genitive is mostly not expressing possession but he does not see it expresses the attribution of something or some quality to someone or some other thing, which implies we have to reconsider the basic value of this genitive. The third example would be that he does not see verbs are by principle dynamic and that all roots are "verbal" (and we should discuss this term because we are before the very distinction between verbs and nouns, in a proto semantic state where nominal and verbal are irrelevant) that is to say dynamic and not static. It is the use of the root in either a nominal or a verbal derivation that makes it a verb or a noun. The book what's more does not give any syntax, I mean the syntax of sentences. He does not see for one example that "BHU" is both "BE" and "BECOME", static and dynamic localizing "state" neither verbal nor nominal in our understanding of these categories in the root itself (and the reference to the traditional translations `be' and `become' is pure intellectual laziness based on the fact that our languages do not have a proto semantic form that is neither nominal nor verbal, before verb and noun emerge). But when the nominative subject of this BE-BECOME understanding when conjugated into a verb is declined in the genitive the BE-BECOME relation from this nominative to the nominative predicative noun is transformed into a HAVE-(GET) relation (note it is purely relational and has nothing to do with a special semantic unit) from this genitive to the nominative predicative noun. If he had dwelt on this case, and there are others of the same type that he quotes at times when examining the uses of the various cases, he would have been able to understand the genitive does not express a possession but the beneficiary of an attribution movement. Yet this book has to be checked, be it only because it is rather clear and explains what has been said since on Sanskrit, as long as linguists did not question the basic concepts. Luckily some linguist have started to question them.



Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine & University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne